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88
“ The Two (Treat Problems
[Mar4
still a need for the service of this denomination as a member of
the Christian body, with a distinct work of its own, we rejoice in
a name, which however confusing it may be if we consult only a
dictionary for its meaning, has clearly enough defined itself in the
intellectual and social and religious struggles of the last half cen
tury, and has gathered about itself memories and associations of
which we have such reason to be glad.
We will only add that this journal will have no official authority
of any kind, and that it is entirely independent of any organiza
tion — and we repeat that we shall rejoice in feeling that we are
working in co-operation with all, who, under whatever name, are
helping to advance the cause of Truth and to promote the interests
of Christian faith.
~
Charles Lowe.
fi
»
“THE
TWO
■
■
■■
•
J•GREAT PROBLEMS OF
CHRISTIANITY.”
UNITARIAN
A short article, with the above heading, appeared in the last
number of the Religious Magazine, and read so much like a
wail from a sad heart that we have been prompted to write a rep]yIn the opening paragraph the writer says, “We believe that
Unitarian Christianity is a universal gospel; that it is for the
masses as well as for the cultured few, capable of stirring men
to greater action, and giving them a more ample religious growth
than previous forms of Christian truth. But, before it can become
the supreme gospel of the race, two problems must be solved.”
Before considering those two problems, I would like to say a word
on this opening paragraph.
That “ Unitarian Christianity is a universal gospel, intended for
the masses as well as for the cultured few,” I devoutly believe ;
understanding by Unitarian Christianity, simply the Christianity
of Christ. That is, so far forth as Christianity can be put into
words, into propositions, into philosophical statements. But are
we not in some danger of forgetting, that the vital part of Chris-
�1874.]
of Unitarian Christianity39
rcianity is not susceptible of statement in words ? It is a spirit of
life. We can make statements concerning this spirit of life ; we
may hold a philosophy about it, and that philosophy may be sus
ceptible of logical explication, but the vital thing which Christian
ity, the Spirit of Life, is, cannot be formulated. Now, our Uni
tarian Philosophy and statements about this vital life-giving spirit,
seem to me to be true, and I believe will prevail so far and so fast
as men shall be able to appreciate logical and philosophical state
ments about anything. But the masses are not now able to ap
preciate. So that acceptance of our statements about Christian
ity may not, for a long time to come, be very general. But (and
here is our salvation as religious teachers) the masses, however
lacking in ability to appreciate our philosophy, have no difficulty
in appreciating the thing about which we philosophize and make
statements. The spirit of divine life, when manifested in us, it
requires little or no philosophical acumen to see and appreciate.
Our present thought concerning the Bal thing which Christian
ity is, and our present statements of our thought, may both be
modified, it would be strange if they were not; but the thing itself
is ever the same, and is not in the Sgclugive keeping of any sect,
or party, or school of thinkers.
But to advance to the next, the thwd belief stated by the writer
in the opening paragraph, namely, -— that Unitarian Christianity
is “ capable of stirring men to greater action, and giving them a
more ample and religious growth than previous forms of Chris
tianity.” I do not believe the first part of this statement, that
Unitarian Christianity is capable of stirring men to greater action
than previous, or many prevailing forms of Christianity, unless we
are to define action to be somlRing quite different from what it
is usually understood to be in this relation. This is almost too
evident to require illustration; yet, at the risk of being prolix and
commonplace, for the sake of simplicity let me offer an example of
“ action,” produced by other forms of belief and teaching, and
which Unitarianism is not competent to produce. Take an audi
ence of evangelical (unconverted) believers, if the expression
may be allowed, under the manipulation of any well-known power
ful revivalist preacher. He evidently believes that all before him
are in danger of eternal burning, and by his earnestness (for in-
/
�40
“ The Two (Treat Problems
[Mar*
deed how can he help being earnest) he moves the multitude ; he
impresses them with a feeling, which soon amounts to a conviction,
that they are in danger, imminent danger; and soon, action, emo
tional, passionate action is apparent. A shout or a sob in one
direction is followed by a sob or a shout in another, until soon
there is shouting and sobbing all round; and speedily the “ anxious
seats” are crowded with those eager to flee from the danger of the
wrath to come. This is action. And so long as these continue
to believe themselves in such danger, the action in one form or an
other will continue. And so long as others are believed to be in.
such danger action will not cease, efforts will be made to save
others. Is Unitarian Christianity capable of stirring men to any
such action ? I believe not. Nor is Christianity, under any name,
capable of it. It is not Christianity that has done it in the case
of the revivalist’s audience. The revivalist, and thousands of others,
may believe it is, but I do not believe it. It is no more Christian
ity in this instance than it was Christianity in the instances of the
Inquisition and the Massacre of St. Bartholmew. I grant that the
form of action was very different; and it may be said one party
was moved by a love of souls and the other was not; yes, but all
claim to be seeking the glory of God, the establishment of the
true religion, the kingdom of heaven. Now, because Unitarianism
cannot stir men up to what is called intense action, shall we enter-'
tain any doubt of its truth, or its worth, or the wisdom of laboring
for its wider prevalence ? Not until it can be shown that action
can take no other form, or that it cannot exist without being very
demonstrative. The value of action is not to be determined by
any such tests. When you put an acorn into the ground, and
alongside of it the seed of a sunflower, both may grow, but the
manifestation of life in the case of each is different. You can al
most see and hear the growth of the sunflower, and in less than a
year it flames out in garish colors to be seen of all men. But the
acorn has no such action. It is hardly noticeable the first year,
and a century is not sufficient to perfect it, while the sunflower,
meanwhile, has had a wide following in kind. Let not the oak
look in contempt at the sunflower, nor the sunflower despise the
oak.
The higher the type of life you propose for man, the slower will
�1874.]
of Unitarian Christianity.”
41
be his growth toward it, and the longer it will take him to reach
it. While if you are satisfied to tell men that they are in danger
of eternal hell if they do not flee from it, it will not take some very
Bong to start, and they will give themselves no rest or peace until
believed to be beyond danger. But the spiritual quality of the
lives which such a system is competent to produce cannot be of a
very high order. I would not be understood as holding that there
are not multitudes of good, saintly, Christian men and women, who
honestly believe in these doctrines and these methods; of course
there are; but .they are so, in spite of their doctrines, and not
because of them. The writer of the article which I am consider
ing would not pretend that these doctrines are any part of Chris
tianity, and he must know, doubtless does know, that as Christlike
men and women as he ever met are men and women of whose
belief the doctrine of eternal damnation forms no part. But I do
not forget that the question is not one simply of personal charac
ter, but of the value of different systems or views of truth ; and I
recur to the question.
I have dwelt thus at length on the opening paragraph of the
article, because I felt that in it lurked the point of the subsequent
inquiries.
The writer proceeds to say, “ Before Unitarian Christianity can
become the supreme gospel of the race two problems must be
solved.” The first of these problems he regard^ as the finding of
“some motive power to outward action equal to the Orthodox doc
trine of eternal punishment.” I should state it differently, and
say, — Before Unitarianism can become the prevailing form of
Christianity, it must manifest some motive power of inward life
superior to that found in connection with all other forms of Chris
tianity. Considered in its most vital relations, it is not a question
of doctrines, or philosophies of doctrines, half so much as many
seem to think. It is a matter of spirit and life. And it is not a
question of more or less noisy demonstration of life, but of sweet
ness and purity.
Unitarianism and Unitarians need the same motive to outward
action that was in Christ. What was that? Was it not Bove —
Love to God and love to man. His love for God kept him at one
with God. His love for man prompted him to give himself to the
�42
“ The Two Great Problems
Mar.]
work of bringing man also at one with God. It was not so much
the sentiment of fear in Christ, concerning man’s threatened
doom, that was the motive to action in him. It was love for that
which is essential manhood in all men, that which has divine pos
sibilities. He did not overlook man’s danger, he never spoke
lightly of sin, but the moving motive in him never seemed so
much fear of the consequences of sin, or hatred of sin itself, as
love for that which man is capable of becoming. To make Uni
tarianism the prevailing gospel we must not be content to say that
it is the best; nor content philosophically to demonstrate its supe
riority in doctrine over all other forms of Christianity. The merest
novice can state, with beautiful simplicity and truth, the mere law
of the gospel, — to love God above all things and thy neighbor as
thyself. Everybody knows that to practically carry this out is
to live a Christian; and we may as well now, as ever, give over all
idea of finding any superior statement of Christianity, and con
fine ourselves to the more important work of keeping alive in our
own hearts the Spirit which prompts
love, and the generation
and keeping alive of that spirit in other hearts, where it may not
be, or where it exists only in possibility, like the oak in the acorn.
In the presence of the spirit of the living Christ, looking out in
tenderness through human eyes; falling on the ear in sweet ca
dences from human tongue; manifesting itself in self-sacrificing
deeds among men ; in presence of the spirit of. life thus set forth,
of what moment is the doctrine of eternal punishment, or any
other doctrine which is not accompanied with this spirit ? And if
this be present, we can well spare the doctrine. And the influence
and the effect of this spirit, although it might not indeed stir men
to shout, and howl, or sob, would it not do what it did of old, draw
all men to it in more or less loving sympathy, and awaken in them
a kindred spirit ?
The second problem, which in the mind of the writer of the
article under consideration must be solved before Unitarianism is
to prevail, “ is, to find a form of truth that shall make God as
near and helpful to the soul as the Orthodox doctrine of the deity
of Jesus.”
A word on this. The human soul will never outgrow its need of
a feeling of nearness to God, nor outgrow its need of help from
�1874.]
of Unitarian Christianity43
him. It is sweet to feel him near, but does it drive him off, or
does it necessarily rob the soul of all consciousness of his near
ness, to believe concerning him as Jesus believed, namely, — that
he is the ever present spirit of love, power, tenderness and sym
pathy ? It is true, as the writer says, that, “ not much is ac
complished when it is proved that Jesus is not God.” But is it
true that, “ When we do this, he ceases to be a central fact, a
leader, a Saviour ? ” Did the sun cease to be a central fact when
it was proved that he did not move round the earth ? Does Plato
cease to be a leader in philosophy, when it is proved he is not
somebody else, and never wrote the Iliad ? And does Jesus
really cease to be all these, “ a central fact, a leader, a Saviour,”
when it is proved he is not God ? He must cease to be such a
central fact as Orthodoxy conceives him to be, of course, but he
remains just as important a fact nevertheless. And of course he
must cease to be such a leader as Orthodoxy conceives him, but he
may remain just as helpful in his leadership still. And as such a
Saviour as Orthodoxy believes man to be in need of, of course he
must cease to be when the reality of eternal hell is disposed of. But
he may be 'all the Saviour that man really needs still. The writer
seems to overlook the fact that Unitarianism does something more
than prove that Jesus is not God. , It affirms that God was in
Christ, and in him for a blessed purpose, a loving purpose, to bring
man into sympathy and fellowship of life with himself. Christ is
to Unitarian thought a u central factf inasmuch as the divine
life, the life of God, becomes a helpful fact in him, and inasmuch as
the fact of Christianity has its visible root in him, although invisibly
it is in God. He is a leader, not alone by virtue of what he has
taught, but more especially by what he was and is in the spiritual
quality of his life. He was not a leader in literature, science or
art, but he was in the divine art of godly living, in the art of set
ting forth the divinely human life.
And we affirm him Saviour, by virtue of his being the divinely
appointed instrument for the generation and keeping alive in us
of the only thing that can save, the spirit of self-sacrificing love.
Unitarianism, as I hold it, does not oblige me to legislate God
out of Jesus, when it teaches me that Jesus was not God. Jesus,
aside from the Spirit of God, which was livingly in him, of course,*
�44
“ The Two Great*Problems.”
s
Mar.]
is no Saviour. It is God in Christ that wo find to be so precious
and so helpful a Saviour.
But here again I am reminded that no mere statement of this can
accomplish much. It is the Saviour presented in our own lives*
that will be the most effective doctrine. To have its fullest and
best effect, the doctrine must be lived, not simply preached.
Dr Sears is quoted as saying “ that Christianity was a new in
flux of divine power,” and the question is asked, “ Is Unitarianism
a new influx of Divine power, or is it only a philosophy made
momentarily popular by a few fervid orators ? ”
In reply I would say, No, Unitarianism is not a new influx of
Divine power, it is a natural evolution of the influx which was new
in Christ. It is new, of course, in the sense that the spirit is living,
and ever new, as well as old. As I understand Unitarianism, it is
not “ only a philosophy,” but Christianity, minus the theology of
the middle ages, and plus the, common sense of the nineteenth cen
tury. It will become, the form of religion of the masses, just as
far and as fast as the masses learn to va’lue spirituality of life and
righteousness of character, above any merely personal reward,
either in the form of worldly profit, or other-worldly immunity
from threatened doom. But its progress is slow, and the average
preacher of it who sighs for a large following must be willing to be
disappointed. The less religion is mixed up with worldly elements
the longer it will take to make it popular. There is great satisfac
tion in the reflection that the divinest preacher of all did not have,
in his own day, a reliable dozen of followers. There were, who
heard him gladly, but they did not very closely, or publicly identify
themselves with him. And there were not three out of the twelve
who did not mix up his religion with a good many worldly policies.
We have no cause for discouragement. It may not be the ani
mus of our movement to build up a great ecclesiasticism, but it
can do better; it can continue to make clear the superiority of
spiritual religion over the religion of form, of dogma or of tradition
alism ; and who doesnot know that one such living religionist is not
worth, in his influence for good, ten thousand terror-stricken ad
herents of some fear-awakeniftg dogmatism.. Let us continue to
“ hold fast the profession of our faith without wavering.”
J. B. Green.
�
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Place of publication: [Boston]
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Notes: From the library of Dr Moncure Conway. A reply to an article of the same title appearing in the Religious Magazine. For content of complete issue see: https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=wu.89069654465;view=1up;seq=7 (accessed 11/2017). From the Unitarian Review and Religious Magazine. Vol. 1 (March 1874).
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^nnibrmrg <Simbag, 1874.
I
-A- szeie^zveozlst;
PREACHED
AT
ST. GEORGE’S HALL, LANGHAM
PLACE, OCTOBER 11, 1874,
REV.
CHARLES
BY THE
VOYSEY.
The text was taken from Psalm cxxiv., 7, “ Our help
standeth in the Name of the Lord.”
He said—With these hopeful words we concluded our
three years ago. We began, as all good
and great works must begin, in the face of many obstacles and
discouragements. Beyond the earnestness and zeal of the
little band of men and women who had pledged themselves
to the work, there was not much ground for the hope of per
manence or success. The whole thing was an experiment;
the country, as it were, was unexplored, the invaders were
unfamiliar with its aspects, their weapons of attack and
Het). C. Voysey’s sermons are to be obtained at St. George’s
Hall, every Sunday morning, or from the Author (by post), Camden
Hottse^ Dulwich^ S.H Price one penny, postage a halfpenny.
�2
defence as yet untried. Among the earliest recruits were
some who did not quite know their own minds, who hardlyrecognized in these eccentric efforts the real object in view.
Some joined our forces for the mere pleasure of witnessing
assaults on orthodox belief, and were disappointed to find
that these assaults were only preliminary to the building up
of a rational faith. Others helped us in the hope of seeing
established a new church, or a new sect, with banners of new
dogma around which they might rally, and thus form a
society which would replace the social losses they had for
their heresy incurred. There were, too, those who came
armed to the teeth with their own peculiar prejudices, who
Jiad built up an adamantine barrier beyond which they would
not advance, and who resented our refusal of their shibboleths
with quite orthodox indignation.
Custom, also, had its obstacles to throw in our path. Some
could not endure a religious worship held in a j/wasz-theatre,
nor patiently bear the necessary discomforts of a building
not our own. Others objected to the form of prayer which
had been adopted; others to the minister continuing to use
the raiment to which all his life he had been accustomed;
others found fault with the music that it was not congrega
tional, while nearly all were found to be unwilling to repeat
responses in an audible voice, thus rendering a choral service
an absolute necessity.
Well do I remember the anxiety and misery of those early
days in our undertaking, and hdw much patience and perse
verance and kindly feeling were requisite from every member
of our congregation in order to tide-over the period of
unsettlement.
To-day I have no thoughts but those of satisfaction and
�3
gratitude in the retrospect. It is almost marvellous how
these difficulties were one by one cleared away, how members
one after another laid aside or smothered their prejudices in
order to promote good-will, and to secure the final triumph
of our endeavours. Compared with the large number oftliose
who worship here whenever they can, the seceders are com
paratively few. Not more than a score do I know of, who
having given these services a fair trial have deserted them
from dislike or on principle.
I see some before me now, and I know of many more who
are only temporarily absent from us to-day, who, at the sacri
fice of their own prejudices and tastes, have held on to our
society for the sake of those aims which in importance are ’
far above the trifling details of our worship or the
idiosyncrasies of the preacher with which they have no
sympathy. I honour them, and I thank them publicly with
my whole heart, not only for their manly and faithful support
of an unpopular cause, but also for setting before us all the
beautiful example of self-denial and devotion in not permitting
any private sentiments to interfere with their well-chosen
duty. Believe me, they will discover that they have lost
nothing by their generous concessions, which would beget
on my part, were it ever wanting, a desire to adapt both
service and discourse to their tastes, so far as can be
done consistently with honour and with the common good.
There remain with us to this day, some who look upon
our prayers and praises as idle words, some who dislike our
music, some who prefer a methodistical to an ecclesiastical
form and accessories, some who never can feel contented with
our present place of worship. More gratifying still is the
fact that some are still with us, rendering most valuable aid
�4
with a regularity that passes praise, who object to the dis
courses, some alleging that not enough is made of Christ
and Christianity, others saying that there is too much
religious sentiment and not enough of polemic. Many, too,
are here with patient constancy, who are far better fitted than
I to occupy this part.
Now all this is to us a source of comfort and encourage
ment beyond that which we find even in closer agreement and
sympathy. It leads us to ask once more, what is it that binds
us together? What is that noble aim which acts like a
spell upon such apparently incongruous and unruly
elements ?
My friends, I believe I shall speak only your own thoughts
when I say that the bond of union between us is our common
aim—to endeavour to solve what Professor Tyndall has
called “ that problem of problems, the reasonable satisfaction
of the religious emotions.” It is for this we have in various
ways and degrees sacrificed earthly comfort and advantage,
have stifled our own petty and private crotchets, have been
willing to put up with this, that, or the other thing which has
been distasteful. You are as sure of my loyalty to this grand
aim, as I am of yours; and it is to this loyalty alone that we
owe our assembling here to day, keeping our anniversary and
inaugurating the fourth year of our history as one of the
most remarkable religious movements in this century. This
is also why, in distant parts of Great Britain, and in north,
south, east, and west of the whole earth, thoughts of joyous
sympathy with us are throbbing, hands of generous help are
being held out to us, blessings are invoked, and prayers are
being uttered for the success of our enterprise.
With all its faults, and not one of them incurable, our
�5
service is as yet as reasonable as any service in existence, if
not the most reasonable of all; and whatever be the faults
and short-comings of the discourses added to it, the principle
on which they are delivered, and on which it is known they
are received, is that of perfect reasonableness;—the right on
the one hand of the absolutely unfettered speech of honest
thought, and the equal right, on the other, of accepting or
rejecting what is said, at will.
We have a great deal of faith, but we have no formu
lated creed; we have very strong opinions, and tena
ciously cling to certain doctrines; but we have not a
syllable of dogma; not an opinion which may not be chal
lenged, nor a doctrine not open to question. We are tied to
no Scripture, ancient or modern ; we are beholden to no
prophet, old or new, that we should obey his voice as Divine;
we lean on no Christ, Galileean or British, that we must bend
our thoughts to his thoughts, or take him for our master or
guide.
The best and the worst, the truest and the most false must
bring their doctrines to the same test in each of us. The
Reason, the Conscience, and the Affections.
Whatever
harmonizes with these we will accept, because of the harmony,
and not for the speaker’s renown. Whatever jars upon them,
we reject, for its intrinsic falsehood, regardless of the speaker’s
authority.
And still we leave ourselves open to correction. We are
not going to deify, and to worship as infallible, our Reason,
our Conscience, or our Affections, We expect our reason to
err sometimes; but we listen to it because it is better than
the authority of another man’s reason. We expect our con
sciences to be warped or stunted sometimes; but we do better
�6
in walking by our own conscience than by that of the priest.
We expect even our affections to err through deficiency
sometimes, perhaps even through excess, but it is better to be
guided through them to the light of love Divine than to
search for it in external nature or metaphysics, and worse
still to stifle our affections as unholy.
Moreover, we aim at the proper and harmonious action of
all the three, that none may be unduly exalted at the expense
of the other two. Were a man all reason, he would only
think rightly without right action. Were he to be all'con
science, he could nut perceive the reasonableness or the beauty
of right conduct. Were he all love, he would be foolish and
extravagant, though, perhaps, more likely to go right by
instinct than in the other two cases.
As religious enquirers, and even as religious believers, the
chief field of our enquiry, and the chief ground of our belief
is man. By the study and cultivation of our best human
faculties we are on the road to the discovery of Him to whom
our common human instinct points as the Ruler and Friend
of the universe.
But in doing this we absolutely forswear that very certainty
and infallibility, which at present are the life of all dogmatic
churches. We have such unbounded confidence in man, and
in Natural Religion, that we will not encumber ourselves with
those expedients which have hitherto proved so successful
in the machinations of priestcraft. We prefer our uncer
tainty and consciousness of the possibility of error, to a
certainty which has no solid foundation, to the claims of an
infallibility, which we can prove to be false. We are quite
as much in earnest to be right as the Christians are; but we
are not so much afraid to be mistaken. As believers, we
�■{
w ffg> o*d
'■:'
7
trust God’s entire justice to visit upon us no calamity which,
we do not deserve, to punish us with no penalty for what we
could not help, still less to inflict permanent misery and
disappointment in returu for our most loyal endeavours to
gain the truth. We are not afraid to be mistaken, in the
old sense of that awful fear of Hell-fire which is the
threatened doom of the Churches against any intellectual
error.
We are afraid of error only so far as we
may do mischief to other people, or fail of our own
proper improvement; and our worst errors, we believe,
will one day be thoroughly corrected, and we shall know
all the truth. A dear friend of mine, a convert to Roman
ism, confessed that he could not possibly understand this
perfect calm in a mind wide-awake to the possibility, and
even probability, of being in error. My reply was “ It is
because I believe in a God as good as myself—not to say
better ; that is enough to make me sure that, so long as I
honestly desire to go right, I shall be certain to know the
truth at last. He will not damn me for rejecting what seems
to me unreasonable and even blasphemous.
This, my friends, is where we stand; and more unfettered
than this, no man, or body of men can be; this is the secret
of our firm bond of union, and let me add the secret of our
past and future success. All will depend on keeping clear of
dogmatism, or the attempt to tie down each other, or the
future generation, to special modes of thought which may
suit ourselves.
In the Inaugural Discourse to which I have referred, I
took pains to shew what lines our several efforts ought to
take. 1st. That we should do all we could to expose the
falseness and absurdity and impiety of the orthodox doctrines..
i
I
�8
'2nd. That we should let the world know what religious
beliefs and hopes we had to put in their place. 3rd. That,
-at all events, we might hope in this generation to wean the
people from their insane dread of damnation for opinion. 4th.
That we should help those who had no faith at all towards
a reasonable trust in the goodness of G-od. And 5th. I dwelt
upon the necessity, on every ground, of the cultivation of
personal beauty of character and conduct, as the only condi
tion in which religious emotions could thrive.
From careful observation, I have come to the conclusion
that we are not held together by a common hatred and
rejection of orthodox Creeds, so much as by our mutual
agreement in the main on the subjects of G-od and immor
tality. I mean that there is far more sympathy between us
as to what we believe than as to what we deny. This sympathy
is not only deeper than the other but more general. It is but
a small minority who only enjoy discourses of attack upon
prevailing beliefs. With very few exceptions, we all like
best those subjects which help to clear our own insight and
to add to the foundation of a reasonable faith. To me this
fact is more than any other significant of progress and
^endurance. Had it been the reverse we could not have lasted
long. People not only weary in time of polemics, but the
function of polemics dies with the perishing superstition at
which they are aimed, and then the controversialist has
nothing more to do ; his mission is soon done and over. But
when people are united in the pursuit of that knowledge or
belief, which by its very nature cannot be exhausted, the
interest in it cannot die, its investigators become more eager
-and fascinated the longer they search. I am inclined to
think not only with Theodore Parker but with Tyndall, that
�9
the interest in religious enquiry is inexhaustible, and of such
a nature as to engage and engross the highest faculties of
the best of our race. And therefore if, as is the case, we are
linked together in sympathy, not merely to uproot hoary and
decaying superstitions, but above all things to find out all
that is true about the vast mystery of Grod and man, and to
strengthen each other in our faith and hope whenever they
rest on reasonable foundations, then indeed my heart leaps
up with renewed courage to feel sure that this our work will
prosper, that in time it will leaven the whole world, that what
is true and sound in our principles will prevail, and that in
ages to come we shall have made it an easier task for
posterity to correct our errors, than it has been for us to
uproot the errors of our forefathers.
Fifteen years ago, Francis William Newman said these
words, or words of the same meaning, “For the truly religious
in this age, there is no Temple.” We cannot yet ask that
this most just and severe sentence be withdrawn; but we may
ask the venerable professor, and the world of lofty minds and
souls like his who sigh for such a temple, to recognize, at all
events, our most earnest endeavours to erect such a Temple,
to mould such a form of worship. Ours at least has the
germs of self-improvement, ours is designed to be severely
subject to the dictates of reason and yet open to the embellish
ments which poetry and the highest aesthetic taste can provide.
To be worship at all, it must be emotional, and emotion is a
subtle thing very variable and transitory, soon satisfied
and soon repelled. The whole of the Service cannot then in
the nature of things be equally tasteful to every worshipper
alike. But we have entire liberty to make it what we please;
as the changes in, and additions to, it during the past three
�10
years will shew. We know it to be the envy of many clergy
men and others who are tied to old forms; and it has been
adopted in whole or in part by some who are free.
Is it not then somewhat of a reproach to us—or rather to
those who are one at heart with us, but who are afraid or un
willing to confess it—is it not a reproach, I ask, that such a
service should have as yet no local habitation, should be
relegated to a Music Hall, and be performed with all the
drawbacks of a small- theatre ? Is it not a reproach that
while Mr. Spurgeon (whom I personally greatly respect)
could get a Tabernacle built to hold 6,000 persons on purpose
to hear the Gospel of Hell Fire, the Religious Free-thinkers
of this Country cannot raise enough money even to buy a
bit of land for such a building as our Service and our
cause deserve ?
While his sermons are circulated by the million, we are
thankful to get ours sold by the thousand. While a little
book which in all good-nature I call a “wicked book” by a
Scotch Minister, entitled Grace and Truth, but which ought
to be entitled Disgrace and Falsehood, has been sold to the
amount of 70,000 copies since November last, we have still
on hand volumes which have never passed into a second
edition.
A Ritualistic Church in the suburbs which can scarcely
scrape together £20 for the London Hospitals, can raise
£300 at any time for a new set of vestments.
Again, as an instance of hearty earnestness, a handful of
Jews agree to build a new synagogue, and they raise
amongst themselves the sum of £80,000 for its erection.
For once I must reproach my countrymen, and say that,
although considering the agency at work, to have held on for
�three years is more than one could have expected : yet con
sidering the cause in question and its bearing on the interests
of humanity all over the world, such neglect is a discredit.
And it is a reproach to this wealthy country that we have
not in possession, this day, the finest Temple that could
be built in all London.
We are quite sure that there are at least 50 persons in this
country (probably ten times as many) who are in entire sym
pathy with our work and who could afford to put down
£1,000 each, as easily as we shall contribute our sovereigns
to the offertory to-day. We are bound to ask them why they
any longer hesitate to give the world such a pledge and
token of their honest belief? The moral value of their con
tribution will be lost, if it be.delayed till the cause becomes
a fashion. On the other hand, it is earnestness which wins
men’s confidence and does more to make converts than years
of talking and preaching.
While, however, this main ultimate object be kept in view,
the current expenses must not be forgotten; nor must it be
imagined that the sum of £100 a month can be defrayed out
of the ordinary receipts. Our weekly collection, as is well
known, is to enable non seat-holders and visitors to contribute
what they please towards the expenses ; and we need there
fore two or three special offertories in the course of the year
to make up deficiencies.
This is the first time in three years that I have made any
appeal to yourselves or to our country friends for greater
exertion. I am the worst pleader for money that ever spoke,
but I can refrain no longer from asking everyone, who at heart
wishes us well, to do his or her utmost to carry those kind
wishes promptly into effect. Let us endeavour to earn what
�12
Dr. Davies said of us in the Daily Telegraphy “ These people
are terribly in earnest.”
Still we must be patient; for we have even greater cause
for rejoicing and hope than if we had at command the wealth
of the country. The leaven is working more rapidly than we
could have expected. On every side, in every church and sect,
our denials and our beliefs are spreading with a speed that
must strike dismay into the very hearts of the champions of
orthodoxy. Truly this is all we want, a fruition more welcome
than any amount of worldly success. With the most modest
and truthful estimate of our own small powers to work so
mighty a change, we yet thankfully recognize that we have
had some share in it, and that it is the truth and the reason
ableness of what we proclaim, and not the mode of its
proclamation, which is working so mightily upon this
generation.
To conclude in the key-note with which we began, while
doing our best to ensure progress let us remember Him whose
truth we are patiently and honestly seeking to discover and
to declare ; whose Divine call first awakened our souls to this
holy service and has all along fortified'us . to encounter the
perils and to.conquer the obstacles which opposed our march;
whose assurances of final enlightenment and whose words of
Heavenly peace have led us on calm and unflinching in our
darkest hours ; and whose Love, bountifully shed over all his
creatures, has set us on the Rock of Haith and Trust, and
filled our hearts with songs of Praise.
“ Our help standeth in the Name of the Lord.”
CABTEB&WnllAMS, General Steam Printers, 14, Bishopsgate Avenue, Camomile-street,E.O
�
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Victorian Blogging
Description
An account of the resource
A collection of digitised nineteenth-century pamphlets from Conway Hall Library & Archives. This includes the Conway Tracts, Moncure Conway's personal pamphlet library; the Morris Tracts, donated to the library by Miss Morris in 1904; the National Secular Society's pamphlet library and others. The Conway Tracts were bound with additional ephemera, such as lecture programmes and handwritten notes.<br /><br />Please note that these digitised pamphlets have been edited to maximise the accuracy of the OCR, ensuring they are text searchable. If you would like to view un-edited, full-colour versions of any of our pamphlets, please email librarian@conwayhall.org.uk.<br /><br /><span><img src="http://www.heritagefund.org.uk/sites/default/files/media/attachments/TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" width="238" height="91" alt="TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" /></span>
Creator
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Conway Hall Library & Archives
Date
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2018
Publisher
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Conway Hall Ethical Society
Text
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Original Format
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Pamphlet
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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Anniversary Sunday, 1874: a sermon preached at St. George's Hall, Langham Place, October 11, 1874
Creator
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Voysey, Charles [1828-1912.]
Description
An account of the resource
Place of publication: [London]
Collation: 13 p. ; 19 cm.
Notes: Part of Morris Miscellaneous Tracts 6.
Publisher
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[Carter & Williams]
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
[1874]
Identifier
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G4828
Subject
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Sermons
Rights
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<a href="http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/mark/1.0/"><img src="http://i.creativecommons.org/p/mark/1.0/88x31.png" alt="Public Domain Mark" /></a><span> </span><br /><span>This work (Anniversary Sunday, 1874: a sermon preached at St. George's Hall, Langham Place, October 11, 1874), identified by </span><a href="https://conwayhallcollections.omeka.net/items/show/www.conwayhall.org.uk"><span>Humanist Library and Archives</span></a><span>, is free of known copyright restrictions.</span>
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application/pdf
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Text
Language
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English
Morris Tracts
Religion
Sermons
-
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PDF Text
Text
65
lUIIab.
Why is it so with me, false Love,
Why is it so with me ?
Mine enemies might thus have dealt;
I fear’d it not of thee.
Thou wast the thought of all my thoughts,
Nor other hope had I:
My life was laid upon thy love;
Then how could’st let me die ?
The flower is loyal to the bud,
The greenwood to the spring,
The soldier to his banner bright,
The noble to his king :
The bee is constant to the hive,
The ringdove to the tree,
The martin to the cottage-eaves;
Thou only not to me.
Yet if again, false Love, thy feet
To tread the pathway burn
That once they trod so well and oft,
Return, false Love, return;
And stand beside thy maiden’s bier,
And thou wilt surely see,
That I have been as true to love
As thou wert false to me.
F. T. Palgrave.
4—5
�
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Victorian Blogging
Description
An account of the resource
A collection of digitised nineteenth-century pamphlets from Conway Hall Library & Archives. This includes the Conway Tracts, Moncure Conway's personal pamphlet library; the Morris Tracts, donated to the library by Miss Morris in 1904; the National Secular Society's pamphlet library and others. The Conway Tracts were bound with additional ephemera, such as lecture programmes and handwritten notes.<br /><br />Please note that these digitised pamphlets have been edited to maximise the accuracy of the OCR, ensuring they are text searchable. If you would like to view un-edited, full-colour versions of any of our pamphlets, please email librarian@conwayhall.org.uk.<br /><br /><span><img src="http://www.heritagefund.org.uk/sites/default/files/media/attachments/TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" width="238" height="91" alt="TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" /></span>
Creator
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Conway Hall Library & Archives
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2018
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
Conway Hall Ethical Society
Text
A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text.
Original Format
The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data
Pamphlet
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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Ballad
Creator
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Palgrave, Francis Turner
Description
An account of the resource
Place of publication: [London]
Collation: 1 page (p.65) ; 23 cm.
Notes: From the library of Dr Moncure Conway. From the Cornhill Magazine 30 (July, 1874). Attribution from Wellesley Index to Victorian Periodicals, 1824-1900.
Publisher
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[Smith, Elder & Co.]
Date
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[1874]
Identifier
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G5347
Subject
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Poetry
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<a href="http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/mark/1.0/"><img src="http://i.creativecommons.org/p/mark/1.0/88x31.png" alt="Public Domain Mark" /></a><span> </span><br /><span>This work (Ballad), identified by </span><a href="https://conwayhallcollections.omeka.net/items/show/www.conwayhall.org.uk"><span>Humanist Library and Archives</span></a><span>, is free of known copyright restrictions.</span>
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application/pdf
Type
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Text
Language
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English
Conway Tracts
English Poetry
Poetry in English
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67d1a1d9aafc71f31149cb1e1ce0c1b7
PDF Text
Text
1874.]
Charles de Montalembert.
45
CHARLES DE MONTALEMBERT *
•
The service which this distinguished man rendered to the United
States during our civil war, and his able and generous plea for us
at a time when half the European world were against us, should
.give him a claim upon our attention, and lead us to make acquaint
ance with his character and life.
We confess that we know very little of the works of Mrs
Oliphant, but we feel after closing ^he pages of this book, that a
mind which could draw,such a graceful and delightful picture of
its hero, and at the same time make so fair, so broad, and phil
osophical an estimate of his character, must possess no common
culture and ability. There is not, in our opinion, one dull page
in this Memoir. It is contrary, at the same time, to all the re
ceived laws of good biography, which generally *equire that thet
r
author should keep himself and his views out of sight as much as
possible. If the writer therefore had made an uninteresting book,
we should have the right to' complain; but he who succeeds, makes
laws for himself. We have something here far more comprehen
sive than a series of facts, however valuables We have a grand
colossal figur'e, standing out amid the pigmjes of the past half cen
tury in France, painted, by the hand of affection, and in the glow
ing yet chaste colors of an artist, who saw the original in no false
iight, but noble and beautiful as he really waslIt is not our purpose to make a complete review of this book, but
there are some elements in the character of Montalembert which
are peculiarly fitting for us to contemplate in this age of the
world.
So-called Liberal Christians are too apt to believe that liberality
of thought must inevitably belong to at mind that accepts radical
opinions in religion. Hence our unseemly haste to force a man, by
the charge of cowardice, out of the communion where he was born,
* Memoir of Count de Montalembert, Peer of France, Deputy for the
Department of Drubs. A Chapter of recent French History. By Mrs.
Oliphant.
�46
Charles de Montalembert.
Mar.] •
and which he loves. We forget ’that human nature is not a math
ematical machine, which must continually repeat that two and two
make four, or else be charged with failure. We forget how many
different elements it takes to make up a man, and so, because he
has got hold of some one great truth, we are impatient with him,
that he cannot see others close under his vision. It is a trite
saying, but we cannot hear it too often, that liberality is a qual
ity that lies more in a man’s character and heart, than in his
way of thinking. We have in Montalembert a good illustra
tion of this truth. There never was perhaps a more ardent, un
swerving, and some would say fanatical Roman Catholic than he.
In the glow of youth, with life all before him, eager to rouse his
beloved church to a sense of its privileges and responsibilities, he
calmly puts aside his weapons of warfare, and like a docile Son of
the Faith, renounces his cherished hopes, because an old man,
the Pope, whom he believes the Father of Christendom, bids him
lay his hand on his mouth and be still. Who would dare charge
him with moral cowardice ? Courage has nothing to do with these
inexplicable emotions, proceeding from the religious imagination,
born with our being, growing with our growth, heightened by the
associations of youth, and sanctified by the sorrows 'of after years.
The logical critic, the religious economist, have nothing to do with
such a character. They read him exactly as they read the Bible ;
ready to square everything with their line and plummet, impa
tient at inequalities, and disposed to reject the whole if they can
not accomplish their object.
We cannot discover that this sacrifice of his will to that of another
equally fallible injured the mettle of Montalembert’s'character, or
dimmed his vision of abstract truth. We all have our ideals.
This was his ideal: Whatever the Pope’s private failings, he as the
great Bishop of the church below, wore the mantle of Christ, and
commanded the entire devotion of the faithful. As to the doctrine
of the infallibility of the Pope, he never accepted it, and he little
valued his temporal power. Montalemb.ert’s love of civil liberty
was in no way impaired by his obedience to the church, although
he seemed to hold the opinjon of Plato, that “ the acceptance
of established opinions must precede and aid the private judg
ment, because the mind which submits to lawful authority is most
�' 1874.]
Charles de Montalembert.
47
likely to possess real independence, in distinction from that coun■ terfeit which is only a slavish fear of a creed.”
His efforts in the cause of free education were unceasing. He
accepted the powers that were, — that is, the existing govern
ment in France, — but reserved to himself the right to oppose
them constitutionally when their measures went against his sense
of right. It was a hard lesson which he endeavored in vain to
teach France after her terrible memories. He tried to show her
how to curb legitimately her tyrants and demagogues, without
the awful necessity of revolution. He felt the truth of the say
ing of a distinguished Frenchman, tha| “ France. had wit, indus
try and even genius, but not character.” He had such a hor
ror of anarchy and bloodshed, that he was ready to accept
Louis Napoleon as the only salvation of the Country. His
loyal soul never suspected treachery^ and the President of the
•
Republic became the Emperor before his eyes were opened.
Between him and Louis Napoleon unmask® there could be no
real sympathy. The Emperor cast him off as soon as he no longer
needed his services. His political life s^denly ceased.
In the prime of life, in the vei^heat of the contest, flushed with
the consciousness of his own pow^s, and wakened to the delightful
fact that he had the ears of his fellow-mea he was compelled by the
insolent power of one man to lay off his armor, and Satire from the
field. He had reached the most httliant period in his career.
Nothing could equal the effect of his speeches before the assem
bly. When in early life he had the whole house in opposition to
him, even then he chained their attention. It was such a novel
spectacle to see in that blase circle of men, a young nobleman so
high toned, so impassioned, so bold, and so religious. But often in
later years — as, for instance, when he made an appeal against
the intolerance of the Swiss Protestants towards the Catholics —
he brought down the house with wild plaudits! The Jesuit party
in Germany to-day might well invoke his memory, for though he
was no Jesuit, he always took the side of the oppressed.
In regard to his speeches it is difficult to describe them. We
have very superficial ideas of French eloquence. We form our
’ opinions from the melo-dramatic sayings which come to us in the
time of revolution. The public words of Lamartine, of Victor
�48
Charles de Montalembert.
Mar.J
Hugo, and other distinguished men, have a sentimental air that
does not suit our Anglo Saxon tastes. We defy any one to make
this criticism of the speeches of Montalembert. They read ad
mirably, which is a great deal to say of such fragments as appear
in this life, — a public speech being supposed to depend so much
upon the voice and manner. There is very little of historic allu
sion, as in our great speeches, there are few illustrations, or figures,
no arts to attract the attention, but simply the overwhelming ap
peal of a nature that cannot rest until it has convinced you.
Sometimes it is the cutting, calm, repressed satire of the avenger
of meanness and injustice; sometimes the lofty conviction of the
religious man who loved his church like a lover; sometimes the
generous plea for the rights of humanity, denied to his bitter
opponents; and sometimes, as when he took his seat in the
French Academy, the grand survey of intellectual truth and
liberty.
Two other men figured largely in France during the life of
Montalembert. They also had their mouths sealed and their
young aspirations quenched. One of them, Lacordaire,1"was of
an elastic temperament like Montalembert, and when repressed in
one field of action he broke out in another. The other, Lammenais, was of a different nature; he could not struggle with
destiny. His whole life was embittered by his cold reception
at Rome, and the impossibility of carrying out his cherished
plans for the enfranchisement of the church. A country which
can produce three such men in one generation, need not be
despaired of, much less a church. Whatever may be its local
and political prejudices against the Reformed Catholic party
in Germany and Switzerland, the Romish Church in France
must see, that if it is to live, it must widen with the march of
civilization. It may do it in its own way, the way best suited to
the genius of its people. Happy would it'be for France, if the
church would inscribe on her banners the names of these three
great men.
Montalembert published several volumes during his life. One
was a memoir of St. Elizabeth, another a sort of romance founded
on the lives of two friends. His article on the Triumph of the
North, and the Question of Slavery in America, is full of clear
�1874.]
Charles de Montalembert.
49
good sense, and delicate appreciation of the condition of things in
this coilntry.
His greatest work, 44 The Monks of the West,” he left unfin
ished. In the preparation of this book he called to his aid all the
richest treasures of sacred art and history, amid the retirement
of his literary life. The thoroughness of his research was only
equalled by his enthusiasm, which threw a halo of subdued and
beautiful light around the lives of those early fathers of the
church and floods the whole book with a warm religious glow.
One day his beautiful and beloved daughter came to him with a
sweet smile upon hefr face, and announced to him her desire to
enter a convent; and when he remonstrated with her, she turned
towards his table, and faid her hand upon the manuscripts of this
book, and said, 44 Here, my Father, is wher<T have learned to pre
fer the monastic life to all others.’? He was struck dumb. He
had not thought of the practical effect of the book upon the life of
to-day, but only of the beauty and sanctity of the past. He strug
gled with the feeling of the fond parent and let her go, but he
never recovered from what he called his 44 grande desolation.”
The latter part of his life he spent in his country house, an old
Chateau, which he remodelled with much taste. He loved his
trees and lands like an Englishman, and respected his humble
neighbors, who, strange to say, with the fickleness of French peas
ants, ripped up the bark of his saplings, and injured, his dwelling,
whenever any out-break at the capital encouraged them to make
raids upon those who were noble or rich. He bore it patiently, for
he had long been used to ingratitude from his country and church.
So passed away a noble life. When will France have another
son like him ?
Martha Perry Lowe.
7
�
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A collection of digitised nineteenth-century pamphlets from Conway Hall Library & Archives. This includes the Conway Tracts, Moncure Conway's personal pamphlet library; the Morris Tracts, donated to the library by Miss Morris in 1904; the National Secular Society's pamphlet library and others. The Conway Tracts were bound with additional ephemera, such as lecture programmes and handwritten notes.<br /><br />Please note that these digitised pamphlets have been edited to maximise the accuracy of the OCR, ensuring they are text searchable. If you would like to view un-edited, full-colour versions of any of our pamphlets, please email librarian@conwayhall.org.uk.<br /><br /><span><img src="http://www.heritagefund.org.uk/sites/default/files/media/attachments/TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" width="238" height="91" alt="TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" /></span>
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Conway Hall Library & Archives
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2018
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Conway Hall Ethical Society
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Charles de Montalembert
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Lowe, Martha Perry [1829-1902]
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Place of publication: Boston
Collation: 45-49 p. ; 23 cm.
Notes: A review of 'Memoir of Count de Montalembert, peer of France, deputy for the Department of Drubs. A chapter of French history'' by Mrs Oliphant. Martha Perry Lowe was a 19th-century American poet. She supported women's rights, temperance, education, and Unitarian organisations. From the library of Dr Moncure Conway. For content of complete issue see: https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=wu.8906965 (accessed 11/2017). From the Unitarian Review and Religious Magazine. Vol. 1 (March 1874).
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[Unitarian Review and Religious Magazine]
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[1874]
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G5434
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<p class="western"><img src="http://i.creativecommons.org/p/mark/1.0/88x31.png" alt="Public Domain Mark" /><br />This work (Charles de Montalembert), identified by <span style="color:#0000ff;"><span lang="zxx"><u>Humanist Library and Archives</u></span></span>, is free of known copyright restrictions.</p>
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Text
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English
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Unitarianism
Charles Forbes Rene de Montalembert
Conway Tracts
-
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Conway’s Sacred Anthology.
191
attempts to reconcile the irreconcilable ; let him rather rest
at a point where faith supplements instead of conflicting
with reason; and with the reverence, more especially his own,
which forbids him to close his soul against the spiritual
influences he dimly but intensely feels around him, let him
combine that other form of reverence, born of the loyal
search for scientific truth, which equally forbids all prema
ture claim to have pushed back the boundaries of the
*
unknown.
Ernest Myers.
TIL—CONWAY’S SACRED ANTHOLOGY.
Col
lected and edited by Moncure Daniel Conway. London :
Triibner and Co. 1874.
The Sacred Anthology, a Book of Ethnical Scriptures.
When Demetrius Phalereus was forming the royal library
at Alexandria, he recommended Ptolemy Philometor to pro
cure from Jerusalem a copy of the laws of the Jews. Whe
ther or not we trust the plea of their divine origin with
which Josephus has credited him,-|- it seems clear that the
great confluence of religions in the third century B.C. at the
meeting-point between the East and West, was beginning to
attract considerable attention. How far Demetrius carried
his intention of “making a collection of all the books
throughout the world,” it is no longer within the power of
the historian to trace. Had the communities of Hindus and
Persians been sufficiently numerous, it is possible, as Ewald
* Since writing the above, 1 have been interested to find the following pas
sage in Mr. J. S. Mill’s Autobiography (p. 39). Speaking of his father, James
Mill, he says: “He found it impossible to believe that a world so full of evil
was the work of an Author combining infinite power with perfect goodness and
righteousness. His intellect spurned the subtleties by which men attempt
to blind themselves to this open contradiction. The Sabaean or Manichaean
theory of a Good and an Evil Principle, struggling against each other for the
government of the universe, he would not have equally condemned ; and I have
heard him express surprise that no one revived it in our time. He would have
regarded it as a mere hypothesis; but he would have ascribed to it no deprav
ing influence.”
+ Jos. Ant. xii. 4.
�192
Conway's Sacred Anthology.
has suggested * that the sacred writings of these races also
might have been gathered and translated at the same time.
The opportunity, however, slipped away, and no further
efforts seem to have been made in the study of comparative
religion. But the influence of the wide culture of the Alex
andrian schools was not wholly lost, and re-appears in the
first Apologists for Christianity. The doctrine of the “ Sper
matic Word” enabled them to look with genial eyes upon
every attempt to arrive at the knowledge of divine things :
they did not desire to claim for one race alone the exclusive
possession of the oracles of God; they eagerly welcomed
the testimonies to their own truths which had fallen from
the lips of the wise and good in other ages and in other lands ;
“whatever things,” affirmed Justin Martyr, “have been
rightly said among all men are the property of us Christians ;-fand Clement attributed inspiration to' Plato or Cleanthes
as readily as to Moses or Isaiah. £ The fall of Rome, the
Mohammedan conquests, the decay of Western learning, all
contributed to disperse completely what little interest had
ever been felt in the Oriental faiths ; and Protestantism in
its turn, founded on the finality of the Bible, reversed the
scepticism of the Pharisees of old, and was unwilling to
believe that any good thing could come from anywhere but
Nazareth. Only here and there some mind of rarer insight
and elevation, like Cudworth’s, detected the broken har
monies of a “symphony of religions” which it was reserved
for a later day to rescue from the confusion of tongues in
which it at first appeared wholly lost.
In India, indeed, the experiment had been already tried.
In the sixteenth century, the Emperor Akbar gathered round
him at his court at Delhi, Jews and Christians, Brahmans
and Zoroastrians. Week by week the learned of all deno
minations assembled at the palace to discuss the most intri
cate questions of theology. Nights and days alike were
spent in investigation, and the august student displayed a
spirit of inquiry which was in truth fundamentally opposed
to every Islamitic principle, and excited the gravest disap
proval of one of the contemporary historians of his feign.
The result of the imperial researches was in the highest
* History of Israel, Vol. V. p. 251.
+ Cohort, vi.
+ Second Apology, xiii.
�Conway’s Sacred Anthology.
193
degree disastrous in the eyes of this worthy Mohammedan.
“ There gradually grew, as the outline on a stone, the con
viction in his heart that there were sensible men in all reli
gions” ! Well indeed might the believer ask, “ If some true
knowledge were thus everywhere to be found, why should
truth be confined to one religion, or to a creed like the
Islam, which was comparatively new, and scarcely a thou
sand years old ? why should one sect assert what another
denies? and why should one claim a preference without
having superiority conferred on itself?”*
These questions have not yet wholly ceased to perplex
some minds nearer home. Vague and indefinite ideas about
revelation still obscure “ the true light which lighteth every
man that cometh into the world;” and it is probable that
no better contribution to liberal theology could be made at
the present day than a collection of the best utterances of
morality and faith produced by other races and creeds such
as Mr. Conway has aimed at compiling. In the East alone,
the labours inaugurated by Anquetil du Perron and Sir Wil
liam Jones a century ago, have already proved marvellously
fruitful; and the study of comparative philology has paved
the way for the no less important study of comparative
religion. The soundness of the scholarship of Sir William
Jones remains, we believe, unimpeached, and those who
have followed in his steps have simply extended, without
having to correct, his discoveries. Du Perron’s work, how
ever, has not stood equally well the test of subsequent ex
plorations in the same field. His unwearying energy and
splendid devotion brought the Zend Avesta to light; but
the progress which has since been made in the knowledge
of Zend has to some extent thrown doubt upon the trust
worthiness of his translation; and as Mr. Conway gives his
readers no precise marginal references, it is to be regretted
that he has nowhere stated how far he has availed himself
of it. But the Brahmanic and Zoroastrian religions are not
the only Oriental faiths which have established themselves
on sacred books. Within fifty years Buddhism has gene
rated a literature which threatens to rival its own canon in
voluminousness ; and the writings of Lao-tsze and Confucius
* Badaoni, quoted by Max Muller, Introduction to the Science of Religion,
p. 89.
�194
Conway's Sacred Anthology.
are yielding up their meaning to the indefatigable deter
mination of recent investigators. From Mr. Conway’s cata
logue of authorities, however, we miss some familiar names,
such as those of Eugene Burnouf and Stanislas Julien ; nor
can it be said that this miscellaneous list at the end of the
volume compensates for the want of exact indications of
the sources from which the separate passages have been
derived.
The materials which modern inquiry has placed at the
disposal of the compiler of a sacred anthology, are indeed
embarrassing from their extent and variety. But if they
are to throw any light on the inner relations of different
religions to one another, they ought to be carefully sifted and
methodically grouped. These requirements we cannot think
that Mr. Conway’s collection satisfactorily fulfils. It appears
deficient in principles both of choice and of arrangement.
A glance at the subjoined table will shew the range of
*
nationalities which have contributed to it. Mr. Conway has
wisely passed the limits which he seemed at first sight to
impose on himself by the use of the term “ Scriptures,” and
has for the most part drawn his “testimonies” from a much
wider area. But it is to be regretted that he has adhered
to the canonical restrictions in some cases and not in others.
The numerous Persian poets who supply so many charming
fancies and wise apothegms would no doubt be the first to
disclaim the faintest supposition of rivalry with the Pro
phet, yet here they meet on equal terms. Three millenniums
divide the Dabistan from the Zend Avesta, but in Mr. Con
way’s pages they stand side by side; the fables of Hito* The following table is a rough classification of the passages ascribed to each
religion or nationality :
3
Sabzean..................... ..............
Persian (Mohammedan) .. . 185
Tartar ..................... ..............
2
Hindu (Brahmanic).......... . 140
1
African..................... ..............
Hebrew, Old Test, in- ) 1 AK
1
Chaldzean................. ..............
eluding the Apocrypha )
English..................... ..............
1
Christian ........................... . 102
1
Japanese................... ..............
Buddhist ........................ . 49
Russian..................... ..............
1
Arabian (Mohammedan) .. . 44
Syrian ..................... ..............
1
. 40
Chinese...............................
Theurgists ............. ..............
Parsi .................................. . 30
1
Unknown ................. ..............
Talmud........... ................... . 12
1
—
Scandinavian .................. . 12
4
Total................. .............. 740
Egyptian ........................... .
Turkish ........................... .
4
�Conway's Sacred Anthology.
-
195
pades& take their place along with the hymns of the Rig
Veda and the laws of Manu ; and the chronicles of Ceylon
are on a par with the sermons of Buddha. The cordon, which
is relaxed for the Mohammedans and the Parsis, the Brah
mans and the Buddhists, is tightly drawn for the Christians,
whose literature is apparently regarded as complete with
the last book of the New Testament. Yet it may be doubted
whether, among ordinary readers, Augustine, Tauler, and
Pascal are so much better known than Sadi or V^mana, as
to justify their entire exclusion and if the Imitatio Christi
was too familiar, some of the old Latin hymns might have
represented a spirit of devotion unknown in the East. It
is probably the same fear of intruding upon his readers what
they were already acquainted with, which has led Mr. Con
way to ignore the poets and philosophers of Greece and Rome
altogether. Happily this dread did not compel the psalm
ists and apostles to be silent also ; but no other cause could
have kept out Homer and let in the Eddas
.
*
Yet Sophocles
is at least as well worth reading, and almost as little read,
as Hafiz; it is difficult to see why Marcus Aurelius should
be unheard while Vladimir II. is permitted to speak; the
extracts from the Gospels, under the head of the “ Ethics
of the Intellect,” might well have been supplemented with
passages from the Apology of Socrates ; Plutarch or Seneca
could have furnished maxims quite as good as those of
Turkey, Japan, or England; and in the section entitled
“ Sanctions,” we look in vain for one of Plato’s wonderful
myths, such as that of Er the son of Armenius. Nor can
we think that Mr. Conway does justice to the oldest civilis
ation in the world, in omitting all reference to the Egyptian
“ Book of the Dead.” It may be that the doctrine of im
mortality appears there in a form <too pronounced for his
taste ; but the remarkable conceptions of personal and social
duty implied in the confessions of the soul before the fortytwo assessors in the “Hall of the Two Truths” deserve
recognition in any work which is designed like this to secure
a wider appreciation for “the converging testimonies of ages
and races to great principles.” The mystic sayings of Hermes
Trismegistus”* are pallid and obscure by the side of the
vows and aspirations of the funeral ritual so touchingly
called the “ Book of the Manifestation to Light.”
CLVII.
VOL. XI.
P
�196
Conway's Sacred Anthology.
Of hardly less importance, however, than the selection of
the ethnical Scriptures is their classification. If the object
is to enable the reader to compare together different types
of religion, the quotations ought snrely to be arranged ac
cording to the faiths from which they spring; and extracts
taken from works separated by a long range of time should
be set as far as possible in chronological order, so as to
exhibit the phases of development through which any par
ticular religion has passed. Mr. Conway, however, has pre
ferred a division by subjects rather than by creeds; and has
gathered his materials under the somewhat Emersonian
titles of “ Laws,” “ Nature,” “ Character,” “ Conduct of Life,”
and the like. An arrangement of this kind might have been
advantageously combined with a classification according to
religions, if a few well-defined orders of thought had been
adopted. The opening section of “ Laws,” however, contains
precepts upon every variety of virtue, and deals largely
with “ Charity,” “ Love,” and “ Humility between “ Wis
dom” and “ Knowledge,” “ Religion,” “ Theism,” and “ Wor
ship,” it is somewhat difficult to draw any clear line ; and
these headings do not facilitate the inquirer in ascertaining
whether any given passage is included. This task is, indeed,
rendered harder by the absence of any table of sources. To
each extract a title is prefixed, and of these, it is true, a list
is supplied; but (to take instances only from the Christian
Scriptures) not every one would seek for the parable of the
owner of the vineyard and his two sons under the desig
*
nation, “ The Established Church,” nor would many divine
that “ Demand for a Cause” signified the story of the young
ruler who went away sorrowful, having made what Dante
called “ the great refusal.” To any one, therefore, who takes
up the volume for the first time, the index of titles is almost
useless; and the book is simply a mass of citations, many
of them of high moral and religious value, but unavailable
for critical comparison, and beyond the reach of verification.
Mr. Conway has apparently, however, desired to provide
his readers with some little apparatus which should help
their judgment, and has accordingly appended a series of
Chronological Notes on the various works which have sup
plied him with quotations. But the information imparted
* With the connected discourses, Matt. xxi. 23—32.
�Conway's Sacred Anthology.
197
must be said to be exceedingly meagre: to those who are
already acquainted with Oriental literature it is superfluous,
while to the uninitiated it is tantalisingly inadequate. The
Chinese books are dealt with first; but though Lao-tsze and
*
Confucius- were the founders of religions entirely distinct,
no hint is afforded us of their divergence. The list of Parsi
writings extends over a period of three thousand years, but
we look in vain for any estimate of the relations between
the Zend Avesta and the Dabistan at its two extremes. It
would be perhaps needless to discriminate the Sama Veda
and the Yagur Veda from the Pig Veda (the Atharva Veda
does not appear at all); but some indication of the epic
character of the Ramayana and the Mahabharata would
have been acceptable. But the obliteration of all distinc
tions between the authoritative books of an established
religion and works of poetry or history, ought not to have
caused any confusion between the literatures of rival faiths.
Among the Hindu writings, however, between the Vedas and
the laws of Manu, three works are enumerated which are not
Hindu at all, but Singhalese—not Brahmanic, but Buddhist.
The Mahavamsa, placed by Mr. Conway about B.C. 477—
459, is a kind of royal chronicle, different parts of which
bear different dates. The language in which it is written is
not the Sanskrit of the Vedas, but the Pali of the Buddhist
Scriptures. The author or compiler of the first thirty-seven
chapters was Mah&nama, the uncle of Dhatusena, king of
Ceylon from 459 to 477 A.D.; the next section, written by
a priest named Dharmakirti, carried down the history to
1267; and a third hand has concluded it at 1758. The
Raja-Waliya, which Mr. Conway ascribes to the fourth cen
tury B.C., is of uncertain age; but the oldest portion of it
is probably not so old as the corresponding part of the Mah&vamsa. The same date is affixed to the Raja-Ratnakara,
though the Singhalese in which it is written is of a more
modern form than that of the Raja-Waliya already named.
The author was a certain Abhaya-Raja, who lived about the
middle of the sixteenth century of our era I Even Upham’s
translation, included by Mr. Conway among his “ principal
authorities,” if not altogether trustworthy, would at least
* Mr. Conway separates them by an interval of a century and a quarter.
Max Muller, however, and other writers speak of them as at any rate during a
part of their lives contemporary.
P 2
�198
Conway’s Sacred Anthology.
have enabled him to assign these works to their proper
place among the Buddhist writings, subsequent to the col
lection of the “ Three Baskets.”*
The Hebrew and Christian Scriptures hardly meet with
more satisfactory treatment. Of the Pentateuch we are told
that “ the tendency of modern criticism is to the conclusion
that a large number of very ancient fragments, historical,
legendary and poetic, were sifted, fused, or to use Ewald’s
expression, compounded, into the books which we now have ;
and that they assumed their present shape in the eleventh
century B.C.” The primitive document which lies at the
foundation of the books of Genesis and Exodus may possibly
be ascribed to the period of Samuel, or placed a little later
than that of Solomon. But if Mr. Conway had taken the least
pains to acquaint himself with the views of Ewald, he could
hardly have overlooked the fact that that great historian, in
common with the vast majority of recent critics, postpones the
completion of the Pentateuch till after the composition of
the book of Deuteronomy, which he assigns to the seventh
century.-f- Nor have subsequent investigators contented
themselves with leaving the question there. Prof. Russell
Martineau, in accordance with the views of some of the
Dutch scholars, has shewn in the pages of this Review J that
there is good ground for believing that a large portion of the
Levitical legislation did not come into existence before the
return from the captivity. If the Pentateuch is thus brought
to the front too early, the book of Job seems not admitted
till too late. Its date is, it is true, somewhat difficult to
determine: Mr. Conway, however, adopts a view of its origin
* See “Le Bouddha et sa Religion,” by M. Barthelemy Saint-Hilaire, pp.
327, 328. We do not know exactly what use has been made by Mr. Conway
of Upham’s translation ; but its grave deficiencies might have been corrected by
the work of Tumour, which, though incomplete, is of far higher value. The
further dates assigned to such books asDhammapada (246 B.C.) and Kuddhaka
P&tha (250 B.C.) must likewise be received with some caution. The White
Lotus of the Good Law is also referred to the year 246 B.C.; it is not, like
Dhammapada and Kuddhaka P&tha, included in the “Three Baskets” acknow
ledged in Ceylon, which do not appear to have been reduced to writing till about
88 B.C ; it is in Sanskrit, not Pali; but it does not seem possible to fix the
year of its production with precision.—As I have been unable to resort to stan-'
dard works on this subject, I must express my obligations for the greater part
of my information to T. Rhys Davids, Esq., late of Ceylon.
+ History of Israel, I. p. 127, IV. p. 220, sqq.
J Theol. Rev. for Oct. 1872, p. 474, sqq.
�Conway's Sacred Anthology.
199
which prevents him from finding a place for it till after the
Jews had been brought in contact with some of the nations
of the East in the sixth century. In the margin of the
section “ Sorrow and Death,” where an abridgement of it
*
appears, he characterises it as “ Hebrew or Persian.” This
designation is explained in the Chronological Notes by the
statement that it is a version probably of a Persian form of
a Brahmanic story of similar character. As well might we
say that Hamlet was a “version” of a French form-f- of a
Danish tale. If there be any book in the Old Testament
which bears the stamp of strong individual genius, surely it
is the book of Job. It stands entirely outside of the limits
of pure Mosaism, but it is Semitic and not Aryan. Its
author was not shut up in the domestic politics or faith of
Israel; but it was from the wisdom of Teman and the civi
lisation of Egypt that he drew much of his argument and
his imagery. The Satan who presents himself among the
sons of God bears no resemblance to the Zoroastrian Ahri
man ; and the story of his ineffectual endeavours to prove
that Job did not “serve God for nought” may have been
the common property of the wide East as that of Othello
was of Europe, but it needed a Hebrew Shakspeare to weld
it into the earliest, and in some respects the greatest, tragic
drama of the world. With the same want of critical per
ception (as we must consider it), Mr. Conway cites the open
ing and the closing chapters of the book of Isaiah as if they
all alike came from the same pen ; and upon this principle
compiles into one passage verses from oracles against Philistia, against Moab, and against Babylon, separated by
nearly two centuries. The result is described as “The
Tyrant’s Fall/’J For this, perhaps, the wretched divisions
of our English Bible are in part responsible; but this plea
does not excuse a similar treatment of soma, of the Psalms.
Who would think it fair if some continental collector were
to put together stanzas from Milton, Wesley, and Faber, and
present the compound as a specimen of an English hymn ?
We may pass over Mr. Conway’s notices of the Septua* P. 393, sqq.
+ That of the novelist Belleforest.
J dcx. , made up apparently from Is. xiii. 2, 3, 11, 12, xiv. 7, 12, 16, 26,
30, and xvi. 5.
>
’
’
�200
Conway's Sacred Anthology.
gint and the Apocrypha, as they are of slight importance ;
*
but graver issues are raised by his views of the growth of
the New Testament. The Apocalypse, the book of Acts,
and the Epistles of Paul, are the only books which he saves
for the first century. The judgment which treats the book
of Revelation and the letters of Paul as the earliest Christian
documents which we possess, is no doubt a sound one ; but
its correctness seems almost fortuitous, for the next sentence
sweeps away the Epistles to the Ephesians, the Galatians,
the Colossians, and Timothy (together with that to the
Hebrews and those bearing the names of Peter, James, John
and Jude), as of uncertain date and apocryphal authorship.
Why the Epistle to the Galatians should be thus boldly
struck out, we are at a loss to conceive ; the hardiest critics
(with the exception of Bruno Bauer *-) have never ventured
f
to impugn its authenticity; and it is difficult to know on
what grounds it should be thrown overboard while the Epistle
to the Philippians is retained. A still stronger reversal of
accepted decisions is to be found in the priority assigned to
the book of Acts. If there is any point on which all schools
are agreed, it surely is that this book supplemented, instead
of preceding, the Gospel of Luke. Mr. Conway, however,
thinks otherwise. In virtue, perhaps, of the narrative of
the voyage of Paul to which the use of the first person lends
so fresh an air, he reserves a place for this work among the
earliest productions of the primitive church. The four Gos
pels are all relegated into the second century, that of Mat
thew being referred to its first quarter, that of Mark being
set down near its last, while intermediate positions are pro
vided for those of Luke and John. This theory, however,
brings down the composition of the Gospel of Mark hazard* Mr. Conway places the version of the Septuagint in the year 250 B.C. It
is, however, clear that the translation was not made all at once ; but the point
is of minor interest except as it helps us to fix the date of the book of Wisdom,
the author of which seems to have been acquainted with the Greek rendering
of the Pentateuch and Isaiah. The period assigned by Mr. Conway (B.C. 250
—300) would thus appear to be too early.—The “four books of Esdras, ranging
from B.C. 150—31,” are in reality only two. The Vatican MS. contains two
books of Esdras, the first being the book known by that name in our Apocrypha,
and the second being the canonical Ezra. In the Vulgate, however, the canon
ical Ezra stands first; Nehemiah is designated the second book of Esdras; what
we know as the first book of Esdras follows in the third place; and the so-called
second book, of which no Greek text exists, comes fourth and last.
f Davidson’s Introduction to the New Testament, I. p. 101.
J
-Sj'
'.f
3
�SECOND EDITION, NOW READY.
SACRED ANTHOLOGY
THE
j
i. 'ilif r.f ■!
a
BOOK OF ETHNICAL SCRIPTURE^
BY MONCURE DANIEL CONWAY.
Triibner & Co., Ludgate Hill.
The second edition of this work contains an Index of Authors,
in addition to the Index of Subjects, List of Authorities, &c.,
and the Chronological Notes
carefully revised.
The book contains 740 Readings from the Asiatic and Scan
dinavian Sacred Books and Cla^jfes, arranged according to
subjects in 480 pages royal 8vo, with marginal notes.
OPINIONS OF THE PRESS.
It is certainly instructive to see the essential agreement of so many
venerated religious writings, though for depth of meaning and classicality
of form none of them approaches the HebrewSfcmd Christian Scriptures.
The idea of the work is arj^cellentone, and Mr. Conway deserves great
credit for being the first to realise it.— We^^B^i^keview.
It remains for us to point out so^ of the remarkable coincidences
in the principles of morals and reli||on which Mr. Conway’s diligence
and tact have brought together. HillaMand Confucius enunciated the
safhe warning in almost the same words—“ WhaWou do not wish done
to yourself do not to others.” Beneath a tropic sky, the flamingoes and
green parrots suggest the same lessons as the ravens and lilies of the
■field upon the hills of Galilee. A few words sum up with unsurpassed
pathos the parable of the virgins—“ A poor man watched a thousand
years before the gate of Paradise ; then, while he snatched one little nap
it opened and shut.”— Theological Review.
�2
Few more valuable contributions have been made to the popular study
of comparative theology than Mr. Conway’s “ Sacred Anthology,” well
fitted to serve as a volume of devout reading to those who choose without
theological forethought or afterthought to apply it to that use. To the
more speculative student, it curiously illustrates at once the different
genius of the various nations of the world, and the identity of human
nature in its apprehension of the loftiest topics of faith and morals. Few
can read it without feeling their mental horizon enlarged, and without a
deeper sense of the common humanity that lies at the basis of the dif
ferences by which history, climate, and civilisation disguise men and
nations from each other.—Daily News.
The book may fairly be described as a bible of humanity, and as an
ethical text book it might well be adopted in all schools and families
where an attempt is made to instil the highest principles of morality
apart from religious dogma. He has produced a work which a great
number of people have long been desiring to possess, and which is likely
to mark a distinct epoch in the progress of ethical culture.—Examiner.
The result is most interesting. For the first time, an English reader
may judge for himself of the moral and religious merits of writings which
heretofore have been to him only venerable and shadowy abstractions.
We shall be much surprised if every reader does not lay it down in a
better mental frame than was his when he took it up. It teaches charity
and toleration, and makes men less spiritually arrogant. It is not with
out even greater lessons to those who have ears to hear.—The Echo.
The “ Sacred Anthology ” should find a place on every library shelf.
It is a bible free from bigotry, and were an Universal Church ever estab
lished, might fairly be a lesson book for that church. The labour ex
pended by Mr. Conway in editing, abridging, and selecting, can hardly
be fairly estimated. We can heartily recommend it to Freethought
Societies as a volume in which they may find readings otherwise inaccess
ible to them.—National Reformer.
The principal authorities for the beautiful thoughts and precepts so
skilfully collected by the editor, are given at the close of the volume, to
make his work as complete as possible. Mr. Conway also publishes
chronological notes, and it is scarcely necessary to say that his views
with regard to the dates of our sacred books differ considerably from those
adopted by orthodox divines.— The Pall Mall Gazette.
A very slight examination of the volume will show that it is indeed a
valuable anthology of the scriptures of all races. As complete and
entertaining a volume as one would wish to read.—The Bookseller.
It will be seen that all the sacred books of mankind have their prin
cipal features in common ; that the differences between them are not of
essential nature, but of degrees of manner and style, and that an inspired
spirit variously modified and expressed breathes through all. Mr. M. D.
�Conway has contributed a real service to an enlightened view of this
subject by his “ Sacred Anthology,” a book which we commend to the
attention of all who are accustomed to speak of the bible as the only
word of God.— The Inquirer.
Such of our readers as may have studied a remarkable book, India in
Greece, which appeared some twenty years ago, are well aware of the
extent to which Indian rites and customs after having been transported
to Greece, and thence re-exported to Italy, have become permanently
imbedded in the Romish system. Indeed, we believe there is scarce a
Popish notion, emblem, or ceremony that may not be distinctly traced
to 9. Pagan source. However, if the original have come from thence,
thence also may be derived an anecdote that may somewhat tend to
diminish its ill effects. For among the guse Hindoo aphorisms (as ren
dered in Mr. Moncure Conway’s recent book), we find the following,
which some amongst us might ponder with advantage at the present
time:—“Sdnyasis (?Hindu Rits) acquaint themselves with particular
words and vests; they wear a brick-red garb and shaven crowns; in
these they pride themselves ■ their heads look very pure, hut are their
hearts so ?” “ Religion which consists in postures of the limbs (mark
this ye clergy of St. Alban’s, Holborn) is just a little inferior to the
exercises of the wrestler.” “ In the absence of inward vision boast not
of oral divinity.” We are not sure that Vishnu’s philosophy would not
compare favourably with that of Pio Nono.—The Rock.
Many years ago, Philip Bailey, of “Festus,” announced as forthcoming
a book entitled “ Poetical Divinity,” th^object of which was to show by
quotations from the bards of all time, that they all held substantially the
same creed which we presume was held by Festus himself—Pantheism
plus Universal Restoration. This book never has appeared, but Mr
Conway’s is arranged on a somewhat similar plan, and is altogether a
volume of such a unique yet delightfully varied character that it must
commend itself to readers of every sort. We have seen already the eyes
of a rather strictly orthodox person glistening with eager delight over
many of the maxims and beautiful little moral fables with which it abounds.
—The Dundee Advertiser.
It would be impossible that such a book, even if it were compara
tively carelessly done, could be without interest ; but Mr. Conway’s task
has been most conscientiously performed, and it will be found of the
greatest possible value, for it casts a strong light upon many matters
which are frequently in discussion.—The Scotsman.
Mr. Conway has conferred a signal service on the literature of Theism by
publishing for the first time a comprehensive collection of some of the best
passages from the ancient scriptures of different nations. A few years ago
we, in the Brahmo-Somaj, made an humble effort in that direction, which
resulted in the issue of a small book of theistic texts now in use during
service in most of our churches. Mr. Conway’s excellent publication
is on a far grander scale, embraces a wider variety of subjects, and ex
tends its selection through a much larger range of scriptural^ writings
than we could command.—The Indian Mirror.
�4
There is, I suppose, no book inexistence quite like it, perhaps none on
the same plan and of equal scope. He who found no higher use for the
book would rejoice in it as a handbook for scriptural quotations not
otherwise readily accessible, as the number of volumes from which they
have been brought together sufficiently proves. There is nothing we
more need mentally than a tinge of Orientalism, something to give a new
bent and scope to minds fed perpetually on the somewhat narrow and
practical literature of the Western races. Mr. Conway, with his eager
poetic instincts, his warm feeling and wide sympathies, is a good guide
to those in search of what is most impressive to the imagination or
stimulating to the sensibilities.—“ G. W, S.,” in the New York Tribune.
A Significant Book.—Significant of what? Of interest in the
religious life of men who are outside the pale of Christianity, of that
“ sympathy of religions ” which has lately found in the missionary lecture
of Max Muller in Westminster Abbey an exhibition which might
well strike terror into High Church dignitaries, of a growing faith that
the attitude of Christianity towards the other great religions of the world
is not wholly that of a teacher, but may be that of a pupil; of this, at
least—we trust of much beside.—Rev. John W. Chadwick, in the
“ Liberal Christian” New York.
He then read a few sentences from a book called “ Sacred Anthology,”
which work, he said, was a compilation from the religious works of all
nations, some older than our bible : the book he should leave on the desk
as his bequest to the society.—Report of an Address by A. Bronson
Alcott, Esq.,at the opening of a new hall in Massachusetts.
“The Anthology ” may be obtained through any Bookseller, or
from the Librarian, the Chapel, 1I, South Place, Finsbury.
Price, ios. Postage, 9d.
■f
f J
�201
Conway's Sacred Anthology.
-ously late; nor are we aware of any strong grounds for
postponing it till after the appearance of the fourth Gospel.
Altogether it must be said that the value of the book
before us is needlessly impaired by these rash remarks.
For the general purposes of comparative religion, it is unne
cessary to enter into the “ results of modern criticism ” of
the Christian Scriptures. Their position in the history of
thought is sufficiently well known to enable their contents
to be correctly estimated by the side of the Vedas or the
Koran without any previous determination of the authorship
of Epistles or the order of the Gospel narratives. The in
version of a couple of books of the New Testament is of
light consequence compared with the transposition of writ
ings belonging to one language or religion into another a
millennium or so too soon ; but such critical lapses throw
an air of inexactness over the whole work, and somewhat
detract from our appreciation of the genial sympathy which
has evidently directed its preparation. It may be hoped
that in a future edition Mr. Conway will substitute for his
Chronological Notes an introduction such as he well knows
how to write, which may pass in rapid review the genius
of each great faith, assign to the various phases of its de
velopment the books respectively belonging to them, and
thus assist his readers in taking a general survey over the
wide field through which he is so admirably qualified, by
the range of his own reading and the delicacy of his per
ceptions, to be their guide.
It remains to point out as briefly as possible some of the
remarkable coincidences in the principles of morals and
religion which Mr. Conway’s diligence and tact have brought
together. Hillel and Confuciusd" enunciated the same
*
warning in almost the same words,
“ What you do not wish done to yourself^ do not to others
and the Arab sages supply a similar repetition^ of the more
pointed Hindu proverb,
“Do not force on thy neighbour a hat that hurts thine own
head.Ӥ
To return good for evil ceases to be a virtue peculiarly
enjoined on (would that we could also say practised by)
* XXVII.
+ X.
J XII.
§ XLI.
�202
Conway's Sacred Anthology.
Christians ; for the followers of Lao-tsze are hidden to “ re
compense injury with kindness;”* the Buddhist finds in
Dhammapada the command,
“ Let a man overcome anger by love; let him overcome evil
by good; let him overcome the greedy by liberality, and the liar
by truth+
and Mohammed assigns the deeper reason already revealed
by Jesus,
“For God loveth that you should cast into the depths of your
souls the roots of his perfections.’’^;
All class distinctions are abolished, and the foundations
of universal brotherhood are laid by the simple question of
Vemana,
“ Of what caste is He who speaks in the pariah
In this vast circle, however, particular duties are not to
be lost in general obligations, and Indian wisdom provides
in a breath for the aged and the young:
“ Educate thy children; then thou wilt know how much thou
owest thy father and mother
for servants—
“ What sort of master is that who does not honour his servants
while they discharge their duty 1 .... By taking up the whole
time of a servant, by increasing expectation, by denying reward,
the ill-disposed master is recognised. Favourable discourse to a
servant, presents that denote affection, even in blaming faults
taking notice of virtues, these are the manners of a kind master.
He who knows how to consider his servants, abounds in good
ones ;”5T
and for animals.
**
Beneath a tropic sky, the flamingoes
and green parrots++ suggest the same lessons as the ravens
and the lilies of the field upon the hills of Galilee ; and the
Persian poet discloses the same source of hidden wealth as
Christ:
“ Place your affections on the Creator of the universe : that
will suffice.” U
From this quarter, also, comes a tale of a treasure hid in
* DXCIX.
f
II COXXXIX.
HI C00LXI.
H DOLIV.
CCCOLXXXI.
I OCCXLI.
** CCCXXVIII.
§ OOCCXLIV.
++ CCCCLXVH.
�Conway*ts Sacred Anthology.
,203
•a field, which relates that the finder, unlike the buyer in
*
the gospel story, insisted on sharing his discovery with the
original owner, who in his turn refused to receive it; and
a few words sum up with unsurpassed pathos the parable
of the virgins:
“ A poor man watched a thousand years before the gate of
Paradise. Then, while he snatched one little nap—it opened,
and shut.”+
From the far North rings out a note of blended caution
and trust in human nature:
“No one is so good that no failing attends him, nor so bad as
to be good’for nothing
while a Chinese proverb compresses into one brief maxim
the art of living with others :
“ When alone, think of your own faults; when in company,
forget those of others.” §
In spite of this advice, however, divisions may be inevit
able here; but in the future, if Mohammed’s insight is
correct, they shall disappear:
“ All have a quarter of the heaven to which they turn them;
but wherever ye be, hasten emulously after good; God will one
day bring you all together.” ||
Should any hapless soul be left to struggle with an adverse
destiny, one spirit, at any rate, was ready to bear it com
pany even in its conflicts and its pains, for, in one of the
finest extracts of the book, Kwan-yin, a Fo (Chinese Budd
hist) prophetess, answers by implication the “ comfortable”
doctrine of the sovereign mercy of God in the torments of
the damned, and declares :
“ Never will I seek nor receive private individual salvation,
never enter into final peace alone ; but for ever and everywhere
will I strive for the universal redemption of every creature
throughout all worlds. Until all are delivered, never will I leave
the world of sin, sorrow, and struggle, but will remain where
I am.”T
But her self-imposed privations shall at length have an
* DLX.
+ CCCCLXXVIII.
X Saemund’s Edda, cccclxx.
§ CCCCLXXXIV.
|| LXXXIV.
U COOLIII.
�204
Conway's Sacred Anthology.
end, if the Arabian saying (relating, it is true, to a wholly
different order of conceptions) may be trusted:
“In the last day, when all things save paradise shall have
passed away, God will look upon hell, and in that instant its
flames shall be extinguished for ever.” *
It must be confessed, however, that we have here morality,
sometimes “ touched with emotion/’ and sometimes destitute
of it, rather than religion. And so far as Mr. Conway’s
extracts enable us to judge, it appears that religion, in the
sense of personal communion with God, finds more fervent
expression in the Semitic than in the Aryan mind. This
is observable even in the treatment of nature, which is but
the vesture of the unseen Will. The metaphysical phrases
of the hymns to Brahma "f and Vishnu J do not thrill us
*
like the joyousness of the hundred and fourth psalm ; and
it is to the Koran that we must go to strike another note in
the same chord of sympathy with universal life.
“ Hast thou not heard how all in the heavens and in the earth
uttereth the praise of God ? The very birds as they spread their
wings ? Every creature knoweth its prayer and its praise. Ӥ
The relations between Deity and his creatures are those
of reason rather than affection ; their quality is that of light,
not warmth. It is the Mohammedan traditions ||—even in
their Persian dress, for the genius of religion triumphs over
nationality—which exhibit with most beauty the deep sense
of the abiding presence of God, to which the habit of prayer,
in the bazaar, on the river-bank, or by the road-side, as
well as in the mosque, bears such touching witness. Spiri
tual religion is not, indeed, ignored. Hindu pilgrimages
gave birth to the pungent protest,
“Going to holy Benares will make no pig an elephant ;”1T
and the land of the fakirs further humiliates ritualism with
the quiet saying,
“ Religion which consists in postures of the limbs is just a
little inferior to the exercises of the wrestler.”**
But only here and there do we seem clearly to touch the
“ higher pantheism” which blends in one the spiritual forces
+ C.
* D00XV.
|| CLXVI., CLXVII.
’
H CLXIV.
I Oil.
** COXXVID.
§ Oil.
�Comvay's Sacred Anthology.
205
of the universe, without however destroying the individual
ity of the soul. Of this, the following passage of the Zend
Avesta may serve as an example:
. “ God appears in the best thought, the truth of speech and the
sincerity of action, giving through his pure spirit health, pros
perity, devotion and eternity to this universe. He is the Father
of all truth.”*
It is natural, therefore, that of the language of penitence,
of consciousness and confession of sin, there should be Httle
trace among the Aryan hymns. The Vedic prayer, “to be
united by devout meditation with the Spirit supremely blest
and intelligent,” f contains no provision for the wounded
and struggling conscience ; the passionate utterances of the
fifty-first psalm would be unintelligible to the mystics of
the far Fast; even in the midst of the sorrow and misery
by which he is surrounded, it is by his own strength that
man is to rise to higher things—it is by the path of intel
lectual enlightenment rather than by that of moral conflict
that his progress is to be made; and so the whole range of
Aryan literature does not appear capable of producing any
thing like the parable of the Prodigal Son.
The last section of Mr. Conway’s book is entitled “ Sanc
tions.” Its general purport is to illustrate the well-known
couplet,
“ Our acts our angels are, or good, or ill,
Our fatal shadows that walk by us still.”|
But how far this unseen attendance will follow us, is left
obscure. “ Let the motive be in the deed,” it is well said in
the Bhagavat Ghita ;§ and Rama truly declares that
“ Virtue is a service man owes himself: though there were no
heaven nor any God to rule the world, it were not the less the
binding law of life.” ||
The belief in immortality need not, however, be confounded
with “otherworldliness;” and we are surprised that the
intense moral conviction which formerly shaped itself into
* CXVII.
CLXX.
I See in particular the four vivid pictures from the book of Ardai Viraf the
Persian Dante (one of which, however, has strayed a long way from its compa
nions), DCXXXVII., DOCXXVII., DCOXXX., DOXXXII.
§ DCLXVI.
|| dlvi. ; the whole passage is of remarkable force and elevation.
F
�206
Report of the Committee of Council on Education.
the doctrines of heaven and hell, and now re-appears as the
striving after perfection, receives no fuller recognition as the
prophecy of an endless destiny. It is not at least for want
of testimonies. The oldest monuments of human thought
*
the ripest genius of human wisdom, the deepest insight of
human love, have all contributed their choicest fruits to
nurture the faith of an undying life. The noblest races, and
minds which seem to stand above race and belong to man
kind, have found in this hope the spring and the spur of all
aspiration, and the prospect of the solution of problems in
determinable here. The new philosophy may perhaps be
summed up in the words of Omar Kheyam (eleventh
century, A.D.), with which Mr. Conway closes his selection:
11 Resign thyself, then, to make what little paradise thou canst
here below; for as for that beyond, thou shalt arrive there, or
thou shalt not.”
But it must at any rate be remembered that on this great
theme the “ symphony of religions ” does not in reality thus
fade away in a doubt.
J. Estlin Carpenter.
TV.—THE REPORT OF THE COMMITTEE OF COUNCIL
ON EDUCATION FOR 1872-73.
There are not many subjects on which the press has been
more busy during the last few years than on all the various
topics which have arisen in connection with plans for Na
tional Education. Government returns of the most compre
hensive nature extending over many volumes, reports as
to educational methods adopted at home and abroad, the pub
lications of associations founded for the promotion of anta
gonistic principles, volumes published by earnest workers
in defence of their own plans and criticising the opinions
and proposals of others, pamphlets and leading articles
without number—all shew how deep an interest is felt in
* We have not space to multiply quotations from the Egyptian Book of the
Dead, the Hindu Vedas, or the Iranian Zend Avesta, to say nothing of Plato.
�
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Victorian Blogging
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A collection of digitised nineteenth-century pamphlets from Conway Hall Library & Archives. This includes the Conway Tracts, Moncure Conway's personal pamphlet library; the Morris Tracts, donated to the library by Miss Morris in 1904; the National Secular Society's pamphlet library and others. The Conway Tracts were bound with additional ephemera, such as lecture programmes and handwritten notes.<br /><br />Please note that these digitised pamphlets have been edited to maximise the accuracy of the OCR, ensuring they are text searchable. If you would like to view un-edited, full-colour versions of any of our pamphlets, please email librarian@conwayhall.org.uk.<br /><br /><span><img src="http://www.heritagefund.org.uk/sites/default/files/media/attachments/TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" width="238" height="91" alt="TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" /></span>
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2018
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Conway Hall Ethical Society
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Conway's Sacred Anthology
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Carpenter, J. Estlin (Joseph Estlin)
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Place of publication: [s.l.]
Collation: 191-206 p. ; 23 cm.
Notes: From the library of Dr Moncure Conway. A review by Joseph Estlin Carpenter of Moncure Conway's work 'The Sacred Anthology' from 'Theological Review' 11, April 1874. Includes bibliographical references.
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Book reviews
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Book Reviews
Conway Tracts
Moncure Conway
Sacred Books
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Text
"O «2
c* ' J-
TTW
DAVID FRIEDRICH STRAUSS.
COMMEMORATIVE SERVICES
AT
SOUTH PLACE CHAPEL, FINSBURY,
February 22, 1874.
WITH
JA
DISCOUHSE
BY
MONCURE D. CONWAY.
11, SOUTH PLACE, FINSBURY.
1874.
PRICE THREEPENCE«
�I
�I.
I CANNOT plainly see the way,
So dark the grave is; but I know
If I do truly work my day
Some good will brighten out of woe.
For the same hand that doth unbind
The winter winds, sends sweetest showers,
And the poor rustic laughs to find
His April meadows full of flowers.
I said I could not see the way,
And yet what need is there to see,
More than to do what good I may,
And trust the great strength over me ?
Why should I vainly seek to solve
Free-will, necessity, the pall ?
I feel, I know that God is love,
And knowing this I know it all.
Alice Carey.
II.
READINGS.
Whoso seeketh wisdom shall have no great travail; for he
shall find her sitting at his door. She goeth about seeking such
as are worthy of her, showeth herself favourably to them in the
highways, and meeteth them in every thought. Love is the
keeping of her laws. The multitude of the wise is the welfare
of the world.
�4
Wisdom is the worker of all things: for in her is an under
standing spirit, holy, one only, manifold, subtile, lively, clear,
undefiled, simple, not subject to hurt, loving the thing that is
good, quick, which cannot be letted, ready to do good ; kind to
man, steadfast, sure, free from care, having all power, overseeing
all things; and going through all understanding, pure and most
subtle spirits. Wisdom is more moving than any motion: she
passeth through all things by reason of her pureness. For she is
the breath of the power of God, and a pure influence flowing
from the glory of the Almighty? therefore can no defiled thing
fall into her.
For she is the brightness of the everlasting
light, the unspotted mirror of the power ©f God, and the image
of his goodness. And being but one, she can do all things;
and remaining in herself, she maketh all things new: and in all
ages entering into holy souls, she maketh them friends of God
and prophets. She is more beautiful than the sun, and above all
the order of the stars: being compared with the light, she is
found before it; for after day cometh night, but vice shall not
prevail against wisdom.
Wisdom of Solomon.
The Duke Gae asked about the altars of the gods of the land.
Tsae-Wo replied, “The Hea sovereign used the pine-tree, the
man of the Yin used the cypress, and the man of the Chow used
the chestnut,—to cause the people to be in awe.”
Confucius, hearing this, said, “ Things that are done, it is
needless to speak about; things that have had their course, it is
needless to remonstrate with; things that are past, it is needless
to blame. ”
Kee-Loo asked about serving the gods. The Master said,
“While you are not able to serve men, how can you serve the
gods ?”
�5
Kee-Loo said, “ I venture to ask about death. ”
The Master said, “While you do not comprehend life, how
can you comprehend death ?
“ If a man in the morning hear of the right way, he may in
the evening die without regret
“Yew, shall I teach you what knowledge is ? When you know
a thing, consider that you know it; and when you do not know
a thing, understand that you do not know it This is knowledge.
“ For a man to worship a deity not his own is mere flattery.
“To give one’s-self earnestly to the duties due to men, and
while respecting the gods, to respect also their distance, may be
called Wisdom.”
Confucius.
Mahomet said, Instruct in knowledge ! He who instructs,
fears God ; he who speaks of knowledge, praises the Lord; who
disputes about it, engages in holy warfare ; who seeks it, adores
the Most High; who spreads it, dispenses alms to the ignorant;
and who possesses it, attains the veneration and goodwill of all.
Knowledge enables its possessor to distinguish what is forbidden
from what is not; it lights the way to heaven; it is our friend in
the desert, our society in solitude ; our companion when far away
from our homes ; it guides us to happiness ; it sustains us in
misery ; it raises us in the estimation of friends ; it serves as an
armour against our enemies. With knowledge, the servant of
God rises to the heights of excellence. The ink of the scholar is
more sacred than the blood of the martyr. God created Reason,
and it was the most beautiful being in his creation: and God
said to it, “I have not created anything better or more perfect or
more beautiful than thou: blessings will come down on mankind
on thy account, and they will be judged according to the use they
make of thee. ”
Mohammed.
�6
If Morality is the relation of man to the idea of his kind, which
in part he endeavours to realise in himself, in part recognises
and seeks to promote in others, Religion, on the other hand, is
his relation to the idea of the universe, the ultimate source of all
life and being. So far, it may be said that Religion is above
Morality; as it springs from a still profounder source, reaches
back into a still more primitive ground.
Ever remember that thou art human, not merely a natural
production ; ever remember that all others are human also, and,
with all individual differences, the same as thou, having the same
needs and claims as thyself: this is the sum and substance of
Morality.
Ever remember that thou, and everything thou beholdest
within and around thee, all that befals thee and others, is no dis
jointed fragment, no wild chaos of atoms or casualties, but that it
all springs, according to eternal laws, from the one primal source
of all life, all reason, all good : this is the essence of Religion.
Strauss : “ The Old Faith and the New."
III.
Fall, fall ye mighty temples to the ground !
Not in your sculptured rise
Is the real exercise
Of human nature’s brightest power found.
’Tis in the lofty hope, the daily toil,
’Tis in the gifted line,
In each far thought divine
That brings down heaven to light our common soil.
�7
’Tis in the great, the lovely, and the true,
’Tis in the generous thought
Of all that man has wrought,
Of all that yet remains for man, to do.
Fall, fall, ye ancient litanies and creeds :
Not prayers or curses deep'
The power can longer keep,
That once ye held by filling human needs.
The quickening worship of our God survives
In every noble grief,
In every high belief,
In each resolve and act that light our lives.
IV.
MEDITATION.
V.
The future hides in it
Gladness and sorrow ;
We press still thorow,
Nought that abides in it
Daunting us, —Onward.
And solemn before us,
Veiled the dark Portal ;
Goal of all mortal:—
Stars silent rest o’er us,
Graves under us silent.
�While earnest thou gazest,
Comes boding of terror,
Comes phantasm and error;
Perplexes the bravest
With doubt and misgiving.
But heard are the Voices,
Heard are the Sages,
The Worlds, and the Ages :
“ Choose well; your choice is
Brief, and yet endless.
“ Here eyes do regard you
In Eternity’s stillness;
Here is all fulness,
Ye brave, to reward you.
Work, and despair not! ”
(Gckthk, ir. Carlyl.
�DAVID FRIEDRICH STRAUSS.
Towards the close of the last century a young
German student was climbing amid the Swiss
Alps—alpenstock in hand—gazing with wonder
on glaciers, scaling the dizziest peaks. His Alpine
wanderings were preliminary to the climbing of
nobler summits, commanding vaster prospects.
For this was Friedrich Hegel, destined to create
an epoch in the history of the human mind.
Amid those barren heights and weird chasms of
Switzerland there was born in his mind a doubt
which has influenced the world. Before those wild
desolations he asked himself whether it could
be possible that this chaos of rock and glacier
had been specially created for man’s enjoyment ?
It was a problem which required for its solution
not only his own long, laborious life, but many
lives ; yet, to the philosophical statement of that
one man we owe a new order of religious thought.
If I may borrow an expression from geology, it
may be said that we are all living in the Hegelian
formation; and this whether we understand that
philosophy or not, and even if we reject its terms.
�IO
For Hegel was as a great vitalising breath wafted
from afar, beneath which, as under a tropical
glow,’ latent seeds of thought were developed to
most various results. From afar; for really
Hegel’s philosophy was an Avatar for cultivated
.Europe of the most ancient faith of our race. Its
essence is the conception of an absolute Idea
which has represented itself in Nature, in order
that by a progressive development through Nature
it may gain consciousness in man, and return as
mind to a deeper union with itself. It is really
the ancient Hindu conception of a universal soul
of Nature, a vast spiritual sea in which each
animal instinct, each human intellect, is a wave.
Or, in another similitude, every organic form,
however great or small, represents some scattered
spark of a central fire of intelligence, on the way
back to its source, bearing thither. the accumu
lated knowledge gathered on its pilgrimage
through many forms in external Nature.
Briefly, the Hegelian philosophy means a soul
in Nature corresponding to the soul of Man. Of
■ course—I have already stated it—it did not
originate with Hegel. It maybe traced from the
Vedic Hymn to the cry of Kepler, when, looking
up to the stars, he said, “ Great God, I think thy
thought aftei' thee !” But with Hegel it gained
�II
an adaptation to the thought of Europe, and
passed into the various forms of belief and feeling.
It inspired all the poetry of Wordsworth. It is
reflected in the materialism no less than in the
idealism of our age, and may be felt in the
philosophy of Huxley no less than in that of its
best exponent, Emerson.
Among the many German thinkers who sat at
the feet of Hegel there was but one who compre
hended its tremendous bearings upon the theology
of Europe ; but one through whom it was able to
grow to logical fruitage ; and that one was the
great man whose life has just closed—David
Friedrich Strauss. Strauss proved himself the
truest pupil of Hegel by throwing off the mere
form of his forerunner’s doctrine, just as that
philosopher had thrown off the formulas of his
forerunners. The literal Hegelians, of course,
regarded Strauss as a renegade ; on the surface
it would so appear: Hegel called himself a
Christian, Strauss renounced Christianity; Hegel
was designated an idealist, Strauss a materialist.
But we must not be victims of the letter. Fruit
is different from blossom ; but it is, for all that,
blossom in another form.
I need, not dwell on the outward biography of
Friedrich Strauss. The greatest men live in
�12
their intellectual works. The sixty-five years of
this man were not marked by many salient or
picturesque incidents. As a student of theology
at Tübingen, and as a professor, he travelled an
old and beaten path,—poverty, hard study, hard
work. At the age of twenty-seven he publishes
his great work, the Leben Jesu ; is driven from
his professorship ; offered another at Zurich Uni
versity, he is prevented by persecution from
holding it; and finally settles himself down to a
life of plain living and high thinking. He is
elected by his native town Ludwigsburg to the
Wurtemburg Legislature, but surprises them by
his “ conservatism,” as it was called, and answers
their dissatisfaction by resigning. He marries, and,
alas ! unhappily. Agnes Schebert was an actress,
and she was also a clever authoress; but when she
was married to Strauss there was shown to be
an incompatibility of disposition which led to a
quiet separation without recriminations on either
side. The lady once wrote a parody on the
writing of Hegel, which is amusing, but suggests
that she could hardly have been fortunately
united with a philosopher who had sat at the
feet of Hegel. She left with him a daughter and
a son, who were devoted to their father through
life, and for whom he wrote a tender and touch-
�ing account of their mother that they might think
of her with affection.
He lived a busy life, and wrote a large number
of admirable works, the absence of most of
which from English libraries is a reproach to our
literature.
His biographies are among the
most felicitous that have been written, and have
brought before Germans noble figures which are
for most English readers mere names,—Ulrich
von Hutten, the brilliant radical of the Refor
mation ; the discoverer of lost books of Livy,
Quintilian, and other classic authors ; the fellow
fugitive of Erasmus before the wrath of the
Pope ; the lonely scholar who has made classic
the islet of Lake Zurich where he died :—the
Biography of Hermann Reimarus, who one hun
dred years ago was the leading prophet of
Natural Religion : —the Life of Friedrich Daniel
*
Schubart, poet and publicist, who, beginning as
an organist in Ludwigsburg, lost his place for
writing a parody on the Litany; who in later life
was invited by the Duke of Wurtemburg to
dinner, on his arrival seized and imprisoned in
Asberg Castle for ten years, because of an epi
* His chief works are “ The Wolfenbuttel Fragments,” edited
by Lessing; “The Principles of Natural Religion,” and “The
Instincts of Animals. ”
�14
gram written by the poet,—who, for the rest, has
left songs which the Germans still love to sing.
*
The work of Strauss on Voltaire consists of a
series of lectures prepared by request of the
Princess of Hesse-Darmstadt (daughter of Queen
Victoria), who listened to them ; and the work
is written in a spirit of high admiration of the
great French heretic. If, as I doubt not, the two
biographies which he has left—“ Lessing ” and
“ Beethoven ”—are of equal value to those I have
mentioned, Strauss will have left six works at
least, apart from his contributions to theology,
of a character which must write his name very
high among the literary workers of this century.
When the life of Strauss is written, no doubt
the details of it will be found of great interest ;
but nothing relating to his private and personal
history will ever be so impressive as the unfold
ing of his intellectual and religious nature. Fully
told, even as traceable in his works, this repre
sents the pilgrimage of a Soul from the crumbling
shrines of Superstition across long deserts of
doubt, and the rugged passes of adversity, even
* The principal is one entitled “Caplied” (Cape Song), sup
posed to be sung by soldiers, sold to the Dutch, on their way to
the Cape of Good Hope. Another celebrated poem of his is,
“Die Fiirstengruft ” (The Tomb of Princes).
�to the beautiful temple of Truth, where his last
hymn of joy ended in the gentle sigh of death.
Of this, his mental biography, I can give here
but a slight outline. I have already taken up
the thread of his life at the point where he was
learning the secret of Hegel. That implied a
foreground with which many of us are familiar;
for he was born to orthodoxy, and. had to'flee
that City of Destruction. So much he had accom
plished in his youth, and was ready to set him
self to the real task of his life. The philosophy
of Hegel left room for mysticism, but none for
miracle. Paulus, Schelling, Schleiermacher, and
others, each endeavoured in their several ways tobridge over the gulf between supernaturalism
and reason ; they wanted reason, they must
have Christianity, and so held on to the miracles
without believing them miraculous. But Strauss
had already placed before his mind Truth as the
one attainable thing worthy of worship ; and he
set himself to the task of studying the life of
Christ, with all its investiture of fable, as a
historical phenomenon. The fables he knew were
not true, but he would know how they arose, and
he would know what form they would leave were
they detached from the New Testament narra
tives. In reaching his sure result he was aided
�i6
by the veracity of his mind no less than by his
learning. He had but to apply to a miracle
found in the Bible the same test which everyone
applied to a miracle when found in Livy or Ovid.
He had but to take the method which Christians
used when dealing with the wonders of Buddhism,
and apply it honestly to the marvels of
Christianity. The result was that he tracked all
the New Testament marvels back to their pagan
or Judaic origin; he found that they were the
same stories that had been told about Moses,
Elijah, David, about Isis and Osiris, Apollo, and
Bacchus. In a word he proved that they were
myths, such as in unscientific ages—when the laws
of Nature and the nature of laws were unknown—
had arisen and gathered about every teacher who
had become an object of popular reverence.
In denying the value of miracles as historical
events in the life of a particular man, Strauss
was impressed by the perception that these
myths which had come from every human race to
invest Christ represented something more im
portant than the career of any individual; they
represented humanity. They were born out of
the human heart in every part of the world, and
were types of its aspirations, hopes, and spiritual
experiences. That which could not be respected
�¡7
as history could be reverenced as a reflection of
the religious sentiment. He would place an
idea where the church set an individual.
“ Humanity,” he wrote, “ is the union of the
two natures—God become man, the infinite
manifesting itself in the finite, and the finite
spirit remembering its infinitude; it is the child
of the visible Mother and the invisible Father,
Nature and Spirit; it is the worker of miracles,
in so far as in the course of human history, the
spirit more and more completely subjugates nature,
both within and around man, until it lies before
him as the inert matter on which he exercises his
active power; it is the sinless existence, for the
course of its development is a blameless one,
pollution cleaves to the individual only, and does
not touch the race and its history. It is
Humanity that dies, rises, and ascends to heaven,
for from the negation of its phenomenal life
there ever proceeds a higher spiritual life.”
When this lofty faith in Humanity as the true
Christ, which had unconsciously symbolized itself
as the life of one man, shone out upon the mind
of Strauss, all interest in the individual Jesus
paled under it. Since his great work was pub
lished—near forty years ago—we have, by stand
ing on the shoulders of such men as he, been
�iS
able, no doubt/ to see somewhat further. The
rational study of the New Testament has disclosed
certain fragments of real history, and by piecing
these together we can shape out the figure of a
great man,—great enough to show why it was
that the human heart brought all its finest dreams
and marvels to entwine them around that single
brow. But the grand generalization of this
scientific thinker, who pierced the veil of fable
and recognised beyond it the face of humanity
transfigured with divine light, is one which can
hardly be parallelled by any utterance since the
brave words of Paul: “ We henceforth know no
one according to the flesh ; and if we have ever
known Christ according to the flesh, yet now we
no longer know him.” “ The Lord is a Spirit 1”
Having disposed of the old Christology,
Strauss proceeded to apply his method—the
method of Science—to all the theories of Nature
and of human life which were intertwined with
it What the results of his inquiries were are
summed up in his last work, “ The Old Faith
and the New.” And at the outset I must say
that the whole purport of that book has been
falsely interpreted for English readers by the
blundering exposition of it given by Mr. Glad
stone in a speech delivered in Liverpool. The
�late Prime Minister, it will be remembered, held
up Dr. Strauss before the school-children as an
awful example of what they would come to if
they once began exercising their own faculties.
He admitted his own incompetence to answer the
arguments of Strauss ; it would have been well
if he had also acknowledged his inability to trans
late his words correctly. In describing that
“Universum” wdiich Strauss had declared to be
the highest and divinest conception of human in
telligence, the Cosmos which man should adore in
place of the old deity of dogma, Mr. Gladstone
said that the author represented it—the adorable
Universe—as without reason. The word which
Strauss really uses is “ Vernunftvoll ”—full of
reason ! This inexcusable error makes all the
difference between Theism and Atheism. “ Our
highest idea,” says Strauss, “ is the law-governed
Cosmos, full of life and reason and he censures
Schopenhauer, who declares Nature to be hope
lessly evil. “We consider it,” he says, “ arrogant
and profane on the part of a single individual to
oppose himself with such audacious levity to the
Cosmos whence he springs, from which, also, he
derives that spark of reason which he misuses.
We recognise in this a repudiation of the senti
ment of dependence which we expect from every
�20
man. We demand the same piety for our Cosmos
that the devout of old demanded for his God.”
In this his last work, “ The Old Faith and the
New ”—the translation of which we owe to a
woman as we do that of his first work—Strauss
embraces with enthusiasm the theory of Evo
lution. Thereby his old Hegelian idealism is
transmuted to Darwinian Materialism. Of course,
many people fancy that Materialism is something
which is inconsistent with belief in a deity or
even in religion.
But really, with regard to
divine existence and religion there is no differ
ence between Idealism and Materialism. Strauss
justly pronounces the religious issue between the
two a quarrel about words. They both and alike
“ endeavour to derive the totality of phenomena
from a single principle—to construct the universe
and life from the same blockin this equally
opposing the Christian dualism which divides
man into body and soul, and severs God from
Nature. In their common endeavour after unity
Idealism starts from above, Materialism starts
from below ; “ the latter constructs the universe
from atoms and atomic forces, the former from
ideas and idealistic forces. But if they would
fulfil their tasks, the one must lead from its
heights down to the very lowest circles of
�21
1 Nature, and to this end place itself under the
I control of careful observation ; while the other
i must take into account the higher intellectual
I and ethical problems.” In short, all that the
j Idealist says of soul the Materialist says of
I brain; all that any worshipper can say of his
| God, Strauss says of Nature.
I What the creed of this thinker was may be
I found in this last work, wherein it is expressed with
an exaltation which becomes more impressive
f now that we know that even while he was so
! uttering his perfect faith in the fair universe, the
i terrible cancer was destroying him. These are
his words: “We perceive in Nature tremendous
I contrasts, awful struggles; but we discover that
i these do not disturb the stability and harmony
of the whole,—that they, on the contrary, pre
serve it. We further perceive a gradation, a
development of the higher from the lower, of the
refined from the coarse, of the gentle from the
rude. And in ourselves we make the experience
that we are advanced in our personal as well as
our social life ; the more we succeed in regula
ting the element of capricious change within and
around us, and in developing the higher from the
lower, the delicate from the rugged. This, when
we meet with it within the circle of human life,
�22
we call good and reasonable. What is analogous
to it in the world around us, we cannot avoid
calling so likewise. The Cosmos is simulta
neously both cause and effect, the outward and
the inward together. We stand here at the
limits of our knowledge ; we gaze into an abyss
we can fathom no' farther. But this much at
least is certain,—that the personal image which
meets our gaze there is but the reflection of the
wondering spectator himself. At any rate, that
on which we feel ourselves entirely dependent, is
by no means merely a rude power to which we
bow in mute resignation, but is at the same time
both order and law, reason and goodness, to
which we surrender ourselves in loving trust.”
In one very important matter many of the
admirers of Strauss have felt distress at his
position and influence. Politically, he has the
reputation of being a reactionist and conserva
tive. This reputation—obtained when he resigned
his seat in the legislature because of disagree
ment with his radical constituency—has been
confirmed by his treatment of political subjects
in his latest work. My own belief is that the
views of Strauss on these matters are very
seriously misunderstood by reason of the fact
that they are altogether conceived from the
�ft
o%
Hegelian standpoint. Those who study Hegeln know that his apparent conservatism was the
IE crust outside a fiery radicalism.
The political
philosophy of Hegel is contained in the followfi| ing extract from his writings :—“ Moral liberation and political freedom must advance
together. The process must demand some vast
J space of time for its full realisation; but it is the
d law of the world’s progress, and the Teutonic
9 nations are destined to carry it into effect. The
■i Reformation was an indispensable preparation
J
¡4 for this great work. The history of the world
* is a record of the endeavours made to realise the
idea of freedom and of a progress surely made,
but not without many intervals of apparent
failure and retrogression. Among all modern
failures the French revolution of the eighteenth
century is the most remarkable. It was an
! endeavour to realise a boundless external liberaj tion without the indispensable condition of moral
] freedom. Abstract notions based merely on the
understanding, and having no power to control
wills of men, assumed the functions of morality
and religion, and so led to the dissolution of
society, and to the social and political difficulties
under which we are now labouring. The proI gress of freedom can never be aided by a
�24
revolution which has not been preceded by a
religious reformation.”*
That a similar conviction was rooted in the
mind of Strauss I became aware by personal,
intercourse with him. Some years ago, as I
walked with him on the banks of the Neckar, he
declared to me that the motives he had in pub
lishing his “ Life of Christ ” were hardly less
political than religious. “ I felt oppressed,” he
said, “ at seeing nearly every nation in Europe
chained down by allied despotism of prince and
priest. I studied long the nature of this oppres
sion, and came to the conclusion that the chain
which fettered mankind was rather inward than
outward, and that without the inward thraldom
the outward would soon rust away. The inward
chain I perceived to be superstition, and the
form in which it binds the people of Europe is
Christian Supernaturalism. So long as men
accept religious control not based on reason they
will accept political control not based on reason.
The man who gives up the whole of his moral
nature to an unquestioned authority has suffered
a paralysis of his mind, and all the changes of
*SeeGostwick and Harrison’s “Outlines of German Litera
ture,” p. 481.
�25
f® outward circumstances in the world cannot make
iiihim a free man. For this reason our European
revolutions have been, even when successful,
merely transfers from one tyranny to another.
I believed when I wrote that book that, in striking
•J at supernaturalism, I was striking at the root of
tj the whole evil tree of political and social degrada
ci tion.”
1 At another time, when speaking of Renan,
whose portrait was the most prominent in his
a study, he said : “ Renan has done for France
d what I had hoped to do for Germany. He has
vj written a book which the common people read ;
r > the influence of my ‘ Life of Christ ’ has been
21 confined to scholars more than I like, and I mean
to put it into a more popular shape. Germany
i| must be made to realise that the decay of
it Christianity means the growth of national life,
J and the progress of humanity.”
J
After this it was very plain to me what
1 Strauss’s conversatism amounted to. It means
» only that he had no faith in the abolition of an
; abuse here and there when the conditions which
i produce every abuse remain unaltered,—no faith
in sweeping away a few snow-drifts when winter
is still in the air, the whole sky charged with
snow. We may wish that he had felt more
—
�26
sympathy with some of the popular movements
around him ; but we must remember that as a
philosophical radical he regarded the ever
recurring enthusiasms of the people,—believing
that they would reach the millennium by abolish
ing capital punishment, or abolishing a throne,—
as so much waste energy. He saw hopes born in
revolutions only to perish in disaster and reac
tion. He came to rest his hope for Humanity,
which he loved, on his faith in the omnipotence of
that Truth which he sought to enthrone above it.
Such was the faith, such the work, of the great
man, to whose memory we pay this day our
heartfelt homage. In his writings- I have met
with but one allusion to himself. It is in the
last pages that he ever wrote, and is as follows :
—“ It is now close upon forty years that as a
man of letters I have laboured, that I have
fought on and on for that which appeared to me
as truth, and still more perhaps against that
1 which has appeared to me as untruth ; and in th‘e
pursuit of this object I have attained, nay, over
stepped the threshold of old age.” Then it is
that every earnest-minded man hears the whisper
' of an inner voice: “ Give an account of thy
stewardship, for thou may’st be no longer
steward.” Now, I am not conscious of having
�27
been an uujust steward. An unskilful one at
times, too probably also a negligent one, I may,
heaven knows, have been; but on the whole I
have done what the strength and impulse within
prompted me to do, and have done it without
looking to the right or the left, without seeking
the favour or shunning the displeasure of any.”
These few words represent the benediction of
Conscience upon a faithful man, felt by him as
life was ebbing away, and the dark portal grow
ing more distinct before him. His bitterest
enemy need not impugn that approving smile of
his own heart. It was all the wage of his work.
Others have toiled in full view of heavenly
reward. He laboured on with hope of no recom
pense for devotion and self-sacrifice beyond the
consciousness of having made his life an unfalter
ing testimony to truth. Even those who believe
that they see gleams of light irradiating the dark
valley may count his honour not less but more
that he gave his service uncheered by such
visions.
In Heilbronn, where he was residing, he onct
pointed out to me, near an ancient church, the
trace of the old and sacred fountain which gave
the town its name, which signifies “ healing foun
tain.” He said, with his gentle smile : “ The
�28
theory of the priests is that the fountain ceased
to flow when I came here to reside.” When I
looked up to his magnificent eyes, and the grand
dome of his forehead, I could but marvel at the
depth of that superstition which could permit this
man to live as a hermit in communities which will
one day cherish each place of his dwelling as a
shrine. Holy wells may dry up, and the churches
beside them crumble, but men will repair to the
spots where the lonely scholar sat at his task,
and tell their children—here it was that in the
wildernesses of superstition living waters broke
out, and streams in the desert.
�29
V.
Everlasting ! changing never!
Of one strength, no more, no less ;
Thine almightiness for ever,
Ever one thy holiness :
Thee eternal,
Thee all glorious we possess.
Shall things withered, fashions olden,
Keep us from life’s flowing spring ?
Waits for us the promise golden,
Waits each new diviner thing.
Onward ! onward !
Why this hopeless tarrying ?
Nearer to thee would we venture,
Of thy truth more largely take,
Upon life diviner enter,
Into day more glorious break ;
To the ages
Fair bequests and costly make.
By the old aspirants glorious ;
By each soul heroical;
By the strivers, half victorious ;
By thy Jesus and thy Paul,
Truth’s own martyrs,—
We are summoned, one and alL
By each saving word unspoken ;
By thy truth as yet half won ;
By each idol still unbroken ;
By thy will yet poorly done ;
O Almighty !
We are borne resistless on.
Adaptedfrom Gill,
�M
�
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2018
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Conway Hall Ethical Society
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David Friedrich Strauss: commemorative services at South Place Chapel, Finsbury, February 22,1874, with a discourse by Moncure D. Conway
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Conway, Moncure Daniel [1832-1907.]
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Place of publication: [London]
Collation: 29, [1] p. ; 15 cm.
Notes: Morris Miscellaneous Tracts 1. Includes bibliographical references. A list of the author's works available from South Place Chapel on unnumbered back page.
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G3330
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Sermons
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<img src="http://i.creativecommons.org/p/mark/1.0/88x31.png" alt="Public Domain Mark" /><br /><span>This work (David Friedrich Strauss: commemorative services at South Place Chapel, Finsbury, February 22,1874, with a discourse by Moncure D. Conway), identified by </span><span><a href="https://conwayhallcollections.omeka.net/items/show/www.conwayhall.org.uk">Humanist Library and Archives</a></span><span>, is free of known copyright restrictions.</span>
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David Friedrich Strauss
Memorial Addresses
Morris Tracts
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Text
ESSAYS ON CHAUCER,
His Words and Works.
PART II.
III. Practica Chilindri : or, The Working of the Cylinder, by
John Hoveden. Edited, with a Translation, by Edmund
Brock.
IV. The use of final -e in Early English, and especially in Chaucer’s
Canterbury Tales. By Professor Joseph Payne.
V. Elizabeth Barrett Browning on Chaucer.
“ English Poets,” ed. 1863.
From her
VI. Specimen of a critical edition of Chaucer’s Compleynte to Fite,
with the Genealogy of its Manuscripts. By Prof. BernHARd
Ten-Brink,
PUBLISHED FOR THE CHAUCER SOCIETY BY
N. TRUBNER & CO., 57 & 59, LUDGATE HILL,
�Smnir
9.
JOHN CHILDS AND SON, PRINTERS.
�III.
PRACTICA CHILINDRI:
OR
THE WORKING OF THE CYLINDER,
BY
JOHN HOVEDEN.
EDITED WITH A TRANSLATION
BY
Edmund Brock
��57
PREFACE.
By the kindness of Mr Frederick Norgate, we are now
able to lay before the reader another short treatise on the
cylinder. How it was found, and what it contains, may
be learnt from the following notice, which we reprint from
Notes and Queries, 4th Series, III, June 12, 1869.
“CHILENDBE: (‘ SCHIPMANNES TALE, 206.’)
"We have to thank the Chaucer Society for the publica
tion of a very early tract on the ‘ Chilindre,’ removing to
a great extent the difficulty about the meaning of this
word, which for ages has puzzled all the commentators on
the Canterbury Tales. This little tract is devoted almost
exclusively to information as to the construction of the in
strument in question, with only a few brief rules at the
end for its use. I have recently been so fortunate as to
discover another MS. which may be a useful and interest
ing supplement to that which Mr Brock has edited for the
above-named society; and before describing its contents,
let me mention the strange way in which I found it.
Looking through the Index of Authors at the end of Ayscough’s Catalogue of the Sloane MSS. (not thinking at the
time of Chaucer or anything relating to him), my attention
was arrested by the name ‘ Chilander,’ and on turning to
the page referred to, I found Chilander noted as the author
of a work entitled Practica Astrologorum, fyc. Hereupon
I determined on taking the first opportunity of examining
the MS. itself, and having done so, to my surprise I found,
instead of Practica Astrologorum, with Chilander for its
author, a tract entitled Practica Cliilindri secundum magistrum Johannem Astrologum 1 The MS. is of the beginning
of the fourteenth century, neatly written (on vellum), and
differs from that which the Chaucer Society has brought to
�58
PREFACE.
light, inasmuch as it is devoted exclusively to instructions
for using the instrument.
“ The whole is comprised in six pages, closely written,
and in a small but neat hand. The titles of the several
chapters are as follows1:—
1. Primum capitulum est de horis diei artificialis
inueniendis.
2. De gradu solis inueniendo.
3. De altitudine solis et lune, et vtrum fuerit ante
meridiem uel post.
4. De linea meridiei inuenienda et oriente et occidente.
5. Quid sit vmbra versa, quid extensa.
6. De punctis vmbre verse et extense similiter.
7. De altitudine rerum per vmbram uersam.
8. De declinacione solis omni die, et gradu eius per declinacionem inueniendo, et altitudine eius omni hora anni.
9. De latitudine omnis regionis inuenienda.
10. De inuenienda quantitate circuitus tocius orbis et
spissitudine eius.
“ The colophon is as follows :—
‘ Explicit practica chilindri Magistri
Iohannis de Houeden astrologi.’
Fred. Norgate.
“ Henrietta Street, Covent Garden."
This tract, with the former, will give a tolerably clear
idea of the nature and uses of the instrument; but there is
much more on the subject which we have no space to
print, and we must therefore be content with giving the
reader references, which will enable those who care to read
more about the cylinder, to do so.
1. Compositio horologiorum, in piano, muro, truncis,
anulo, con[uexo], concauo, cylindro & uarijs quadrantibus,
cum signorum zodiaci & diuersarum horarum inscriptionibus : autore Sebast. Munstero. Basileae, 1531. Composi
tio cylindri, hoc est, trunci columnaris. Caput xxxix.
2. Horologiographia, post priorem seditionem per Se
bast. Munsterum recognita, & plurimum aucta atqwe
locupletata, adiectis multis nouis descriptionibus & figuris,
in piano, concauo, conuexo, erecta superficie &c. Basileae.
1533. Compositio cylindri, hoc est, trunci columnaris.
Caput xliii.
1 The table is printed according to the MS, from which Mr
Norgate’s copy deviates in one or two cases.
�PREFACE.
59
3. Set
/ Dber Sonnen vpren / $imftft$e
Sefdjvetfcung / wt'e btefelfcigen nad) mantyerley aprt an bte
SDlauren / Sffienbte / (Bme / fie fepen Stgenbe / Sluffgertc^fet /
@d;reg / audf auff S'lonbe I Slu^gepolte vnb fonft alter
$anbt ^nftrument / Sluf^uretffen / 2)urc^ Sebafitanum
STOunfter. 23afel, 1579. 2Ste man etnen timber @ircu*
Iteren vnb jurtc^ten foil. ®ad rrrvj. daptlel
4. Dialogo della descrittione teorica et pratica de gli
horologi solari. Di Gio: Batt. Vimercato Milanese. In
Ferrara, per Valente Panizza Mantouano Stampator Ducale.
1565. In gual modo per pratica operatione si possono
fabricare i Cilindri. Capitolo xi.
5. Gnomonice Andrese Schoneri Noribergensis, hoc est:
de descriptionibils horologiorum sciotericorum omnis generis,
proiectionibns circulorum Sphaericorum ad superficies, cum
planas, turn conuexas concauasqwe, Sphsericas, Cylindricas,
ac Conicas : Item delineationibus quadrantum, annulorum,
&c. Libri tres. Noribergse, 1562. The second book treats
of spherical, cylindrical, and conical dials.
6. Io. Baptistae Benedicti Patritij Veneti Philosophi
de Gnomonum umbrarumqwe solarium usu liber. Augustae
Taurinorum. 1574. De examinations pensilium horologio
rum, § de nouo horologio circulari. Cap. lxxviii.
7. Horarii Cylindrini Canones, 1515. Eeprinted in
Opera Mathematica Ioannis Schoneri, fol. Norinbergae,
1551. This, like Hoveden’s treatise, consists of rules for
using the cylinder.
8. Histoire de l’Astronomie du Moyen Age par M.
Delambre, Paris. 1819, 4to. The third book, entitled
Gnomonique, gives an account of the cylindrical dial
(padran cylindrique') of the Arabians as treated of by
Aboul-Hhasan (pp. 517—520), and of Sebastian Munster’s
(pp. 597, 598).
There is a large cut of the cylinder on page 166 of
Munster’s Compositio Horologiorum, page 269 of his Horologiographia, and page 125 of Der Horologien Beschreibung;
a smaller one on the title-page and page 131 of Horologiographia. In Vimercato’s treatise, page 165, is a cut show
ing the separate parts of the cylinder.
In Cotton MS. Nero C ix, leaves 195—226, we find eight
Latin poems by John Hoveden, chaplain of Queen Eleanor,
mother of King Edward. There can be little doubt that
this writer is the same as the author of the present treatise.
We here give the beginnings and endings of these poems.
�60
PREFACE.
I. Incipit meditacio Iohan?iis de houedene, clerici regine
anglie, matris regis Edwardi/ de natiuitate, passione, et resurreccione domini saluatoris edita, ut legentis affeccio in
christi amore profici[a]t et celerius accendatur / hoc opus
sic incipzt: Aue verbum ens in principi'o. & sic finitur. &
uoluzt editor quod liber medffa&onis illius philomena
uocaretur.
Begins : Ave uerbum ens in principio,
Caro factum pudoris gremio;
Fac quod fragreif presens laudaczo.
Ends : Melos tzfei sit et laudacio,
Salus, honor, et iubilacio,
Letus amor lotus in lilio,
Qui es verbum ens in principio.
Explicit libellus rigtmichus1 qui philomena uocatur, que
meditacio est de natiuitate, passione, et resurrecti’one, ad
honorem domini noshi iesu christi saluatoris edita, a Iohanne
de houedene, clerico Alianore regine anglie, matris edwardi
regis anglie.
II. Incipiunt .xv. gaudia virgznis gloriose, edita a
Magistro Iohanne houedene Clerico.
Begins : Virgo vincens vernancia
Carnis pudore lilia.
Ends : Et nocteni lianc excuciens,
Ducas ad portum pahie. Amen.
Expliciunt .15. gaudia beate virgznis, edita ritmice2 ex
dictamine Iohannis de Houedene.
III. Hie scribitnr meditacio Iohannis de Honedene,
edita ad honorem domini saluatoris, et ut legentes earn proficiant .in amore diuino: et vocatur hec meditacio cantica
.50. quod in .50. canticis continetur.
The first canticle begins :
In laude nunc wpirituo omnis exultet,
Et leta mens do?nini laude sustollat.
The last one ends :
Et ut nouella cantica cumulentur,
In laude nunc spmYuc omnis exultet. Amen.
Explicit meditacio dicta cantica 50*?, edita a Iohanne
de Houedene ad honorem domini saluatoris.
IV. In honore domini saluatoris incipit meditacio, edita
a Iohanne de houedene, clerico Alianore regine anglie, matr/s
regis Edwardi / faciens mencionem de saluatoris redolentissima passione; et amoris christi suaue??i inducit affecturn.
Hec meditacio uocatur cythara eo quod verbzs amoriferis,
1 So in MS.
2 MS. ricunce.
�PREFACE.
61
qnaszquibwsdam cordis musice, ad delectacionemspmTualem
legentes inuitat.
Begins : I mi vena du'lcedinis,
Proles pudica numinis,
Verbum ens in principio,
Fructns intacte virginis.
Ends : Verbum ens in principio,
Et des ut gost has semitas
Nos foueat et felicitas
In celebri coliegio. Amen.
Explicit laus de domino saluatore uel meditacio que
cythara nominator, a Iohanne de Houedene, edita ut legent is
affectus in amore diuino proficiat et celerius accendator.
V. Incipiunt 50^ salutaczones beafe virgwiis, quibns
inseritor memoria domznice passionis, edita. a lohanne de
houedene ad honorem virginis matris, & laudem domzni
saluatoris.
Begins : Ave stella maris,
Virgo singularis,
Vernans lilio.
Ends : Fer michi remedia,
Vt in luce qua lustraris
Michi dones gaudia. Amen.
Expliciunt 50^ salutaciones beate marie, edite a
Iohanne de Houedene.
VI. Incipit laus de beata virgine,. que uiola uocatur,
edita a Iohanne de Houedene.
Begins : Maria stella maris,
Fax sum mi luminaris,
Kegina singularis.
Ends : Penas mittigatura,
Assis in die dura,
Maria virgo pura.
Explicit uiola beate virginis, a Iohanne de Houedene
edita.
VII. Incipit lira extollens virginem gloriosam.
Begins : 0 qui fontem gracie
Captiuis regeneras,
Celos endelichie.1
Ends ; Quos expiat sic puniat,
Vt vices quas variat, i
Alternis sic uniat, ne lira deliret.
Explicit lira NLagistri Iohannis houedene.
So in MS.
�62
PREFACE.
VIII. Canticu?n amoris quod composuit Iohannes de
Houedene.
Begins : Princeps pacis, proles puerpere,
Hijs te precor labris illabere,
Vt sincere possim disserere
Laudem tuam, et letus legere.
End lost from :
Eius claui punctura perea?n,
Cum superstes magis inteream.
There is a copy of the first of these poems in the Lambath MS. 410, and another in Harleian MS. 985 with the
heading : Incipit tractates metricus N. de lion dene, de processu cliristi & redempcfonis nostre, qui aliter dicitur
philomena. At the end are merely these words : Explicit
liber q?zi uocatwr philomena. It appears from Nasmith’s
Catalogue that there is a French version of the poem in
Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, MS. 471, intitled, Li
rossignol, ou la pensee Iohan de Hovedene, clerc la roine
d’Engleterre, mere le roi Edward de la neissance et de la
mort et du relievement et de 1’ascension Iesu Crist et de
l’assumpcion notre dame.
It is perhaps worthy of mention that Hoveden’s Plulo''trte.na has long been confounded by the catalogue-writers
with a wholly different composition, by another writer, and
beginning:
Philomena preuia temporis ameni,
Que recessum nuncians i??zbris atgrne ceni,
Dum demulces animos tuo cantu leni,
Auis predulcissima, ad me queso veni.
End : Quicquid tamen alij dicant, frafer care,
Istam novam martirem libens imitare;
Cumque talis fueris, deum deprecare
Vt nos cantus martiris faciat cantare. Amen.
Copies of this poem are contained in Cotton MS. Cleo
patra A xii., Harleian MS. 3766, and Royal MS. 8 G vi.,
from the first of which the above lines are taken. A late
hand has written the following mistaken heading over it
in the Cotton MS.: philomela Canticum per Ioannem de
Houedene Capellanum Alienorse Reginse matris Ed. primi.
�PREFACE.
63
The Laud MS. 368 contains both these poems; the latter
has the following heading: Incipit meditaczo frafris
Iohawzis de peccham, qwondam cantuarze archiepz'scojh,
de ordine frafrum minorww, que Nocatur philomena. The
real author, however, appears to be Giovanni Fidanza,
better known as Cardinal Bonaventura. The whole poem,
with some additional lines at the end, is printed in his
works, Mayence, 1609, vol. 6, p. 424, and Venice, 1751-56,
vol. 13, p. 338. The English poem of The Nyghtyngale
in Cotton MS. Caligula A ii., leaves 59-64, has no con
nection with Hoveden’s Philomena, but is an imitation of
Bonaventura’s poem.
According to Bale’s account,1 which is followed by Pits2
and Tanner,3 John Hoveden was a native of London, doc
tor of divinity, and chaplain of Queen Eleanor, but after
wards parish priest at Hoveden, where he died in the year
1275. Besides the poems already mentioned, Bale, Pits,
and Tanner ascribe to him the work called Speculum
Laicorum ; 4 but this could not have been written till long
after Hoveden’s death, since it contains mention of Henry
the IVth’s reign.5
1 Bale, v. 79.
2 Pitseus, p. 356.
3 Tanner, under Hocedenus
4 See Royal MS. 7 C xv and Oxford Univ. MSS. 29 and 36.
5 In chapter 36.
�64
PRACTICA CHILINDRI.
[Sloane MS 1620, leaf 2.]
PRACTICA
CHILINDRI
SEOHMD DM
MAGISTRITM
[iOHANNEm]1
[aJstrologum.
1. Primnm capz'bdwm ost de horis diei artificiab's
inueniendis.
2. De gradu sob's inueniendo.
3. De altitudine sobs et lune, et vtrum fuerit anfe
meridiem uel post
4. De linea meridiei inuenienda et oriente et, occide??te.
5. (6.)2 Qzdd sit vmbra versa, (5) qnid extensa.
6. (7.) De punctis vmbre verse, et extense similiter.
7. (8.) De altifojtb'ne rerzzm per vmbram uersam.
8. (9.) De declinaczone sob's omni die, et gradueiwsper
decb’nocionem inueniendo, (10) et eMitudioo eius omni hora
anni.
9. (11.) De latitudine omnis regionis inuenienda.
10. (12.) De inuefnjienda qnanti/ate circuitns tociws
orbis et -spissitudine eius.
DE HORIS INUENIENDIS.
1. Z^vm volueris scire horas diei, verte stilum superiorem super mensem aut signuzn in quo fueris, et
super partem que preteriit de ipso; cumqne hoc feceris,
1 Nearly obliterated.
2 The numbers in parentheses correspond to those which head
the sections.
�65
THE WORKING OF THE CYLINDER.
THE WORKING OF THE CYLINDER ACCORDING TO MASTER
JOHN, THE ASTROLOGER.
1. The first chapter is on finding the hours of the
artificial day.
2. On finding the sun’s degree.
3. On the altitude of the sun and of the moon; and
whether it is before midday or after.
4. On finding the meridian line, and the east and the
west.
6. What umbra versa is, (5) and what umbra extensa.
7. On the points of the umbra versa, and likewise of
the umbra extensa.
8. On (finding) the height of objects by the umbra
versa..
9. On (finding) the sun’s declination on any day, and
on finding his degree by the declination; (10) and on
(finding) his altitude at any hour of the year.
11. On finding the latitude of any region.
12. On finding the extent of the circumference of the
whole world, and its thickness.
1.
ON FINDING THE HOURS.
When you wish to know the hours of the day, turn the
upper style1 over the month or sign in which you are, and
over the part of it which is gone by; and when you have
1 Only one style is mentioned in the former treatise.
�66
. PRACTICA CH1LJNDRI.
vertes etiam inferiorezzz stiluzzz in opposituzzz stili szzperioris,
et erit izzstrumezztum disposituzzz ad horas sumendas.
Cumqzze volueris horas sumere, suspende chilindruzzz pez*
filuzzz suuzzz ad solezzz, mouezzdo ipszzm chilindruzzz hue et
illuc donee vrnbra superioris stili super chilizzdruzzz eqzzidistazzter longitudzzzi eius ceciderit; et ad qzzamczzzzzqzze horazzz
peruenerit vmbra stili, ipsa est hora diei pertransita.
Qzzod si ceciderit finis vmbre inter duas horas, tuzzc apparebit etiam pars hore in qua fueris, secundum quod plus
uel minzzs occupauerit vmhra de ipso spacz'o qzzod est inter
duas lineas horarzzzzz. Est eniro. hora spacium [cojntentuzzz
inter duas lineas horarzzzzz; ipse autezzz linee szzzzt fines
horarzzzzz,
DE GRADU SOLIS.
2. /~^vm volueris scire in quo signo fuerit sol, et in’
quoto gradu eizze, eqzzabis solem ad meridiem
diei in quo volueris hoc scire, siczz£ in lecczonibz/s tabzzlarzzzzz
docetzzr, et addes ei motuzzz 8ue spere, et haftebis graduzzz
solz's quesituzzz. Qzzod si volueris hoc ipszzm leuizzs scire,
intra cum die mezzsis in quo fueris izz aliqzzam 4 tabzzlarzzzzz,
seczzzzdzzm qzzod fuerit annzzs bissextilis uel distans ab eo ;
que qzzidezzz tabzzle izztitulantzzr sic :—Tabzzle solis ad izzuezzienduzzzjlocuzzz eius in orbe decliui fixo. Et izz dirp.e.to
diei cum quo intras statizzz inuenies graduzzz solzs equatum,
et hoc est qzzod voluisti. Qzzod si nec has nec illas tabzzlas
1 That is, straight down the cylinder.
2 The following extract from Delamhre’s Astronomic du Moyen
Age, Paris, 1819, pp. 73, 74, may serve to explain the motion of the
eighth sphere :—
“ Thebith ben Chorath.—Son malheureux systeme de la trepi
dation infecta les tables astronomiques jusqu’a Tycho, qui, le
premier, sut les en purger. Ce long succes n’a point empeche que
son livre ne soit reste inedit; mais j’en ai trouve un exemplaire
latin manuscrit, a la Bibliotheque du Boi, n° 7195. Ce traite a
pour titre Thebith ben Chorath de motu octaves Spheres.........
“ Il imagine une ecliptique fixe, qui coupe l’equateur fixe dana
les deux points equinoxiaux, sous un angle de 23° 33', et une eclip
tique mobile, attachee par deux points diametralement opposes a
deux petits cercles, qui ont pour centres les deux points equinoxiaux
�67
ON THE SUN’S DEGREE.
done this, turn also the lower style into the place opposite
the upper style, and the instrument will be set in order for
taking the hours. And when you wish to take the hours,
suspend the cylinder by its string against the sun, moving
it to and fro, until the shadow of the upper style falls on
the cylinder parallel to its length,1 and whatever hour the
shadow of the style reaches, the same is the (last) past
hour of the day. But if the end of the shadow falls be
tween two hours, then will appear also the part of the hour
in which you are, according as the shadow occupies more
or less of that space which is between the two hour-lines.
For the space contained between two hour-lines is an hour;
but the lines themselves are the ends of the hours.
2. ON THE sun’s DEGREE.
'
When you wish to know in what sign the sun is, and
in what degree thereof, you must adjust (?) the sun to the
noon of the day on which you wish to know this, as it is
taught in the readings of the tables, and add to it the
motion of the eighth sphere,2 and you will have the sun’s
degree which you have sought. But if you wish to know
the same more easily, enter with the day of the month in
which you are into one of the four tables according as it is
leap-year or distant from it. These tables are thus en
titled :—Tables of the sun for finding his place in the fixed
ecliptic, and in a line -with the day with which you enter
de l’ecliptique fixe, et dont le rayon est de 4° 18' 43/z. Ces points
de l’ecliptique tournent sur la circonference des deux petits cercles
opposes; l’ecliptique mobile s’eleve done et s’abaisse alternativement sur l’ecliptique fixe ; les points equinoxiaux avancent ou
retrogradent d’une quantite qui peut aller a 10° 45z. Ce mouve
ment est commun a tous les astres ; ce mouvement est celui de la
huitieme sphere, et il s’appelle mouvement d’acces ou de reces. Le
lieu de la plus grande declinaison du Soleil change done continuellement, puisqu’il est toujours a 90° de l’une et l’autre intersections
de l’ecliptique mobile avec l’equateur fixe. La plus grande decli
naison est done tantot dans les Gemeaux et tantot dans le Cancer.”
For Thebit’s treatise see Harleian MS 13, leaf 117. Incipiif
thehit de motu octaue spere. Or Harleian MS 3647, leaf 88, col. 2,
incipit libfr tebith bewcorat de motu octave spere.
�68
PRACTICA CHILINDRI.
habueris, et volueris [leaf 2, bk] aliter querere gradum solis
[a]ut fere, scito qnod secwndnm compotistas xv. kalendas
cuiuslibet mensis ingreditur sol nouu?n signum, sicn^ patet
in kalendario. Considera ergo qnot dies transierint de
mense i?z qwo fueris, et adde supe?’ eos qnindecim dies, et
serua eos. Computabis ergo ab inicio signi, in qno fuerit
sol, totidem gradus, et ubi finitzzs fuerit nu?nerns, ip.se est
gradus solis quern queris. Qwod si nu??ze?7zs tuus excesserit
xxx., tot gradus qwot excedit xxx. perambulauit sol de
signo seq-"^ 0 si Deus voluerit.
DE ALTIT UDINE SOLIS.
3. ZA vod si altitudinem sohs seu lune placuerit inuestiAv gare, verte stilum sn^eriorem super gradus chilindri, et stilum inferiore?n in oppositum ei-us semper; et
hoc sit tz&i generale, ut uersus qwamcunqwe partem chilindri verteris stilum snperiorem, semper vertas stilum inferiorem in partem ei oppositam. Post hec opponas instrnmentmn. soli, et ad qwemcunqne gradum peruenerit vmbra,
ipsa est altitudo solis, seu lune, si feceris de luna, in eadem
bora. Qnod si volueris scire si fuerit ante meridiem uel
post, aspice snper qnot gradns ceciderit vmbra, et expectans
paulisper, iterato sumes altitudinem sobs; epuod si creuerit
vmbi’a, tunc est ante meridiem. Simz'k/er qnog'we scies de
luna. Et per hoc ipsnm quod dzc/nm est, scies vtrum ipsa
fuerit orientals 9, meridie uel occidental^; qnia dum
vmbra crescit, est in parte orientali a meridie, dum uero
decrescit, est in parte occidentis.
o
�ON THE ALTITUDE OF THE SUN.
69
you will immediately find the sun’s degree rectified, and
this is what you desired. If, however, you have neither
of these tables, and wish to seek, in another way, the sun’s
degree or thereabouts, know that, according to the calcu
lators, the sun enters a new sign on the 15 th before the
kalends of every month, as appears in the calendar. Con
sider, therefore, how many days of the month in which you
are have passed, and add to them fifteen days, and keep
them. Reckon then the same number of degrees from the
beginning of the sign in which the sun is*?&p4, when the
number is completed, the same is the sun’ • gree which
you seek. But if your number exceeds 30, the sun has
passed through as many degrees of the next sign as it (the
number) exceeds 30, if God will.
3.
ON THE ALTITUDE OF THE SUN.
Now if it is your pleasure to investigate the altitude of
the sun or of the moon, turn the upper style over the de
grees of the cylinder, and the lower style always into the
opposite place. And let this be a general rule, that to
whichever part of the cylinder you turn the upper style
you always turn the lower style to the part opposite to it.
After that .hold up the instrument against the sun, and
to whatever degree the shadow reaches, the same is the
altitude of the sun; or of the moon, if you are deal
ing with the moon, at that hour. But if you wish to
know whether it is before midday, or after, see over how
many degrees the shadow falls, and having waited a little
time, take the sun’s altitude again, and if the shadow has
increased, then it is before midday. In like manner you
will know also of the moon. And by what has been said
you shall know whether she is on the east of the meridian
or on the west; for while the shadow increases, she is on
the eastern side of the meridian, but while it decreases, she
is on the western side.
CH. ESSAYS.
F
�70
RRACTICA CHXLINDRI.
DE LINEA MERIDIEI.
4. Z~\ vod si volueris scire lineam meridiei per hoc instrwmentom, fiat circizlws in swperficie aliqwa preparata, eqizidistanter orizonti, cuiwscunqzie magnitudes
volueris, non sit tamen nimis paruus; deinde sumes altitudinem soli's diligentissime, et serua earn; et suspended
etiam in eaAem bora filum vnum cum aliqwo ponderoso in
directo iam fetch circwli, ita u.t vmbra eins cadat omnino
super centrum circuli, et attingat circumferenciam in parte
opposita soli; notabisque contactum vmbre in circumferencia, et post hoc expectabis donee iterato post meridiem
fiat sol in prius accepta altitudine, notabisque etiam [leafs;
tunc vmbram fili super centrum ut prius transeuntem
notabi's, dico, contactum eius in circumferencia in opposito
soli's. Deinde diuide arcum qizi est inter duas notas
vmbre per equedia, et notam iizprimes, coniungesque earn
cum centro, perficiens diametrum circuli, et hoc diametrum
erit linea meridiei. Quadrabis cpuoque circulum ipsum per
diametra, et ha&ebis lineam orientis et occidentis, ut apparet in isto circulo. Sic etiam inuenies omnes partes
orizontis, si Dews voluerit. Et nota quod hec consideracio
verior et leuior est quam ilia que fit per erecci'onem stilj
ortogonalis in circulo, quia vix uel nuncquam possi? ita
ortogonaliter erigi, sicuZ perpendiculum dummorZo pendeat
inmobiliter. SeeZ hec consideracz'o verissima erit, si sumatur
in solsticialibus diebws, et hoc anZequam sol ascendat multum in ilia die.
Nota quod a. et b. sunt note vmbre
anta meridiem et posi ad eandern altitudinem sold ; et mediuzn inter a. et b.
est meridies.
Occident
�ON THE MERIDIAN LINE.
4.
71
ON THE MERIDIAN LINE.
And if you wish to know the meridian line oy means
of this instrument, let a circle he made, of whatever size
you will, only let it not he too small, on some plane pre
pared (for the purpose) parallel with the horizon. Then
take the sun’s altitude very accurately, and keep it; and
also at the same hour hang, over the circle already made,
a thread with something heavy (on it), so that its shadow
falls exactly upon the centre of the circle and reaches the
circumference on the side opposite to the sun; and mark the
(point of) contact of the shadow with the circumference,
and after this wait until the sun again arrives at the before-,
taken altitude after midday; and mark then also the
shadow of the thread passing as before across the centre,
mark, I say, its point of contact with the circumference
opposite to the sun. Then divide the arc which is between
the two shadow-marks into equal parts, and impress a
mark. Join it with the centre, and complete the diameter
of the circle. This diameter will be the meridian line.
■Quarter the circle itself by diameters,1 and you will have
the line of east and west, as appears in this circle. Thus
also you will find all parts of the horizon, if God will.
Note that this observation is truer and easier than that which
is made by raising a rectangular style in the circle, because it
can with difficulty or never be raised as rectangularly as a
plumb-line, provided it (viz. the plumb-line) hangs motion
less. But the observation will be truest, if it be made on the
solstitial days, and that before the sun rises high on that day.
West
�72
PRACTICA CHILINDRI.
DE VMBRA EXTENSA.
5. nVTvnc dicendus est quia! sit vmbra versa, et quid
11 sit vmbra extensa. Igitur intelligamus superfi
cies quanda??! equidistautem orizonti, et super hanc super-'
ficies intelligamus aliquid ortogonaliter erectus, verbi
gratia, palus rectus; huius pali sic erecti cadens vmbrrf
in dzcZam superficiem (iicitur vmbra extensa. Est igitur
vmbra extensa rei erecte ad superficiem orizontis perpendiculariter vmbra cadens iu eades szzperficie.
DE VMBRA VERSA.
6. TTem intelligamus eande?n superficies quam prius, ei
JL in ipsa aliquid perpendiculariter erectus, et ab illo
sic erecto iutelligasus stilus ortogonalt'Zer prominentes,
sicut sunt stili qui prominent in parietibus eccZesiarus ad
horas sumendas; vmbra huius stili cadens super rem orto
gonaliter erectas, equidistanter s[cilicet] longitudzni eiusdes rei, dicitur vmbra versa; equidistanter, dico, cadens,
quia alite?' esset vmbra irregularis. Et huiusmodi vmbra
cadit in chilindro. Hec auZes vmbra versa sesper crescit
vsque ad meridies, et tunc, i[d est] in meridie, est maxisa.
Econuerso est de vmbra extensa, quia ilia decrescit vsque
ad meridie??t, et tunc fit minima.
DE PUN0T1S VMBRE.
vm volue?is scire omni hora quot puncta ha&ue?'it
vmbra versa, verte stilus super puncta vmb/'e, et
super quot puncta ceciderit vmbra, ipsa sunt puncta vmbre
quesite. Quod si volue?-is [scire] vmbra?n extensa??! ad
eandes altitudinem, diuide 144 pe?' [leafs&j puncta que habueris, et exibunt puncta vmbre extense in eades hora. Et si
volueris scire quot status sunt i?i vmb?‘a, diuZde puncta que
7.
�ON THE UMBRA. EXTENSA AND. THE. UMBRA ' VERSA.
5. ' ON THE UMBRA EXTENSA.
'
73
-
Now we must explain, -what is the umbra versa, and
what the umbra extensa. Therefore let us conceive some
plane parallel to the horizon, and on this plane let us con
ceive something raised at right angles, for instance, a
straight stake; the shadow of this stake so raised, falling
on the said plane, is called umbra extensa. The umbra
extensa is, therefore, the shadow of an object which is
raised perpendicularly to the plane of the horizon, falling
on the same plane.
6.
ON THE UMBRA VERSA.
Also let us conceive the same plane as before, and upon
it something raised perpendicularly; and from the latter
so raised let us conceive a style jutting out at a right
angle, like the styles which jut out from the walls of
churches for taking the hours; the shadow of this style
falling upon the object raised at right angles, parallel, of
course, to the length of the same object,1 is called umbra
versa—falling parallel, I say, because otherwise the shadow
would be irregular. And such a shadow falls on the
cylinder. Now this umbra versa always increases until
midday, and then, that is at midday, it is greatest; the
contrary is the case with the umbra extensa, for that de
creases until midday, and then becomes least.
7.
ON THE POINTS OF THE SHADOW.
'When you wish to know how many points the umbra
versa has at any hour, turn the style over the points of the
shadow; and. as many points as the shadow falls over, the
same are the required points of the shadow. But if you
wish to know the umbra extensa at the same altitude,
divide 144 by the points which you have, and the result
will be the points of the umbra extensa at the same hour.
1 That is, straight down it.'
�74
TRACTICA CHILINDRI.
ha&ueris per 12, et exz'bunt states. Quod si non haZ>u[er]is
12 puzzcta, uide quota pars sint puncta de 12, et tota pars
erunt puncta que haftuez’is ad vnuzn statuzn. Est autezn1
status tota longitudo cuzuslibe^ rei, et quia ozzzzzem rem quo
ad vmbrazn eius sumendam diuz’dimzzs in 12 partes eqwales,
propterea 12 puncta vmbre faciunt vnuzn statuzn; est eniin
quodlihet punctuzn longitudznis oznnis eqwale duodecimo
parti2 rei cuius est vmbra.
DE ALTITUDINE RERIZM PER VMBRAAf.
8. Z~^vm volueris scire altitudinem turris per vmbrazzz
V.7 versazzz que cadit in chilindro, aut altitudinem
alicuz'us rei erecte, cum hoc, inquam, volueris, verte stiluzzz
super puncta uznbre, et vide super quot puncta ceciderit
vmbra. Deinde considera izz qua pz’oporczone se ha Sent
puncta uzzzbre in chilindro ad stiluzzz, izz eadezzz proporczone
se ha&et oznnis res erecta ad suazzz uzzzbrazn, hoc est, si
puncta uznbre in chilindro fuerint sex, stilus duplus est ad
vmbrazn, et tunc in eadezn hora erit oznnis uznbz-a extensa
dupla ad suam rein ; et si uzzzbra in chilindro fuerit dupla
ad stiluzn, hoc est, cum vmbra fuerit 24 punctoruzn, erzt
oznnis res erecta dupla ad suazn uznbrazn ; et sic semper in
qua proporczone se haZzet uznbra ‘chilindri ad stiluzzz, in
eadezn proporczozze se ha Set econtrario omnis res erecta ad
vmbrazzz suazzz extensazn, omnis res erecta, dico, que fecerit
vmbrazn sub eadezzz solzs altiZuzfzne, in,ilia hora;.vel, si,
nescieris proporczonem sumez-e, diuide 144 per puncta que
ha&ueris, sicut dz’cbzm est, et exibit vmbra rei erecte que
dzczYur extensa, vide ergo quot status .sint in ilia uznbra
extensa, auZ quota fuerint puncta de 12, et haSebis quod
voluisti.
1 Read, enim.
The word vmbre is wrongly inserted after parti in the MS.
�FINDING THE HEIGHT OF OBJECTS BY THE SHADOW.
75
And if you wish to know how many status are in the
shadow, divide the points which you have by 12, and the
status will be the result. And if you have not 12 points,
see what part of 12 the points are, and the points which
you have will be that part of one status. For a status is
the whole length of any object; and because we divide
every object into 12 equal parts whereby to take its shadow,
therefore 12 points of the shadow make one status; for
every point is equal to a twelfth part of the whole length
of the object, whose the shadow is.
8.
on
(finding)
the height of objects by the shadow.
When you wish to know the height of a tower by the
umbra versa which falls on the cylinder, or the height of
any upright object—I say, when you wish this, turn the
style over the points of the shadow, and see over how
many points the shadow falls. Then consider : what
ever proportion the points of the shadow on the cylinder
hold to the style, every upright object holds the same
proportion to its shadow; that is, if the points of the
shadow on the cylinder be six, the style is double of the
shadow, and then at the same hour every umbra extensa
will be double of its object; and if the shadow on the
cylinder be double of the style, that is, when the shadow
is of 24 points, every upright object will be double of its
shadow; and so always, whatever proportion the shadow
on the cylinder holds to the style, conversely every upright
object holds the same proportion to its umbra extensa.,
every upright object, I say, which throws a shadow under
the same altitude of the sun at that hour. Or, if you do
not know how to take the proportion, divide 144 by the
points which you have, as was said, and the result will be
the shadow which is called extensa of the upright object;
see, then, how many status are in that umbra extensa, or
what part of 12 the points are, and you will have what
you desired.
�76
PRACTICA CHIL1NDRI.
DE DECLINACIONE SOLIS.
vm volueris scire declinaci'onem sobs omni die
anni, scias umbram uersam Arietis in regione in
qua fueris, i[d est], scias ad quem, gradum chihndri proueniat vmbra stili eius in meridie, cum fuerit sol in primo
gradu Arietis, et hec est mbra Arietis in gradibns chilindri in ilia regione. Qno scito, sume vmbram meridiei per
chilindrum qnocunyne die volueris scire declinacionem
soli's, et vide super quot gradus chilindri ceciderit umbra,
et quantum plus uel minns fuerit umbra ilia qnam vmbra
Arietis, tanta erit declinacio solzs in meridie illins diei.
Sed si umbra tua fuerit maior quarn vmbra Arietis, erit
declinacio solis [leaf 4] septemtrionalz's ; si uero minor fuerit,
erzt declinacio meridiana. Qnod si volueris scire gradum
solis in ilia die per eins declinacionem, intra1 in tabnlam
declinacionis solzs, et quere similem declinaci'onem ei quam
inuenisti per chilindrum, et aliqnis 4 graduum quem in
directo eins inueneris erit gradus sob's uel fere; et scies
qnis erit gradus ex ilb’s 4, vt aspicias vtrum declinaci'o
fuerit meridiana uel septemtrionab's. Qnod si fuerit meridiana, erit vnns de gradibns meridionalibas, et si fuerit
declinacio septemtrionalz's, erit vnns de gradibns septemtrionalibiis; ha&ent autem omnes 4 gradus eqnidistantes ab
eqninoctiali eandem declinaci'onem. Cum ergo sciueris
quod fuerit vnns de gradibns septemtrionis seu meridiei,
scies qnis duornzn fuerit gradus soli's, ut aspicias seqnenti
die declinacionem per chilindrum, et si umbra fuerit maior
qnam die precedent^ fueritqne declinacio meridiana, erit
gradus ille a Capricorno in Ariete?n; et si umbra tails declinaci'onis fuerit minor, erit gradus ille a Libra in Capricornum; si uero umbra creuerit, fueritqne declinacio septemtrionalis, erit gradus ille ab Ariete in Cancruzn; si uero
decreuerit, a Cancro in Libram.
9.
1 MS ‘ iuxZn.’
�ON THE DECLINATION OF THE SUN.
9.
77
ON THE DECLINATION OF THE SUN.
When- you wish, to know the declination of the sun on
any day in the year, know the urn,bra versa of Aries in the
region in which you are, that is, know to what degree of
the cylinder the shadow of its style reaches at midday,
when the sun is in the first degree of Aries, and this is the
shadow of Aries in the degrees of the cylinder in that
region. That being known, take the midday shadow by
the cylinder on whatever day you wish to know the de
clination of the sun, and see over how many degrees of the
cylinder the shadow falls, and the declination of the sun
at noon of that day, will be as great as that shadow is
greater or less than the shadow of Aries. But if your
shadow is greater than the shadow of Aries, the sun’s de
clination will be northern, but if it is less, the declination
will be southern. And if you wish to know the sun’s de
gree on that day by his declination, enter into the table of
the sun’s declination, and seek a similar declination to that
which you have found by the cylinder, and some one of
the 4 degrees, which you find on a line with it will be the
sun’s degree or nearly (so); and you shall know which
will be the degree out of those 4, as you look whether the
declination is southern or northern ; for if it be southern,
it will be one of the southern degrees, and if the declina
tion be northern, it will be one of the northern degrees.
But all the 4 parallel degrees have the same declination
from the equinoctial. When, therefore, you know that it
is one of the northern degrees orcofi the southern, you
shall know which of the two is the degree of the sun, as
you observe the declination on the following day by the
cylinder, and if the shadow be greater than on the preced
ing day and the'declination be southern, the degree will be
that from Capricorn towards Aries ; and if the shadow of
such declination be less, ther degree will be that from
Libra towards Capricorn; but if the shadow has increased
and the declination is northern, the degree will be that
from Aries towards Cancer; but- if it has decreased, from
Cancer towards Libra. . '
�78
-
PRACTICA CHILINDRI.
DE ALTITUDINE SOLIS OMNI HORA ANNI.
10. IjlT si volueris scire altiinch'nem sob's que poterit
-Li esse omni bora anni, vide quantum capiet quelibei hora anni de gradibns chilindri, mensurando per circinum aut per festucam, et ipsa erit altitudo sob's ad quamlibei horam anni in regione tua, s[cilicet], snj?er qnam
figurantnr hore chilindri, si Deus voluerit.
DE LATIT UDLVE REGIONIS.
11. Oil volueris scire latitudinem regionis ignote ad
quam veneris, tunc vertes stilum super gradus
altitudz'nis, et vide ad qnot gradus peruenerit vmbra.
Quod si hoc feceris in die eqninoctiali, niinue gradus qnos
habueris de 90, et residuuzn er it latitudo regionis. Quod
si no?z feceris hoc in eqninoctio, vide per tabnlam decb'nacionis que fuerit declinacio solis in ipsa die. Quam declinacionem, si fuerit australis, adde snper susceptam
altitudinem, et hafrebis altitudinem eqninoctialis in eadem
regione ; et si declinacio fuerit septemtrionalis, niinue earn
de accepta altiinciine, haSebisqne altitudinem eqninoctiab's
in eadem regione. Haftita autem alti/nciine eqninoctialis,
minuas ipsam semper de 90, et residuum er it latitudo regionis, que est distencia cenith ab eqninoctiali.
DE QUANTITATE ORBIS TERRE.
12. Oil autem volueris scire quantitatem Deaf4,bk] cirKJj cuitns terre per chilindrum, verte stilum super
gradus chilindri, et scias optime gradum solis et &eelinacionem eins, et serua earn. Cumqne hoc sciueris, sumas
altitudinem sob's meridianam, et serua eam; post hec
autem procedas directe uersus septemtrionem uel meridiem,
donee altera die, absqne augmenta[ta] uel minorata interim
�ON THE LATITUDE OF A REGION.
10.
ON
(finding)
79
THE ALTITUDE OF THE SUN AT ANY
HOUR OF THE YEAR.
And if you wish to -know the sun’s altitude, which may
be at any hour of the year, see how much of the degrees of
the cylinder any hour of the year will take, measuring with
the compasses or with a rod, and the same will he the
sun’s altitude at any hour of the year in your region, that
is to say, (the region) upon which the hours of the cylinder
are figured, if God will.
11.
on
(finding) the latitude of a region.
If you wish to know the latitude of an unknown region
to which you have come, then turn the style over the de
grees of altitude, and see to how many degrees the shadow
reaches. And if you do this on the equinoctial day, sub
tract the degrees which you have from 90, and the re
mainder will be the latitude of the region. But if you do
this not at the equinox, see by the table of declination
:what is the sun’s declination on the same day; add the
declination, if it be southern, to the altitude you have
taken, and you will have the altitude of the equinoctial in
the same region; and if the declination be northern, sub
tract it from the taken altitude, and you will have the
altitude of the equinoctial in the same region. Moreover,
the altitude of the equinoctial being had, subtract it always
from 90, and the remainder will be the region’s latitude,
which is the distance of the zenith from the equinoctial.
12.
ON THE SIZE OF THE WORLD.
If, moreover, you wish to know the extent of the
earth’s circumference by the cylinder, turn the style over
the degrees of the cylinder, and know most accurately the
degree of the sun and his declination, and keep it. And
when you know this, take the meridian altitude of the sun,
and keep it. Then after this travel directly northward or
southward, until on another day, without increase or de-
�80
PRACTICA CHILINDRI.
declinaczone, ascendent sol in gradibus chilindri plus vno
gradu quam prizzs ascendent, plus dico, si processeris
versus meridiem, uel minus, si processeris uersus septemtrionem, et iam pertransisti spaciuzn in terra quod subiacet
vni gradui celi. Metire ergo illud, et vide quot miliaria
sint in eo. Deinde multiplica, sfcilicet], miliaria illius
spacij quod haSueris per 360, qui sunt gradus circuli, et tot
miliaria scias esse in circuitu mundi. Quod si volueris
scire spissitudinem mundi, diuide circuitum eius per tria
et septimam partem vnius, eritque hoc quod exierit diametrum terre, et medietas eius erit quantitas que est a superdcie ad centrum eius, si Deus voluerit. De inueniendis
autem ascendente et ceteris domibus per vmbram satis
dictum est in lecczonibus tabularum, et idea de illis nichil
ad presens. Et hec de practica chilindri sufficiant. Ex
plicit.
■
Explicit practica chilindri
Mag is tri
Houeden astrologi.
Iohannis
de
�ON THE SIZE OF THE WORLD.
81
crease of declination in the mean time, the sun has risen
one degree more in the degrees of the cylinder than he
rose before; more, I say, if you have travelled south
ward, or less, if you have travelled northward; and now
you have traversed on the earth the space which lies
under one degree of the heaven. Measure it therefore, and
see how many miles are in it. Then multiply, of course,
the miles in that space which you have by 360, which are
the degrees of a circle, and know that there are so many
mi les in the circumference of the world. But if you wish
to know the thickness of the world, divide its circumfer
ence by three and the seventh part of one, and the result
will be the diameter of the earth, and half of it will be the
distance from its surface to the centre, if God will. But
on finding the ascendant and the other houses by the
shadow enough has been said in the readings of the tables,
and therefore nothing of them at present. And let this
suffice upon the working of the cylinder. End.
Here ends Master John Hoveden, the astrologer’s,
Working
of the
Cylinder.
�‘4*
I
'I
�83
IV.
THE USE OF FINAL -e
IN EAELY ENGLISH,
AND ESPECIALLY IN
CHAUCER’S CANTERBURY TALES.
BY
JOSEPH PAYNE, ESQ.
�84
SYNOPSIS OF THE ARGUMENTS.
The two main arguments are :—
I. That in the ordinary English speech of the 13th and 14th
centuries there was no recognition of the formative, and little of th6
inflexional, -e, which, chiefly for orthoepical reasons, was appended
to many words employed in written composition.
II. That the phonetic recognition of final -e was confined to
verse composition, and only occasionally adopted by license, under
rhythmical exigency, and consequently not adopted at the end of
the verse where it was unnecessary.
These arguments are maintained, (1.) by considerations inherent
in the nature of the case, (2.) by reference to the practice of AngloNorman and Early English writers, and are supported by illus
trations derived (a.) from the laws which governed the formation
of words in early French, (5.) from the manner in which Norman
words are introduced into ancient Cornish poems, and (c.) from the
usage of old Low German dialects (especially that of Mecklenburg),
in respect to words identical (except as regards final -e) with Early
English words.
�85
THE USE OF FINAL -e IN EARLY ENGLISH, WITH
ESPECIAL REFERENCE TO THE FINAL -e AT
THE END OF THE VERSE IN CHAUCER’S
CANTERBURY TALES.
1. STATEMENT OE THE QUESTION AT ISSUE.
H'
The question whether the final -e, which is so obvious
a feature of numerous English words in the 13th and 14th
centuries, was or was not frequently recognized as a factor
of the rhythm in verse, is not the question which it is
here proposed to discuss. It needs, in fact, no discussion,
since there can be no doubt whatever on the point. The
real question is what it meant, that is, whether it was an
organic and essential element of the words in which it
occurred, to be accounted for by reference to original
formation, inflexion, &c., or whether it was, for the most
part, an inorganic orthoepic adjunct of the spelling, and
only exceptionally performed any organic function.
If the former hypothesis is true, the -e was recognized
in the rhythm because it was recognized in ordinary
parlance as a necessary part of the pronunciation of the
word, and the instances in which it was silent were excep
tional and irregular. If the latter is true, the instances
in which it was silent represent the regular pronunciation
of the words, and those in which it is sounded an excep
tional pronunciation, allowed by the fashion of the times
in verse composition. It is a consequence, moreover, of
the former theory that the -e, being by assumption a neces
sary organic part of the word, ought to be sounded even
where, as in the case of the final syllable of the verse, it is
CH. ESSAYS.
G
�86
THE USE OF FINAL
-e
not required by the rhythm. By the latter theory the -e
of the final rhyme, being generally an inorganic element
of the orthography, not recognized in the ordinary pro
nunciation and not required by the rhythm, was (with
rare exceptions, such as Rome—--to me, sothe—to the, &c., in
the Canterbury Tales and elsewhere) silent.
These theories are obviously inconsistent with each
other, the exceptions of the one being the rule of the
other, and vice versa. The former is that adopted by
Tyrwhitt, Guest, Gesenius, Child, Craik, Ellis, Morris,
and Skeat; the latter is that maintained by the present
writer, supported to some extent by the authority of the
late Mr Richard Price.
In anticipation of the full discussion of the various
points involved, it may be here briefly remarked, that the
former theory requires us to assume that such words as
schame, veyne, sake, space, rose, joie, vie, sonne, witte,
presse, were in ordinary parlance pronounced as scha-me,
vey-ne, ro-se, joi-e, son-ne, wit-te, presse; moreover, that
corage, nature, were pronounced as cora-ge, natu-re, and
curteisie, hethenesse, as cwrfezsz-e, hethenesse, and that
the recognition of the -e in verse as a factor of the rhythm
was required to represent the true pronunciation. The
second theory, on the other hand, assumes that schame,
veyne, seke, joie, witte, nature, curteisie, &c., conventionally
represent scham, veyn, selc, joi, wit, natur, curteisi, as the
ordinary pronunciation of the words, and that the recogni
tion of the -e as significant, was a rhythmical license.
By way of further illustration of the difference between
the two theories, it may be noted that in such verses as
these:
Enbrouded was he, as it were a mede—C. T. v. 89.
Ful wel sche sang the servise devyne—ib. v. 122;
the first theory requires mede and devyne to be pro
nounced me-de, devy-ne; the second, regarding mede
(== A.S. med) and devyne (= Fr. devyn) as conventional
�IN EARLY ENGLISH.
87
spellings, requires them to be pronounced med and devyn.
Servise (Fr. servis, service), here servi-se, is regular by the
first theory, exceptional by the second.1
The main principle of the theory here adopted is
that very early (probably in the 12 th century) phonetic
began to supersede dynamic considerations, and, as a con
sequence, to change. the significance of the originally
organic -e ; and that this change was especially due to the
introduction of the Norman speech and the usages of the
Norman scribes into England. The Norman dialect was
the simplest and purest of all the dialects of the French
language, and largely exhibited the influence of phonetic
laws. This influence it began to propagate on its contact
with English. The first effect was to simplify the for
mative English terminations of nouns. Hence in the
beginning of the 12th century -a, -o, -u (as in tima, hcelo,
sceamu) became -e (as in time, sceame, or schame, hele).
It next acted on the grammatical inflexions, as, for in
stance, in nouns, either by suppressing the -e of the
oblique or dative case altogether (cf. Orrmin’s “ be word,”
“bi brsed,” “o boc,” “off stan,” &c.); or by converting it
from an organic to an inorganic termination, reducing it,
in short, to the same category as name, shame, hele. It
next affected the orthography generally by introducing an
expedient of the Norman scribes (before unknown in
England), which consisted in the addition of an inorganic
-e to denote the length of the radical vowel, an expedient
which, when adopted in English, converted, after a time,
A.S. tar, ben, bed, into tare, bene, bede, without disturbing
the individuality of the words, and re-acted on name,
1 In support of the assumption that sonant -e is exceptional,
not regular, it may be noted that in the first 100 lines of the Pro
logue (Ellesmere text) out of 160 instances of final -e only 22 occur
in which it is sounded before a consonant; of the remaining 138
25 are silent before a consonant, 49 before a vowel or It, and 64 in
the final rhyme where its sound is superfluous—that is to say, in
138 instances the words in -e have, it is assumed, their natural
pronunciation against 22 in which, by license, the -e is reckoned as
an additional syllable.
�88
THE USE OF FINAL -C
schame, hele, &c., by treating them (whatever they may
have been before) as monosyllables. It finally acted on
the versification by introducing the license, well known
in early and, by descent, in modern French, of recog
nizing, under rhythmical exigency, the inorganic -e (silent
in ordinary discourse) as a factor of the verse. It hence
appears that certain principles introduced by the Normans,
and exhibited in their own tongue, affected first the spoken
and then the written English, gradually superseding the
organic function of the -e, by treating it as inorganic, as
an orthoepic sign to guide the pronunciation of the reader;
and that this great change was fundamentally due to the
law of phonetic economy, which, by its tendency to
simplification, gradually overpowered the original dynamic
laws of the language, and ended in converting the forma
tive and inflexional -e into a conventional element of the
spelling.
2.
OBJECTIONS WITH RESPECT TO THE VERSIFICATION CON
SIDERED.
I _
Two d priori objections may be taken, and indeed
have been taken, against this conclusion as applied to
Chaucer’s versification. The first is indicated in these
words of Mr Ellis,1 “that Chaucer and Gdthe'used the
final -e in precisely the same way,” and in these of Pro
fessor Child,2 “that the unaccented, final -e of nouns of
French origin is sounded in Chaucer as it is in French
verse,” by which assertions it is affirmed that the laws of
modern German and French versification are identical with
those of Chaucer.
The full answer to this objection will be found in the
subsequent investigation, but for the present it may be
urged, without pressing the argument already presumptively
1 “ Early English Pronunciation,” p. 339.
2 “ Observations on the Language of Chaucer,” by Professor
Child of Harvard University, a paper contributed to the “ Memoirs
of the American Academy,” vol. viii. p. 461.
�IN EARLY ENGLISH.
89
stated, that the use of -e in German and French versifica
tion is (with very rare exceptions) regular and constant,
while that in Chaucer is continually interfered with hy
instances of silent -<?, which, indeed, outnumber those in
which it is sounded (see note, p.' 87), even -without taking
into consideration the -e of the final rhyme. Then with
regard to the final rhyme, the objection as applied to
French versification proves too much, inasmuch as the -e
at the end of a French verse is not, and probably never
was, a factor of the rhythm. This argument, then, as far
as it is worth anything, is for, not against, the theory here
maintained.
The following instances, which are typical, show that
the laws of French versification are continually violated by
Chaucer:
And he hadde ben somtyme in chivachie.— v. 85.
In hope to stonden in his lady grace.—v. 88.
He sleep nomore than doth a nightyngale.—w. 97, 98.
Ful semely aftui' hire mete sche raught.—v. 13-6.
By cause that it was old and somdel streyt.—v. 174.
Kfrere ther was, a wantoun and a merye.—v. 208.
In alle the ordres foure is noon that can.—v. 210, &c.
If these verses are read by the French rule they become
unmetrical; it is only by ignoring it that they can be read
with metrical precision. The conclusion, then, is that the
only exact identity between French and early English
versification consists in the silence of the -e at the end of
the verse.
Nor would it be difficult to show from the above and
from thousands of other instances, that the strict applica
tion of the laws of German versification would render
Chaucer unreadable.
The second'd priori argument, first put forward by
Tyrwhitt, against the theory here adopted, that the -e at
the end of a verse was silent, is to the effect that Chaucer
intended the verse of the Canterbury Tales to be an imita
tion of the Italian endecasyllabic, that of Boccaccio, &c.,
and, therefore, that he required the -e at the close of the
�90
THE USE OF FINAL -0
line to be pronounced to make the eleventh syllable.
Against this assumption, however, it may be urged that he
simply adopted the decasyllabic French verse, of which
there were numerous examples before his time. The metre
of the Chanson de Roland, Huon de Bordeaux, Guillaume
d’Orange, &c., as well as of many of the “Ballades” of his
contemporary Eustache Deschamps, appears to be pre
cisely that of the Canterbury Tales. The following are
typical examples :—
Co sent Rollenz que la mort le tresprent,
Devers la teste sur le quer li descent.— Chan, de Roland.
Ma douce mere jamais ne me verra.—Huon de Bordeaux.
Cis las dolans, vrais dex, que devenra.—ib.
Forment me poise quant si estes navres
Se tu recroiz, a ma fin sui alez.— Guillaume d? Orange.
En bon Anglais le livre translatas.—Eustache Deschamps.
Grant translateur, noble Geoffroy Chaucier.—ib.
Ta noble plant, ta douce melodie.—ib.
We see, then, that there was no occasion for Chaucer to
go to the Italians for a model. It may, moreover, be
plausibly urged that in none of Chaucer’s earlier works is
there any trace of Italian influence, whether as regards
subject, general treatment, or versification.3
3. THE SECTIONAL PAUSE.
Before entering on the illustration by reference to the
actual usage of early French and English poets of the
theory which has been already stated, some notice may be
taken of a characteristic feature of early French and
English verse which has an important bearing on the
point at issue.1 It is that of the sectional pause, a stop
made in the reading of the verse, for the sake of the sound,
and having no immediate connection with the sense.
This pause in decasyllabic verse (to which, however, it is by
no means confined) occurred at the end of the fourth or
1 It is remarkable that scarcely any of the writers on early
English versification (except Dr Guest) have noticed the sectional
pause, or explained the true use of the prosodial bars or full-points
found in the MSS.
�IN EARLY ENGLISH.
91
sixth measure, and divided the verse into two parts, which
were prosodially independent of each other; that is, it
made each part a separate verse. Dr Guest (History of
English Rhythms, i. 181) thus states the rule generally:
“ When a verse is divided into two parts or sections by
what is called the middle pause, the syllable which follows
such pause is in the same situation as if it began the
verse.” The bearing of this point, however, on the ques
tion at issue is more fully seen in the usage of early
French verse, in which the effect of the pause was to
silence the -e which closed the section. This usage is
altogether unknown in modern French verse; a fact which
of itself forms an argument against the presumed identity
of the laws of early English and modern French versifica
tion. The rule is thus stated by Quicherat (“Versification
frangaise,” p. 325) :• “ Une preuve de Timportance que nos
anciens poetes donnaient au repos de la cesure ” (he means
the sectional pause) “ c’est qu'ils la traitaient comme la
rime, et lui permettaient de prendre une syllabe muette, qui
n'etait pas comptee dans la mesure.”
This principle, in its application to early Anglo-Nor
man and English, may be thus formulated :—
The -e that occurred at the sectional pause (and, pre
sumptively, that at the final pause closing the
verse) was silent, and not a factor of the rhythm.
Instances in which the -e at the pause was silent
abound in early French and Anglo-Norman poems, and
this usage was borrowed or imitated by English poets, as
may be seen in the instances which follow.
Fors Sarraguce || ki est en une muntaigne.— Chanson de
Roland, v. 6.
De vasselage || fut asez chevaler.—ib. v. 25.
Mais ami jeune || quiert amour et amie.—Eustache Des
champs, i. 122.
Car vieillesse || sans cause me decoipt.—ib. ii.' 20.
Desous la loi de Rome || na nule region.—Rutebeuf, i. 236.
Si li cors voloit fere || ce que lame desire.—ib. i. 399.
Toz cis siecles est foire || mais lautre ert paiement.—ib. i. 400.
/
�92
THE USE OF FINAL -6
De medle se purpense || par ire par rancour.—Langtoft (ecl.
Wright), i. 4.
Lavine sa bele file || li done par amour.—i&.
Norice le tient en garde || ke Brutus le appellait.— ib.
I rede we chese a hede || fat us to werre kan dight.—De
Drvnne (ed. Hearne, i. 2).
pat ilk a kyng of reame || suld mak him alle redie.—ib. i. 4.
Sorow and site he made || per was non oper rede.—ib. 5.
That ben commune || to me and the.—Eandlyng Synne (ed.
Furnivall, p. 1).
In any spyce || pat we falle ynne.—ib. p. 2.
For none \>arefore || shulde me blame.—ib.
On Englyssh tunge || to make pys boke.—ib.
In al godenesse || pat may to prow.—ib. p. 3.
pe yeres of grace || fyl pan to be.—ib.
Faire floures for to fecclie || pat he bi-fore him seye.— William
of Palerne (ed. Skeat), v. 26.
and comsed pan to crye || so ken[e]ly and schille.—ib. v. 37.
panne of saw he ful sone || pat semliche child.—ib. n. 49.
pat alle men vpon molde || no mqt telle his sorwe.—ib. v. 85.
but carfuli gan sche crie || so kenely and lowde.—ib. v. 152.
It will be seen that in all these instances the power of
the pause overrides the grammatical considerations. Alle,
commune (plurals), reame, spyce, tunge, grace, molde
(datives), crie (infin.), to fecche, to crye (gerundial infini
tives), have the -e silent.
The following examples show that Chaucer adopted
the same rule :—
Schort was his goune || with sleeves long and wyde.—Earl.
n. 93.
He sleep no more || than doth a nightingale.—ib. v. 97.
Hire gretest otliex || nas but by seint Eloi.—Tyrmhitt, v. 120.
Hire grettest ooth || nas | but by | seint Loi.—-Earl. v. 120.
That no drope || til | uppon | hire brest.—ib. v. 131.
That no drope || ne fille upon hir brist.—Ellesmere, v. 131.
I durste swere || they weyghede ten pound.—Earl. v. 454.
And of the feste || that was at hire weddynge.—ib. v. 885.
And maken alle || this lamentacioun.—ib. v. 935.
For Goddes love || tak al in pacience.—iA v. 1086.
Into my herte || that wol my bane be.—ib. v. 1097.
No creature || that of hem maked is.—ib. v. 1247.
And make a werre || so scharpe in this cite.—ib. v. 1287.
Thou mayst hire wynne || to lady and to wyf.—ib. v. 1289.
Ther as a beste || may al his lust fulfille.—ib. v. 1318.
1 Othe and ooth are the same word, the inorganic -e being
merely an index to the sound. This exclamation occurs in
“ Nenil, Sire, par Seint Eloi ” (Theatre Frangais du Moyen Age, p.
120). Loi itself appears to be simply a contraction of Eloi,
�IN EARLY ENGLISH.
93
In. the following instances the independence of the
second section of the verse is shown :—
Whan that Aprille || with ] hise shore | wes swoote.—•
Harl. v. 1.
- And whiche they were || and | of what | degree.—Elies, v. 40.
In al the parisshe || wyf | ne was | ther noon.—Harl. v. 451.
Sche schulde slope || in | his arm | al night.—ib. v. 3406.
That wyde where' || sent | her spy | eerie.—ib. v. 4556.
Than schal your soule || up | to he|ven skippe.—ib. v. 9546.
For Goddes sake || think | how I | the chees.—ib. v. 10039.
And with a face || deed | as ai|sshen colde.—ib. v. 13623.
In view of the numerous instances given above of the
silence of the -e at the sectional pause, it would seem a
fortiori improbable that it would be sounded at the greater
pause, that formed by the end of the verse. This argu
ment, though as yet only presumptive, is held to be
strongly in favour of the theory adopted by the present
writer, who would therefore read,
In God|des love || tak al | in pa|cience
as ten syllables and no more.
Even if the illustrations adduced are not admitted as
decisive of the silence of -e at the end of the verse, they
undoubtedly account for its silence at the sectional pause
as a characteristic of Anglo-Norman and Early English
versification, and confirm the general argument, that in
Chaucer’s time the law of phonetic economy prevailed over
what have been assumed to be the demands of word
formation and grammar.
4. THE USE OF FINAL
-e
AS A FORMATIVE CONVENTIONAL
ELEMENT OF THE SPELLING.
The position to be here maintained has been already
stated (see p. 87), and amounts to this, that, as a con
sequence of Norman influence, the -e, which, whether
1 If the -e of where is sounded, it is probably the single instance
in which it is so used, either in Chaucer or any other Early English
writer. Here and there, too, are always monosyllables, and there
fore Mr Child’s marking of them as dissyllables when final, as in
1821, 3502, 5222, &c., is entirely gratuitous. They will be con
sidered hereafter.
�94
THE USE OF FINAL -e
formative or inflexional, was once organic and significant,
became, as in time = turn, dede = ded, &c., simply a
mark or index of the radical long vowel sound, or as in
witte = wit, presse = press, a mere conventional append
age of the doubled consonant which denoted the radical
short vowel sound.
It- is further assumed that this phonetic influence,
which probably acted first on the formative -e, as in the
instances just given, gradually involved with varying
degrees of velocity also the inflexional -e, and therefore
that the so-called oblique cases as roote, brethe, ramme, &c.,
and the infinitives as take, arise, telle, putte, merely repre
sent in their spelling the sounds rot, breth, ram, tali, arts,
tel, put, the formative and the inflexional -e being reduced
to the same category.
The doctrine here laid down in its largest generality
involves, it is easily seen, the whole question of the cor
respondence between the sound of words uttered in ordin
ary speech and their orthographic representation, as far as
the final -e is concerned, and is to be considered independ
ently of the exceptional use of -e as, by the usage of the
times, an occasional factor of the verse. If, however, it
can be proved it disposes entirely of the assumption that
the -e was sounded at the end of the verse, and this is the
main object in view.
5. CANONS OF
ORTHOGRAPHY
AND ORTHOEPY APPLICABLE
TO EARLY ENGLISH.
The main points, then, to be proved—by reference to
the nature of the case and to actual usage—are, that in the
time of Chaucer and long before, final -e had become either
(1) an orthoepic or orthographic mark to indicate the sound
of the long radical vowel or diphthong, or (2) a superfluous
letter added for the eye, not for the ear, after a doubled
consonant.
�IN EARLY ENGLISH.
95
These conventionalities may he reduced for convenience
of reference to the following
Canons of orthography and orthoepy.
Canon I. (1) When final -e followed a consonant or
consonants which were preceded by a long vowel or
diphthong, it was not sounded.
Thus mede = med, rose = rds, veyne = veyn.
(2) When final -e followed a vowel or diphthong, tonic
or atonic, it was not sounded.
Thus curteisie = curteisi, glorie = glori, weye = wey,
merie = meri.
Canon II. When final -e followed a doubled consonant
or two different consonants, preceded by a short
vowel, it was not sounded.
Thus witte = wit, blisse = blis, sette = set, ende =
end, reste = rest.
Once more admitting that the -e in each of these cases
could be made, and was made, at the will of the poet,
exceptionally significant, we proceed to consider these pro
positions seriatim, merely observing, by the way, that these
rules—framed and adopted five or six hundred years ago—
are in substance the same as those now in common use.
(1.) Final -e suffixed to a consonant or consonants which
were preceded by a long vowel or diphthong, as in mede,
penaunce, veyne.
On this point we are bound to listen to the doctrine of
Mr Richard Price, contained in the preface to his edition of
Warton’s History of English Poetry.
Referring first to the fact that in A.S. the long vowel of
a monosyllabic word was commonly marked by an accent,
which in the Early English stage of the language was
entirely disused, he inquires what was done to supply its
place, and maintains that in such cases an -e was generally
suffixed to indicate the long quantity of the preceding
�9G
THE USE OF FINAL
-e
radical vowel. “The Norman scribes,” he says, “or at
least the disciples of the Norman school, had recourse to
the analogy which governed the French language;”1 and,
he adds, “ elongated the word or attached, as it were, an
accent instead of superscribing it.” “ From hence,” he
proceeds to say, “ has emanated an extensive list of terms
having final e’s and duplicate consonants, [as in witte,
synne, &c.,J which were no more the representatives of
additional syllables than the acute or grave accent in the
Greek language, is a mark of metrical quantity.” He adds
in a note, “ The converse of this can. only be maintained
under an assumption that the Anglo-Saxon words of one
syllable multiplied their numbers after the Conquest, and
in some succeeding century subsided into their primitive
simplicity.” Illustrating his main position in another
place,2 he observes, “ The Anglo-Saxon a was pronounced
like the Danish aa; the Swedish ci, or our modern o in
more, fore, &c. The strong intonation given to the words
in which it occurred would strike a Norman ear as indicat
ing the same orthography that marked the long syllables of
his native tongue, and he would accordingly write them
with an e final. It is from this cause that we find liar,
sar, lidt, bat, wd, an, ban, stan, &c., written hore (hoar),
sore, hote (hot), bote (boat), woe, one, bone, stone, some of
1 Mr Price makes no attempt to prove this position, but a few
remarks upon it may not be out of place here. The general
principle in converting Latin words into French was to shorten
them, and the general rule, to effect this by throwing off the termin
ation of the accusative case. Thus calic-em would become calic,
which appears in Old French both as callz and callee, evidently
equivalent sounds. So we find vertiz, devis, servis, surplis, graas,
and in phonetic spelling ros, clios. Conversely, as showing the
real sound of such words, we find in Chaucer and other English
poets, trespaas, solaas, caas, faas, gras (also grasse~), las, which
interpret solace, case, face, grace, lace, as words in which -e was
mute, and this because it was mute in French. French words
ending in -nee, as sentence, paclence, experience, were presumpt
ively sounded without -e, since we find Chaucer and other English
writers expressing them as sentens, paciens, experiens. See Ap
pendix I “ On the final -e of French nouns derived from Latin.”
2 End of note to the Saxon Ode on the Victory of Athelstan.
�IN EARLY ENGLISH.
97
which have heen retained. The same principle of elonga
tion was extended to all the Anglo-Saxon vowels that were
accentuated; such as rec, reke (reek), lif, life, god, gode
(good), scur, shure (shower); and hence the majority of
those e’s mute, upon which Mr Tyrwhitt has expended so
much unfounded speculation.” 1
Mr Price means to assert—what is maintained by
the present writer—that an original monosyllable, as
lif, for instance, was never intended by those who sub
sequently wrote it life to be considered or treated, when
used independently, as a word of two syllables, though
when introduced into verse it might be employed as such,
under the stress of the rhythm. There seems an a priori
absurdity in the conception of such an interference with
the individuality of a word, as is involved in denying the
essential identity of lif and life. The fact, too, that in
Early English, as distinguished from Anglo-Saxon so
called, nearly, if not quite all, the words in question
appear as monosyllables, seems strikingly to confirm the
hypothesis. Thus in the Orrmulum we find boc, blod,
brad, braed, cwen, daed, daef, daefy, god, so], wa, an, stan,
nearly all of which are the identical A.S. forms, and were
most of them in later texts lengthened out by an inorganic
-e. As the pronunciation of these words was no doubt
well established, there seemed no need for the scribe to
indicate in any way what was everywhere known, but soon
the confusion that began to arise, in writing, between long
and short syllables, suggested the more general use of the
orthoepical expedient in question, and accordingly we find
in early English texts both forms employed. Thus along
with lif, str if, drem, bot, &c., we see bede (A.S. bed),
bene, bone (A.S. ben), bode (A.S. b6d), &c.
The “ Early English Poems” (written before 1300,
1 Mr Price promised to resume the subject “ in a supplementaryvolume, in an examination of that ingenious critic’s ‘ Essay upon
the Language and Versification of Chaucer.’ ” This promise was,
however, never fulfilled.
�98
THE USE OF FINAL -e
in a “pure Southern” dialect1) supply us with numerous
examples. The following are from “ A Sarmun ” :
pe dere (A.S. deor) is nauqte (A.S. naht, nawht) pat pou
mighte sle
v. 24
If pou ertpr.wtfe (A.S. prut) man, of pi fleisse
v. 25
pe wiked wede (A.S. wed) pat was abute
v. 49
Hit is mi rede (A.S. rad, red) while pou him hast
v. 61
pen spene pe gode (A.S. god) pat god ham send
v. 68
His hondes, \sfete (A.S. fet) sul ren of blode
v. 117
Of sinful man pat sadde pi blode (A.S. blod)
v. 124
flopefire (A.S. fyr) and wind lude sul crie
v. 125
And forto hir pe bitter dome (A.S. dom)
V. 134
Angles sul quake, so seip pe bohe (A.S. hoc)
v. 135
To crie ihsu pin ore (A.S. ar)
v. 142
While pou ert here (A.S. her) be wel iware (A.S. gewar) v. 143
Undo pin hert and live is lore (A.S. lar)
v. 144
Hit is to late (A.S. last) whan pou ert pare (A.S. pa*r, par,
per)
v. 146
For be pe soule (A.S. sawl) enis oute (A.S. ut)
v. 171
he nel nojt leue his eir al bare (A.S. bser)
v. 174
and helpip pai pat habip nede (A.S. nead, neod, ned) v. 186
pe ioi of heven hab to mede (A.S. med)
v. 188
heven is heij hope lange (A.S. lang) and wide (A.S. wid) v. 213
In this long list of passages It will be seen that not one
instance occurs in which the formative -e is phonetic, so
that bede, bone, blode, boke, ore, here, lore, nede, bare, ware,
wide, late, &c., are all treated as words of one syllable
in which the -e is merely an orthoepical index to the
sound.
These instances, alone, go far to show what the ordinary
pronunciation of the words in question was, and to make
it appear very improbable that, except by poetical license,
the -e which closes them was ever pronounced.
It appears, then, clear that the A.S. words above quoted
are absolutely equivalent to the corresponding Early English
words ending in -e. But the principle admits of some ex
tension. We find that not only A.S. words ending in a
consonant assumed -e in Early English, but that the A.S.
terminations -a, -o, -u, were also represented by -e. This we
see in time from tima, and hele from hselo, or hselu. When
1 “ Some notes on the leading grammatical characteristics of the
principal Early English dialects.” By Wm. T. P. Sturzen-Becker,
Ph.D. Copenhagen, 1868.
�IN EARLY ENGLISH.
99
these forms were generally adopted, the next step would
he to consider them as in the same category as blode, dome,
&c., and to apply the same rule of pronunciation to them.
Hence, except by way of license, we find in the 13th and
14th centuries no practical difference in the use of the two
classes of words—crede from creda, stede from steda, care
from cearu, shame from sceamu, being treated precisely as
blode from blod, dome from dom, &c.; and the same remark
applies to such adjectives as blithe, dene, grene, &c., which
in their simple indefinite use, at least, were probably mono
syllables.
The position now gained is, that the -e in such English
words as dome, mede, fode, mone, name, &c., was orthoepic,
not organic. It is highly probable—as Mr Price appears
to have believed—that Latin words became French by a
si-mil ar process, and that the orthoepic expedient in question
is of French origin.1 The Norman words place, grace,
face, space, as interpreted in English by plas, graas, faas,
spas, are found in “ Early English Poems,” and later, in
Chaucer, and we also find conversely trespace, case, for
the French trespas, cas. Both in Early French and English
we moreover find as equivalent forms, devis, devise, and
device; servis, servise, service; pris, prise, price; surplis,
surplice; assis, assise.2
It will now be shown by examples, both Anglo-Norman
and English, that in words containing a long vowel
followed by a consonant and final -e, the -e was simply an
index to the quantity of the vowel, and therefore not
generally pronounced in verse composition—though under
stress of the rhythm it might be.
The usage in Anglo-Norman verse will first be shown
generally:
1 See Appendix I.
2 The phonetic identity of -s, -sse, -ce, in Anglo-Norman and
English is shown by numerous illustrations in a paper by the pre
sent writer, on Norman and English pronunciation, in the Philo
logical Transactions for 1868-9, pp. 371, 418-19, 440.
�100
TIIE USE OF FINAL -e
Quy a la dame de parays.—Lyrical Poetry of reign of Edward
I. (ed. Wright), p. 1.
Quar ele porta le noble enfant.—ib.
De tiele chose tenir grant pris.— ib. p. 3.
Vous estes pleyne de grant docour,—ib. p. 65.
The word dame is derived from domin-am — domin —
domn — dom — dam — dame, just as anim-am becomes
anim, anm, dm, ame. In both instances the -e is inorganic.
Dame frequently occurs in Chaucer, and generally, as
we might expect, with -e silent.1 Examples are :—
Of themperoures doughter dame Custaunce.—Harl. v. 4571.
Madame, quod he, ye may be glad & blithe.—ib. v. 5152. (See
also v. 4604, 7786, &c.)
We may presume, then, that at the end of a line, the -e
in this word would be silent, and that the -e of any word
rhyming with it would therefore be silent, as of blame in
And elles certeyn hadde thei ben to blame :
It is right fair for to be clept madarne.—Harl. v. 378-0.
We may infer, then, that English words of the same
termination—as scliame, name, &c., would follow the same
rule—and accordingly we find—
J?e more scliame Jsat he him dede.—Ear. Eng. Poems, p. 39.
We stunt noj?er for schame ne drede.—ib. p. 123.
In gode burwes and \mx-fram
Ne funden he non f>at dede hem sham.—Haveloh (ed. Skeat),
v. 55-6.
Ful wel ye witte his nam,
Ser Pers de Birmingham.—Harl. v. 913 (date 1308) ;
and in Wiclif’s “ Apology for the Lollards ” (Camden
Society), “ in pe nam of Crist ” (p. 6); “ in nam of the
Kirke” (p. 13), &c., as also “in the name" on the same
page. We may therefore conclude that shame = sham, and
name = ndm.
Following out the principle we should conclude that
1 Professor Child, in a communication to Mi- Furnivall, in
tended for publication, decides that “ dame is an exception ” from
the general rule, but quotes Chaucer’s usage of fame throughout the
“House of Fame ” as a dissyllable. There is, of course, no disputing
the fact, but we see nothing in it beyond a convenient license.
Does Mr Child pretend that fame was formed on some special
principle, and for this reason employed by Chaucer as a dissyllable?
�IN EARLY ENGLISH.
101
what is true of -ame would also he true of -erne, in dreme,
-ime in rime, -ome in dome, -ume in coustume; and by
extending the analogy we should comprehend -ene in queue,
-ine in pine, as well as -ede in bede, -ete in swete, -ote in
note, -ute in prute, -ere in chere, &c., and expect that the -e
in all these cases would be mute. This, with exceptions
under stress, is found to be the case—the Northern MSS.
(as seen above) very frequently even rejecting it in the
spelling.
For the purpose of this inquiry it is obvious that such
terminations as -ume, -ine, -ete, -ere, -age, -ance, &c., are virtu
ally equivalent to monosyllabic words of the same elements.
As, however, it would be quite impossible without extend
ing the investigation to an enormous length, to illustrate
them all, the terminations -are, -ere, -ire, -ure, -age, -ance,
will be taken as types of the class.
-ere. We commence -with -ere because Professor Child
asserts that “ there can be no doubt -e final was generally
pronounced after r,” a conclusion inconsistent with the law
of formation already considered, and, as it would appear,
with general usage in early Anglo-Norman and English.
He farther maintains that “ the final -e of deere (A.S. deor,
deore) and of cheere (Fr. chere) was most distinctly pro
nounced ” [in Chaucer].
The first of these propositions evidently includes the
second, and means that words in -are, as bare, in -ere, as
here, in -ire, as fire, in -ore, as lore, generally have sonant -e.
Now it has been shown (p. 98) that bare, here, fire, lore,
were monosyllables in the 13th century. It is, therefore,
extremely improbable that these words would in the 14th
century put on another syllable. And if not these words,
why others of the same termination, as deere and cheere ?
However frequently, then, such words may appear in
Chaucer, with sonant -e, the cases are exceptional, and
being themselves exceptions from a general rule, cannot
form a separate rjile to override the general one.
CH. ESSAYS.
n
�102
THE USE OE FINAL
-e
Although, then, it were proved that Chaucer more
generally than not uses deere as a dissyllable, that fact
being exceptional cannot prove that here,1 prayere, frere,
manere,1 matere, have the -e sonant because they rhyme with
deere. The argument, in fact, runs the other way, inas
much as here, which is without exception a monosyllable
—manere and matere, which are almost without exception
dissyllables, being themselves representatives of the general
law of analogy—have a right, which no exceptional case
can have, to lay down the law. When therefore we find
heere and deere rhyming together, it is here, not deere,
that decides the question, and proves deere in that in
stance to be a monosyllable. We are indeed, in deter
mining such cases, always thrown back on the formative
law, which, being general, overrides the exceptions. All
the instances, then, in which deere rhymes with here,
manere and matere, are instances of monosyllabic deere.
As to chere, on which Mr Child also relies, he seems to
have forgotten that this word is very frequently written
cheer (there are eight such instances in the Clerk’s Tale
alone), and wherever so written confirms, and indeed proves,
the contention that it was-only exceptionally a dissyllable.
Every instance, then, in which deere and cheere rhyme with
here, there, where, matere, manere, frere, cleere, all repre
sentatives of the formative rule, is an argument against Mr
Child’s partial induction.
A few instances will now be given, showing the use of
-are, -ere, -ire, -ore, -ure, in Anglo-Norman and English
writers:
-are, -ere, -ire, -ore:—
’ No instance has yet been met with in Chaucer of here, there,
or manere with sonant -e. Two from Gower of manere, as a tri
syllable, have been found by Professor Child. Gower however,
who affected Frenchisms everywhere, being, if possible, more
French than the native authorities, and in his French ballads writes
in the “ French of Paris,” not Anglo-Norman—is no authority on
the question.
�IN EARLY ENGLISH.
103
Si fut un sirex de Rome la citet.—Alexis, v. 13.
. Quant vint al fare, dune le funt gentement.—ib. v. 47.
En cele manere1 Dermot le reis.— Conquest of Ireland (ed.
2
Michel), p. 6.
Vers Engletere la haute mer.—ib. p. 153.
En Engleter sodeinement.—French Chronicle (Cam. Soc.),
Appendix.
Deus le tot puissant ke eeel e terre crea.—Langtoft (ed.
Wright), v. 1.
Ke homme de terre venuz en terre revertira.—ib.
Uncore vus pri pur cel confort.—Lyrical Poetry, p. 55.
Then, for English instances :
Lyare wes mi latymer.— Lyrical Poetry, p. 49.
Careful men y-cast in care.—ib. p. 50.
Thareiena ne lette me nomon.—ib. p. 74.
Ther is [mani] maner irate—Land of Cokaygne, v. 49.
On fys manure handyl J>y dedes.—Handlyng Synne, p. 5.
Four manere joyen hy hedde here.—Shoreham's Poems (Percy
Soc.), p. 118.
And alle ine nout maner . . . Ine stede of messager.—ib. p. 119.
Sire quap pis holi maide our louerd himself tok.—Seinte,
Margarete (ed. Cockayne), p. 27.
Fyrst of my lvyre my lorde con wynne.—Allit. Poems, i. v. 582.
Bifore3 J?at spot my honde I spennd.—ib. i. v. 49.
pat were i-falle for prude an hove
To fille har stides pat wer ilor.—Ear. Eng. Poems, p. 13.
And never a day pe dore to pas.—ib. p. 137.
More j?en me lyste my drede aros.—ib. v. 181.
1 In Anglo-Norman verse of the 13th century Sire is generally
a monosyllable, and is even repeatedly written Sir. See in “ Polit
ical Songs ” (Camd. Soc.), pp. 66, 67, “ Sir Symon de Montfort,”
“Sir Rogier,” and also in “Le Privilege aux Bretons,” a song con
taining, like that just quoted from, a good deal of phonetic spelling,
“ Syr Hariot,” “ Syr Jac de Saint-Calons ” and “ Biaus Sir ” (Jubinal’s “Jongleurs et Trouveres,” pp. 52—62). Writings of this kind
in which words are phonetically, not conventionally, spelt, are often
very valuable as showing the true sound, and illustrate a pithy re
mark of Professor Massafia’s, that “ pathological examples are fre
quently more instructive than sound ones.”
2 In the “Assault of Massoura,” an Anglo-Norman poem (13th
century, Cotton MS. Julian A. v.), we find mere,frere, banere, arere,
almost always spelt without the -e. Manere (when not final) is a
dissyllable, and, when final, rhymes with banere, which in its turn
rhymes with/re?’. Mester and mestere both occur, and the latter
rhymes with eschapere and governere, for eschaper and governer,
showing that the added -e was inorganic and merely a matter of
spelling.
3 A.S. biforan became in Early English biforen, which fell
under the orthoepic rule which, as in many infinitives (see infra),
elided the -e in the atonic syllable -en. Biforen thus became
biforn, then lost the n and received an inorganic or index letter, e,
becoming bifore or before. No instance has yet been found by the
present writer, of bifore as a trisyllable.
�
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Essays on Chaucer: his words and works. Part II
Description
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Place of publication: London
Collation: [3], 57-177, [2] p. ; 23 cm.
Notes: From the library of Dr Moncure Conway. Printed by John Childs and Son. Published for The Chaucer Society. Publisher's series list inside and on the back over.
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[1874]
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Poetry
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<img src="http://i.creativecommons.org/p/mark/1.0/88x31.png" alt="Public Domain Mark" /><br /><span>This work (Essays on Chaucer: his words and works. Part II), identified by </span><span><a href="https://conwayhallcollections.omeka.net/items/show/www.conwayhall.org.uk">Humanist Library and Archives</a></span><span>, is free of known copyright restrictions.</span>
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Chaucer
Conway Tracts
Poetry
Poetry in English
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Text
1 -'*it
VffftX Jjjf’.t •
A Wt< Ui; JJOfr
;an?|,'nf «
mHhd sptifc*
Icelandic Millenary Festival
1871
:u>U:h «so
.•.» gmuiQ# iWte’Hr gj’J
fin Hitni raeet 'iiiod mt /J
:
:aUw7
—
Jii/l -uh ova jil %(j
is41
fjidwrnb ;5-d husl
•'"bJ
Hymn of Welcome,
composed by Mat’thiasHochumsson,
’
m; b.:
-u v/,(l
fil.'r,
iffll honor7 of
CHRISTIAN LX|KING OF DENMARK,
and sung on the occasion, ofifes visit:-to «Thingvellir —
the ancient place of assembly of the Icelandic Parlia-
y
ment, or Althing' —: August 6th 1874.
! iilOV ■'V'tBg oil.
..
Vfltn’l ■
■n-
'
TV'-i Jb.bd
’ Jrl
English version by George Browning.
e
'C;G
ilk| jhft/
.
;1,.5iO hJicui
\
j [6i<! mcj mod 'tuAo't
go smd
.
fmfrtevlA
0
44*4
iff ;*!.
E'd; Httuad
A
>
'1
�Lag: Kong Christian laegger ned sit Svaercl.
§tig heilum fasti a helgan voll,
Vor bjartaprudi Snaclandssjoli,
/
kdmst fra pinum konungs stdlh ■ | j
Ad sja vor kaeru fostur-fjoll!
Med frelsis-skra a fod^Htendi
tig fyrstan konung Gud oss sendi:
:|: Kom heill! kom heill ad hjarta Frons!
a
Landsfadir! Stig vort Logberg ay
Og lit svo yfir Drottins verkin:
Hvar sastu fegri frelsismerkin —
Eldsteyptu virkiny vdtnin bla!
Her gjorduskvorar, .hetjusogur.
Hjer viknar sjerhver islands mogur:
:|: Altari petta gjordi Gud! :|:
Hjer oma [)usund ara vje
Som ord og fyrjr tin oilduin,
Er geirpjod stdd med gullnum skjoldum
.Qg vardi Logum Wf .og fje.:
I somu tungu, sama landi
Hinmsami lifur frelsfe andi
:|: Og fagnar dyrsti- fylkir pjerf:|
it
th, 9'
f
Nu eru protin jxisund ar,
Srexjir petta fdlkid. hefir lifad
f bok vors Guds er skrad og skrifad
Allt J>j6darstrid vort, praut og far, En gaefu vonin glatt nu brenni
Fra giptu-fridu konungs enni:
Nu hefst upp fogur heilla tid! :|:
Vort land skal, jofur, pakka jojer,
•c Um pusund ar jskal nafn pitt hljoma,
Og Logberg verk pitt endur-oma,
A medan hjer finnst hraun og fever:
Alvaldan fodur born pin bidja
Ad blessa pig, pitt bus og nidja
:[: Til liknar pjodum pusund ar!
I it-.’/hit:
- -Tl.
�Plant thy firm foot on Iceland’s holy plain ;
We welcome thee, most noble-hearted King,
First of all Denmark’s monarchs dost thou deign
To visit our wild mountains, and to bring
The light of Liberty to our dear land:
We welcome thee, 0 King, with heart and hand.
0 Iceland’s father, go to bonder hill,
The Logberg, and thence gaze on all around:
The fire-wrought ramparts, waters blue and still
In the deep chasms, listen to the sound
Of leaping torrents, in the nation’s ear
They whisper «F r e e d o m hath her Altar here».
Ye hoary clefts of leeland’s hallowed ^Sne!
Ye mountains! and ye valleys, as of yore
Re-echo thro’ the land the voi^KKte
Of Freedom! ancRmM sound from shore to shor
For, to our nation still this spirit clings,
And welcomes theeflbeloH| best of kings.
And, tho’ a thousand years are passed since we
First found a dwelling in this Northern clime,
Our nation, ever sBggllng Bo ^^freek.
Hath battled bravely ’gainst the roll of Time';
And in thy coming, King, we hail the mwn
For Iceland, of a brighter happier morn.
May yet, 0 King, thy name a thousand years
Live with the goon conferred on us to-day!
So long as Hecla his proud summit rears,
And Geysir growls and scatters boiling spray,
May the Almighty Father shower down
His blessings on thee and on Denmark’s crown.
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Victorian Blogging
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A collection of digitised nineteenth-century pamphlets from Conway Hall Library & Archives. This includes the Conway Tracts, Moncure Conway's personal pamphlet library; the Morris Tracts, donated to the library by Miss Morris in 1904; the National Secular Society's pamphlet library and others. The Conway Tracts were bound with additional ephemera, such as lecture programmes and handwritten notes.<br /><br />Please note that these digitised pamphlets have been edited to maximise the accuracy of the OCR, ensuring they are text searchable. If you would like to view un-edited, full-colour versions of any of our pamphlets, please email librarian@conwayhall.org.uk.<br /><br /><span><img src="http://www.heritagefund.org.uk/sites/default/files/media/attachments/TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" width="238" height="91" alt="TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" /></span>
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Conway Hall Library & Archives
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2018
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Conway Hall Ethical Society
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Hymn of welcome, composed by Matthias Jochumsson in honour of Christian IX of Denmark and sung on the occasion of his visit to Thingvellir ... August 6th 1874
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Jochumsson, Matthias
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Place of publication: Reykjavik
Collation: 3 p. ; 22 cm.
Notes: From the library of Dr Moncure Conway. Printed by E. Thordarson, Reykjavik.
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[E. Thordarson, printer]
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[1874]
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G5569
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Hymns
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Browning, George (tr)
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<a href="http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/mark/1.0/"><img src="http://i.creativecommons.org/p/mark/1.0/88x31.png" alt="Public Domain Mark" /></a><span> </span><br /><span>This work (Hymn of welcome, composed by Matthias Jochumsson in honour of Christian IX of Denmark and sung on the occasion of his visit to Thingvellir ... August 6th 1874), identified by </span><a href="https://conwayhallcollections.omeka.net/items/show/www.conwayhall.org.uk"><span>Humanist Library and Archives</span></a><span>, is free of known copyright restrictions.</span>
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Icelandic
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Christian IX of Denmark
Conway Tracts
Denmark
Hymns
Iceland
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122
John Stuart Mill.
their interests are not fairly represented; that they are not
dealt with in a fair spirit of trust and forbearance; if they
be isolated and estranged by pride and neglect; or sought for
to be cajoled; or hardened by want of sympathy: then,
when . they awaken to the sense of their full power, they
may, in “bettering the example,” be “dangerous;”—but not
else !
Art.
V.—.John Stuart Mill.
Autobiography. By John Stuart Mill. London:
Longmans, Green, Reader, and Dyer. 1873.
rFHE present memoir which John Stuart Mill has bequeathed
J. to the world contains, not the narrative of a life, but the
growth of a mind. We find none of the smaller incidents and
details that make up the history of the individual, and which
readers commonly look for with a pardonable curiosity and
interest, greater or less in degree, according to the importance of
the place the author of the biography has filled in public estima
tion. It is not therefore surprising that those who had expected
a graphic picture of an entire career, intellectually remarkable,
should feel some disappointment, and conclude that the real
memoir has still to be written. Against any expectation of this
sort Mr. Mill in the first words of the autobiography has done
his utmost to guard. He wrote it, he tells us, not with any con
ception of self-importance, but because education is now a subject
of more profound study among us than at any former period of
our history, and the experiment, as it might well be called, of
which he is an example, may tend to economize the tasks of the
young, and save the many early years that are little better than
wasted; because it might interest and help those, who in an age
of transition are searchers for truth, to see how one engaged in
the same pursuit has profited by a readiness to learn and to un
learn in his forward course; and last, but not least, because he
desired to acknowledge the debt which he believed that in his
moral and intellectual development he owed to others.
. The absence of any minute record of passing events affecting
himself or the persons and objects immediately around him, can
not be regarded as a defect. It is obviously the very condition
under which the work is prepared. We see that the author
rigidly adheres to the purposes indicated. He does not permit
himself to be diverted by any matters, however interesting they
might have been to himself, but which he looks upon as valueless
�John Stuart Mill.
123
to the world. His evident design is, first to convey by the testi
mony of experience of no ordinary kind, a great lesson on the
extent of teaching or education that it is possible for the mature
mind to communicate to the immature; and again, on that neverceasing process of education which continues from youth to man
hood, and thence to the latest period of life, which it is the
business of every mind to gather for itself.
In order that this education should have its proper and benefi
cent influence on character, he shows that it must not simply
operate on the reasoning powers—that there is needed the culture
of the feelings as well as of the reason; that the work is moral
as well as intellectual. Having dwelt on the process for reaching
more perfectly that condition of mental equilibrium the best
suited for forming a right judgment of the result of conduct and
action, we learn the effect which his labour to attain, and his
progress toward that condition, had in confirming or modifying
his. earlier views of the great subjects affecting mankind,
sociological and economical principles, law, religion, and political
government.
Although it is difficult to assent to the judgment Mr. Mill
pronounces upon himself, that in powers of apprehension and
memory, and in activity and energy of character, he was rather
below than above par, yet it is impossible not to perceive from
the facts stated to what an incalculable degree he was indebted
to the early training of his father, which enabled him, as he says,
to start with the advantage of a quarter of a century over his
contemporaries.
James Mill must be regarded as one of the most remarkable
men of his own or any other age. Born without any of the
advantages of fortune, and educated by the aid of one of the
Barons of the Exchequer in Scotland, after whom he named
•his son, he went through the studies of the University of Edin
burgh, and was licensed for a preacher, but finding himself
unable to believe the Church doctrines, he left the profession.
Holding, and always fearlessly asserting, opinions both in politics
and religion more odious at that time to the influential and
wealthy of this country than they have been either before or
since, he maintained himself and his family by his work as a
tutor and an author. Amidst the perpetual interruptions of
settled labour, caused by this necessary struggle for existence,
added to the time employed in the education of his children, he
planned and in about ten years completed the “ History of India.”
In this work lie comments with great severity on many of the
acts of the East India Company in their government, and ex
presses unqualified hostility to their commercial privileges. A
book full of opinions and modes of judgment of a democratic
�124
John Stuart Mill.
radicalism, then regarded as extreme,—he might, as his son truly
observes, have expected it at some future period to win for him
reputation, but certainly not advancement. The Directors of the
East India Company, feeling a far deeper personal responsibility
in the exercise of their powers than perhaps can be expected from
the members of an executive government, whose attention is at
best divided between considerations of party exigency and
regard for the public good, perceived in the author of the History
the qualities of a public servant of inestimable value, and disre
garding his adverse criticisms, appointed him to an important
office in their establishment. It is an event rare in the dispen
sation of public patronage, and should be ever remembered to
their honour. The Autobiography contains very much relating
to the character and works of James Mill, which deserves
an attentive perusal, and there are few who will not agree in the
judgment, that his place w7as an eminent one in the literary and
political history of his country. He died in 1836. “ The
eighteenth century/’ Mr. Mill observes, “ was an age of strong
and brave men and he was a fit companion for its strongest and
bravest. The last of that century, as Brutus was called the last
of the Romans, he had continued its tone of thought and senti
ment into, without partaking of the reaction which was the
characteristic of, the first aste of the nineteenth.
It was the good fortune of Mr. Mill that his education from his
earliest years was conducted by such a teacher. The account of
the progress which he made is full of instruction for a people
now entering upon the work of National Education, and who are
almost everywhere treating the mere instruments of knowledge as
its substitute. While this Autobiography was in the press, an
address was delivered by one who has given as much
study to the subject of Education as any one living,
pointing out the utter insufficiency of an educational method which
assumes that the power to read will develop the love of reading—
the ability to understand and appreciate what is read, to choose
the worthy and reject the unworthy, elevate the taste, arm it
against temptation, and ennoble life !
* What is needed is the
training of the mind, “ to observe nature, animate and inanimate,
to watch and classify ordinary social arrangements, to. trace the rela
tion of cause and effect, to think of the consequences of different kinds
of actions, and to guide conduct accordingly; to forego immediate
enjoyment for the sake of greater good to oneself or others.” We
perceive in the Autobiography, how these, the true objects of
Education, were attained, the mechanical part being subordinated
* See “ Professor Hodgson’s Address as President of the Educational De
partment, Social Science Congress, Norwich,” (Transactions). 1873.
�John Stuart Mill.
125
and acquired almost unconsciously. Mr. Mill tells us that he had
no remembrance of the time when he began to learn Greek.
He had been told that it was when he was three years old. His
earliest recollection on the subject was that of committino- to
memory what his father termed vocables, being lists of common
Greek words, with their signification in English, which he wrote
out for him on cards. Of grammar, until some years later, he
learnt no more than the inflexions of the nouns and verbs, but
after a course of vocables, proceeded at once to translation :—
“ The only thing besides Greek, that I learnt as a lesson in this part
of my childhood was arithmetic : this also my father taught me ; it was
the task of the evenings, and I well remember its disagreeableness. But
the lessons were only a part of the daily instruction I received. Much
of it consisted in the books I read myself, and my father’s discourses
to me, chiefly during our walks. From 1810 to the end of 1813 we
were living in Newington Green, then an almost rustic neighbourhood.
My father’s health required considerable and constant exercise, and we
walked habitually before breakfast, generallv in the green lanes
towards Hornsey. In these walks I always accompanied him, and
with my earliest recollections of green fields and wild flowers is
mingled that of the account I gave him daily of what I had read ’the
day before. To the best of my remembrance this was a voluntary
rather than a prescribed exercise. I made notes on slips of paper while
reading, and from these in the morning walks, I told the story to him •
for the books were chiefly histories, of which I read in this manner a
great number : Robertson’s histories, Hume, Gibbon ; but my great
est delight, then, and for long afterwards, was Watson’s Philip the
Second and Third............ Next to Watson, my favourite histori
cal reading was ‘ Hooke’s History of Rome.’ Of Greece I had seen at
that time no regular history, except school abridgments and the last
two or three volumes of a translation of Rollin’s Ancient Historv,
beginning with Philip of Macedon. But I read with great delight
‘ Langhorne’s Translations of Plutarch.’ In English history, beyond
the time at which Hume leaves off, I remember reading ‘ Burnet’s
History of his Own Time,’ though I cared little for anything in it
except the wars and battles ; and the historical part of the ‘ Annual
Register,’ from the beginning to about 1788, where the volumes my
father borrowed for me from Mr. Bentham left off. I felt a lively in
terest in Frederick of Prussia during his difficulties, and in Paoli, the
Corsican patriot; but when I came to the American War, I took my
part, like a child as I was (until set right by my father) on the
wrong side, because it was called the English side. In these frequent
talks about the books I read, he used, as opportunity offered, to give
me explanations and ideas respecting civilization, governments
morality, mental cultivation, which he required me afterwards to re
state to him in my own words. He also made me read, and give him
a verbal account of many books which would not have interested me
sufficiently to induce me to read them of myself. Arnone others
‘ Millar’s Historical View of the English Government,’ a book of great
�126
John Stuart Mill.
merit for its time, and which he highly valued ; 1 Mosheim’s Ecclesias
tical History,’ ‘McCrie’s Life of John Knox,’ and even 1 Sewell and
Rutty’s Histories of the Quakers.’ . . . Two books which I never
wearied of reading were ‘Anson’s Voyages,’ so delightful to most
young persons, and a collection (Hawkesworth’s, I believe) of ‘ Voyages
round the World,’ in four volumes, beginning with Drake and ending
with Cooke and Bougainville. Of children’s books, any more than
playthings, I had scarcely any, except an occasional gift from a relation or
acquaintance ; among those I had, ‘ Robinson Crusoe’ was pre-eminent,
and continued to delight me through all my boyhood. ” It was no
part, however, of my father’s system to exclude books of amusement,
though he allowed them very sparingly.”
The Latin and Greek stories were carried on from his eighth
to his twelfth year. Among other authors he read much of
Cicero. His strongest predilection was for history, especially
ancient, and writing histories was throughout his boyhood a
voluntary exercise. A spontaneous attempt at a continuation
of Pope’s Iliad, led to a command of his father to continue
his attempts at English versification. Experimental Science,
especially Chemistry—not by actual experiment, but as treated
in scientific works—was also one of his greatest amusements. In
this course of instruction a method was adopted in which the
mind was actively employed without being overtaxed.
“ Most boys or youths who have had much knowledge drilled into
them have their mental capacities not strengthened, but overlaid by
it. They are crammed with mere facts, and with the opinions or
phrases of other people, and these are accepted as a substitute for the
power to form opinions of their own ; and thus the sons of eminent
fathers, who have spared no pains in their education, so often grow
up mere parroters of what they have learnt, incapable of using their
minds, except in the furrows traced for them. Mine, however, was
not an education of cram. My father never permitted anything which
I learnt to degenerate into a mere exercise of memory; he strove to
make the understanding not only go along with every step of the
teaching, but, if possible, precede it. Anything which could be found
out by thinking I never was told until I had exhausted my efforts to
find it out for myself.”
Once be had used the word idea, and his father instantly
asked what an idea was, and expressed displeasure at his in
effectual attempts to define the word. On another occasion, he
used an expression—still commonly repeated by not less than
nine out of ten of the so-called instructed classes—that some
thing was true in theory, but false in practice; provoking the
indignation of his father, who, after making him vainly strive to
define the word theory, explained its meaning, and showed him
the fallacy of the vulgar form of speech he had uttered. In and
after his twelfth year the objects of instruction were chiefly re-
�John Stuart Mill.
127
garded—not the aids and appliances of thought, but the thoughts
themselves. The reading of the scholastic logic, then begun, was
accompanied and followed by the numerous and searching ques
tions of his father in their daily walks.
“ It was his invariable practice, whatever studies he exacted from
me, to make me, as far as possible, understand and feel the utility of
them. ... I well remember how, and in what particular walk in
the neighbourhood of Bagshot Heath (where we were on a visit to
his old friend Mr. Wallace, then one of the mathematical professors
at Sandhurst), he first attempted, by questions, to make me think on
the subject, and frame some conception of what constituted the utility
of the syllogistic logic ; and when I had failed in this, to make me
understand it by explanation. The explanations did not make the
matter at all clear to me at the time; but they were not, therefore,
useless; they remained as a nucleus for my observations and reflec
tions to crystallize upon; the import of his general remarks being
interpreted to me, by the particular instances which came under my
notice afterwards. My own consciousness and experience ultimately
led me to appreciate, quite as highly as he did, the value of an early
practical familiarity with the school logic. I know of nothing, in my
education, to which I think myself more indebted for whatever
capacity of thinking I have attained. The first intellectual operation
in which I arrived at any proficiency was dissecting a bad argument,
and finding in what part the fallacy lay; and though whatever
capacity of this sort I attained, was due to the fact that it was
an intellectual exercise in which I was most perseveringly drilled by
my father; yet, it is also true, that the school logic and the mental
habits acquired in studying it, were among the principal instruments
of this drilling, I am persuaded that nothing, in modern education,
tends so much, when properly used, to form exact thinkers, who
attach a precise meaning to words and propositions, and are not im
posed on by vague, loose, or ambiguous terms. The boasted influence
of mathematical studies is nothing to it, for in mathematical processes
none of the real difficulties of correct ratiocination occur. It is also
a study peculiarly adapted to an early stage in the education of philo
sophical students, since it does not presuppose the slow process of
acquiring, by experience and reflection, valuable thoughts of their
own. They may become capable of disentangling the intricacies of
confused and self-contradictory thought, before their own thinking
faculties are much advanced; a power which, for want of some such,
discipline, many otherwise able men altogether lack; and when they
have to answer opponents, only endeavour, by such arguments as they
can command, to support the opposite conclusion, scarcely even at
tempting to confute the reasonings of their antagonists ; and, there
fore, at the utmost, leaving the question, as far as it depends on
argument, a balanced one.”
There was no author to whom James Mill had thought himself
more indebted for his own mental culture than Plato, or whom
�128
John Stuart Mill.
he more frequently recommended to young students ; and to
the value of this recommendation his pupil bears the like tes
timony. By the Socratic method, the man of vague generali
ties is constrained either to express his meaning to himself
in definite terms, or to confess that he does not know
what he is talking about.The perpetual testing of general
statements by particular instances, the siege in form laid
to abstract terms, the distinctions which limit and define
the thing sought, and separate it from the cognate objects,
Mr. Mill pronounces to be an education for precise thinking
which is inestimable, and one which, even at that early
age, took such hold of him as to become part of his own
mind.
High as the cultivation of the intellect stands, it is not that
alone that is needed for the creation of a better ideal of humanity.
In the parental intercourse there had been, if not a want of
tenderness, at least the absence of its display. His father,
Mr. Mill remarks, resembled most Englishmen in being ashamed
of the signs of feeling, and starving it by want of demonstration.
He found that intellectual culture required correction by joining
other kinds of cultivation with it. Poetry, art, music, to which
he had not before been unsusceptible, began at an early period
to fill a large place in his thoughts. In this part of his self
education he encountered, in his circle of friends, an opposite
theory. There were those who, if possessed of strong suscepti
bilities of temperament, yet found them more painful than
pleasurable—as standing rather in their way than the contrary ;
and who, therefore, regarded the pleasures to be derived from
the fine arts as impediments, rather than aids in the formation
of character.. Mr. Mill considered it too much a part of the
English habit, derived from social circumstances, to count the
sympathies for very little in the scheme of life,—to see little
good in cultivating the feelings, and none at all in doing so
through appeals to the imagination. He more than once adverts
to tnis side of English life—the absence of enlarged thoughts
and unselfish desires, the low and petty objects on which °the
faculties are, for the most part intent, and the habit of taking
for granted that they are always the motives of conduct; and
the effect of this, in lowering the tone of feeling, making people
less earnest, and causing them to look on the most elevated
objects as unpractical, or too remote from realization, to be more
than a vision or a theory.
Several incidents in the Autobiography are introduced to
show, the wholesome and vivifying power which the fancy and
imagination can exercise over the will. Between his eighth and
twelfth years he spent intervals of time at Ford Abbey, the occa-
�John Stuart Mill.
129
sional abode of Mr. Bentham, and he regarded these visits as
fruitful in his education. Elevation of sentiments in a people
are nourished by the large and free character of their habitations.
The mediaeval architecture and the spacious and lofty rooms of
Ford Abbey, so unlike the cramped externals of English middle
class life, gave the sentiment of a larger and freer existence. The
house and grounds in which it stood, secluded, umbrageous, and
full of the sound of falling’waters, were to him in themselves a
sort of poetic cultivation. Again, two or three years later, Sir
Samuel Bentham and his wife, whom he refers to as “u daughter
of Dr. Fordyce, and a woman of much knowledge and good
sense of the Edgeworth kind,” invited their brother’s young
friend and disciple to their residence in the South of France, at
the Chateau of Pompignan, on the heights overlooking the plain
of the Garonne between Montauban and Toulouse. He spent
nearly a year in this visit, accompanying his hosts in an excur
sion of some duration to the Pyrenees. This, his first introduc
tion to the highest order of mountain scenery, gave a colour to
his tastes through life. After adverting to the lectures on che
mistry, zoology, and logic which he attended in the winter at
Montpelier, he adds that the greatest, perhaps, of the many
advantages which he owed to this episode in his education was,
that of having breathed for a whole year the free and genial
atmosphere of continental life, though at that time he did not
estimate or consciously feel the advantage he was deriving It
was not until long afterwards that he learnt to appreciate the
general culture of the understanding, which results from the
habitual exercise of the feelings, and is thereby carried down
into the most uneducated classes of several countries on the Con
tinent in a degree rarely equalled in England.
The impulse and force given to the cultivation of new tastes
and sympathies, served to elevate the ideal of a noble and un
selfish life which his previous teaching had done much to form.
Of his earliest historic readings he says, “ the heroic defence of
the knights of Malta against the Turks, and of the revolted
provinces of the Netherlands against Spain, excited in me an
intense and lasting interest.” His father was fond of putting
into his hands books which exhibited men of energy and resource
in unusual circumstances, struggling against difficulties and over
coming them. The interest which in boyhood he had taken in
the wars and conquests of the Romans culminated in an engross
ing contemplation of the struggles between the patricians and
plebeians, and in his juvenile essays he vindicated the Agrarian
Laws, and upheld the Roman Democratic party. In his fifteenth
or sixteenth year, in 1821 or 1822, after bis visit to France, he
read the history of the French Revolution. Then, he says : —
[Vol. CI. No. CXCIX.l—New Seeies, Vol. XLV. No. I.
K
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John Stuart Mill.
“ I learnt with astonishment that the principles of democracy, then
apparently in so insignificant and hopeless a minority everywhere in
Europe, had borne all before them in France thirty years earlier, and
had been the creed of the nation. As may be supposed from this, I
had previously a very vague idea of that great commotion. I knew
only that the French had thrown off the absolute monarchy of Louis
XIV. and XV., had put the King and Queen to death, guillotined
many persons, one of whom was Lavoisier, and had ultimately fallen
under the despotism of Bonaparte. From this time, as was natural,
the subject took an immense hold of my feelings. It allied itself
with all my juvenile aspirations to the character of a democratic
champion. What had happened so lately, seemed as if it might easilv
happen again ; and the most transcendant glory I was capable of con
ceiving was that of figuring successful, or unsuccessful, as a Girondist
in an English Convention.”
This admiration of great and persistent effort in a worthy
cause, which with advancing years he came more and more to
regard as of incalculable value, in bringing the memory and
imagination to the aid of conduct, had been early rooted in his
mind.”
“ Long before I had enlarged in any considerable degree the basis
of my intellectual creed, I had obtained, in the natural course of my
mental progress, poetic culture of the most valuable kind, by means
of reverential admiration for the lives and • characters of heroic per
sons ; especially the heroes of philosophy: The same inspiring effect
which so many of the benefactors of mankind have left on record
that they had experienced from ‘Plutarch’s Lives,’ was produced on
me by ‘ Plato’s Picture of Socrates,’ and by some modern biographies,
above all by ‘ Condorcet’s Life of Turgot’—a book well calculated to
rouse the best sort of enthusiasm, since it contains one of the wisest
and noblest of lives, delineated by one of the wisest and noblest of
men. The heroic virtue of these glorious representatives of the
opinions with which I sympathized, deeply affected me, and I perpe
tually recurred to them as others do to a favourite poet, when needing
to be carried up into the more elevated regions of feelino- and
thought.”
"
°
It is interesting to trace the abiding influence of the remem
brance of great examples, and of the memories of an heroic
past, in the fact which Mr. Mill mentions, that upwards of thirty
years after the impressions, of which he speaks in the foregoing
extract, had taken root, the thought of completing and giving to
the world as a volume the “ Essay on Liberty,” first arose in
his mind, in mounting in 1865, the steps of the Capitol.
W e have described Mr. Mill in his youth, as a disciple of
Bentham, but this he does notappear thoroughly to have become
until, in 1821 or 1822, he read the Traite de Legislation, which
he terms an epoch in his life. The standard of “ the greatest
�John Stuart Mill.
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happiness/’ the exposure of the fallacy contained in such
sounding expressions, as “ law of nature,” “ right reason,” and
“ moral sense,” burst upon him with all the force of novelty. The
classification of offences and punishment under the guidance of the
ethical principle, of pleasurable and painful consequences, seemed
to place the moralist and student of jurisprudence upon an
eminence, from which he could survey a mental domain of vast
extent, affording the most aspiring prospects of practical
improvement in human affairs. It opened to him a grand
conception of the changes to be effected in the condition of
mankind through that doctrine. Before this time the book
which had contributed most largely to his education in the best
sense of the word, was his father’s History of India. In this
he was not alone. There are others living who acknowledge, as
he does, their debt to this work, and to its disquisitions on society
and civilization, on institutions, and acts of government, for a
multitude of new ideas, and for a great impulse and stimulus as
well as guidance in their future studies.
After the Traitfi de Legislation followed the reading of most of
the other works of Bentham; of Locke’s Essay, an abstract
was made, and discussed, and the other principal English writers
on mental philosophy were also read. In 1822 he wrote his first
argumentative essay, on the aristocratic prejudice which is
supposed to attribute to the rich, moral qualities superior to those
of the poor, and in the winter of the same year he gathered
together and formed a small society of young men called the
Utilitarian Society.
*
In 1823 his father obtained for him
an appointment in the office of Examiner of India Correspondence
in the service of the Company.
The constant occupation in the India House had the necessary
effect of abridging his opportunities of gratification afforded by
a country life, and by travel. The latter was now restricted to the
short annual holiday.
“ I passed (he says) most Sundays throughout the year in the
country, taking long rural walks on that day even when residing in
London. The month’s holiday was, for a few years, passed at my
father’s house in the country: afterwards a part or the whole was
spent in tours, chiefly pedestrian, with some one or more of the young
men who were my chosen companions ■ and at a later period, in
longer journeys or excursions, alone, or with other friends. France,
Belgium, or Rhenish Germany were within easy reach of the annual
holiday : and two longer absences, one of three, the other of six months,
under medical advice, added Switzerland, the Tyrol, and Italy to my
list. Fortunately, also, both these journeys occurred rather early, so
* A title borrowed from Gait’s “ Annals of the Parish.”
K 2
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John Stuart Mill.
as to give the benefit and charm of the remembrance to a large
portion of my life.”
In a chapter entitled “Youthful Propagandism,” we are told
of the efforts which were made to propagate the main tenets of
Utilitarian Radicalism in the columns of the Globe and Traveller,
the Morning Chronicle, and finally in the Westminster Review.
His part in the first appearance of this Review, had been that
of reading through all the volumes of the Edinburgh Review,
and making notes of the articles which he thought his father
would like to examine for the purpose of his intended paper.
This article, of James Mill, treated the Edinburgh Review as
the political organ of one of the two aristocratic parties constantly
endeavouring, without any essential sacrifice of aristocratical
predominance, to supplant each other. The Quarterly Review
was the subject of an article, as a sequel to that of the
Edinburgh. Mr. Mill was one of the most active of the very
small number of young men who, drawn around his father, had
imbibed from him a greater or smaller portion of his opinions,
and were supposed to form the so-called Bentham school in
philosophy and politics. The chief characteristics of their creed
were in politics, an almost unbounded confidence in the efficacy
of two things ; representative government and complete freedom
of discussion; and in psychology the formation of all human
character by circumstances, through the universal principle of
association, and the consequent unlimited possibility of improv
ing the moral and intellectual condition of mankind by
education. It was in the spirit of what Mr. Mill terms youthful
fanaticism that these opinions were seized by the little knot of
young men of whom he was one. For himself, he conceives that
the epithet of “ reasoning machine” was not altogether untrue,
or may be said to be as applicable to him as it could well be to
any one, for two or three years of his life :—
“ Ambition and desire of distinction I had in abundance, and zeal for
what I thought the good of mankind was my strongest sentiment,
mixing with and colouring all others. But my zeal was little else, at
that period of my life, than zeal for speculative opinions. It had not
its root in genuine benevolence, or sympathy with mankind, though
these qualities held their due place in my ethical standard. Nor was
it connected with any high enthusiasm for ideal nobleness. Yet of this
feeling I was imaginatively very susceptible : but there was at that time
an intermission of its natural aliment, poetical culture, while there was
a superabundance of the discipline antagonistic to it, that of mere logic
and analysis. Add to this, as already mentioned, my father’s teaching
led to the under-valuing of feeling. It was not that he was himself
cold-hearted or insensible; I believe it was rather from the contrary
quality; he thought that feeling could take care of itself; that
�John Stuart Mill.
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there was sure to be enough of it if actions were properlv cared
about.” ....
“ From this neglect both in theory and in practice of the cultivation
of feeling, naturally resulted, among other things, an undervaluing
of poetry, and of imagination generally, as an element of human
nature.” . . . . “As regards me (and the same thing might be said
of my father), the correct statement would be, not that I disliked
poetry, but that I was theoretically indifferent to it. I disliked any
sentiments in poetry which I should have disliked in prose, and that
included a great deal. And I was wholly blind to its place in human
culture, as a means of educating the feelings; but I was always per
sonally very susceptible to some kinds of it. In the most sectarian
period of my Benthanism, I happened to look into Pope’s Essay on
Man, and though every opinion in it was contrary to mine, I well re
member how powerfully it acted on my imagination.”
A time came when something more was felt to be needed.
The attainment of a condition of physical comfort alone, in which
the pleasures of life would no longer be kept up by struggle, and in
the midst of privation, could afford no sufficient hope of human
happiness. What had been founded in a large degree on the
intellectual and abstract conception of aggregate results, had to be
converted into an exercise of genuine benevolence, and sympathy
with individual distress and suffering. For the mere rational
conviction that such and such things were good and evil, and the
proper objects of praise and blame, reward and punishment, higher
and deeper motives were substituted. At the same time in ex
ternal things, a sense of vague and general admiration of grandeur
and beauty was concentrated and intensified by examples brought
into immediate contact with the mind and eye. The experiences of
the time led him to adopt a theory of life which, while admitting
that all rules of conduct must be tried by their tending to pro
mote happiness as the end of life, yet that end could not be
reached by its direct and sole pursuit, or by making it the princi
pal object of desire.
This has given occasion to a singular
criticism. “ He found,” say the objectors, “ that it was not a safe or
successful course to pursue happiness as a direct end, therefore,”
they add, “ it follows, that it is not the proper end and aim of life,
and the utilitarian principle fails !” This is a confusion of two
things entirely distinct from each other, the particular and the
general happiness, and the diverse methods of their pursuit.
Nothing in the theory that the happiness of the individual should
not be the direct end of his existence, would forbid the direct
pursuit of ordinary pleasures. He may attend the performance
of a play of Shakspeare, or listen to a composition of Mendelssohn,
set out on a spring day for a woodland walk, or ascend an
Alpine hill, with a direct view to the enjoyment which such a
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John Stuart Mill.
use of his time will produce. But if one passes his life in seeking
nothing else but his own direct and personal enjoyment, if he
does not look beyond this to a higher and nobler purpose of
existence—a purpose into which the idea of its bearing upon his
individual happiness does not enter, except as a sense of the
performance of duty in the promotion of the good of others,
which is attended with an unsought pleasure—the narrow objects
he has pursued will ultimately fail him, and the time will come
of decaying natural powers, and of blunted capacities for the
accustomed enjoyment. Breadth of affection is an element in
its durability. “ When people who are tolerably fortunate in
their outward lot do not find in life sufficient enjoyment to make
it valuable to them, the cause generally is, caring for nobody but
themselves. To those who have neither public nor private
affections, the excitements of life are much curtailed, and in any
case dwindle in value as the time approaches when all selfish
interests must be terminated by death; while those who leave
after them objects of personal affection, and especially those who
have also cultivated a fellow-feeling with the collective interests
of mankind, retain as lively an interest in life on the eve of death
as in the vigour of youth and health.”* “ I do not,” he said, in
concluding his address to the University of St. Andrews,
“ attempt to instigate you by the prospect of direct rewards,
either earthly or heavenly: the less we think about being re
warded in either way, the better for us. But there is one reward
which will not fail you, and which may be called disinterested,
because it is not a consequence, but is inherent in the very fact of
deserving it; the deeper and more varied interest you will feel in
life, which will give it tenfold its value, and a value •which will
last to the end. All merely personal objects grow less valuable
as we advance in life ; this not only endures but increases.”
He was also now led to give its proper place to internal culture,
as among the prime necessities of human well-being. We have
seen how much of the pleasure lie had before enjoyed had been
derived from the love of rural objects and natural scenery. He
now found in the poetry of Wordsworth, the expression not alone
of outward beauty, but of “ states of feeling, and of thought
coloured by feeling, under the excitement of beauty.”
“ In. them I seemed to draw from a source of inward joy, of sym
pathetic and imaginary pleasure, which could be shared in by all
human beings; whicli had no connexion with struggle or imperfection,
but would be made richer by every improvement in the physical or
social condition of mankind. From them I seemed to learn what
would be the perennial sources of happiness, when all the greater evils
* Utilitarianism.
Its Meaning, p. 20.
�John Stuart Mill.
135
of life shall have been removed. And I felt myself at once better
and happier as I came under their influence.” . . . . “ I needed
to be made to feel that there was real, permanent happiness in tranquil
contemplation. Wordsworth taught me this, not only without turn
ing away from, but with a greatly increased interest in the common
feelings and common destiny of human beings.”
This part of the Autobiography introduces the acquaintance
with Frederick Maurice and John Sterling, the former a disciple
of Coleridge, and the latter of Coleridge and Maurice, and both
were of use in his development. Nothing is more interesting
than the account Mr. Mill gives us of his intimacy with
them :—
“ With Sterling I soon became very intimate, and was more
attached to him'than I have ever been to any other man. He was
indeed one of the most loveable of men. His frank, cordial, affec
tionate, and expansive character ; a love of truth, alike conspi
cuous in the highest things and humblest; a generous and ardent
nature, which threw itself with impetuosity into the opinions it
adopted, but was as eager to do justice to the doctrines and the men
it was opposed to, as to make war on what it thought their errors ;
and an equal devotion to the two cardinal points of Liberty and Duty,
formed a combination of qualities as attractive to me, as to all others
who knew him as well as 1 did. With his open mind and heart, he
found no difficulty in joining hands with me across the gulf which as
yet divided our opinions. He told me how he and others had looked
upon me (from hearsay information) as a made or ‘ manufactured’
man, having had a certain impress of opinions stamped on me, which
I could only reproduce; and what a change took place in his feelings
when he found, in the discussion on Wordsworth and Byron, that
Wordsworth, and all that that name implies, ‘ belonged’ to me as
much as to him and his friends.”
From a brief view of the sources and method of Mr. Mill’s
education, and the primary effect it had on his mind and cha
racter, we pass to the opinions of his mature years, and then
to some of the results of those opinions upon his labours in
moral and political science, as well as in practical politics.
And first, on the subject of religion, the Autobiography sup
plies us with a less perfect account of the opinions of Mr. Mill
than it is understood we may expect from some hitherto unpub
lished essays which will be soon before the world. What is to
be collected from the work before us cannot, however, properly
be passed over in silence. The views of James Mill are clearly
stated.
My father had been early led to reject not only the belief in
Revelation, but the foundations of what is commonly called natural
religion. I have heard him say that the turning-point of his mind
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Joitn Stuart Mill.
on the subject was reading Butler’s Analogy. That work, of which
he always continued to speak with respect, kept him, as he said, for
some considerable time, a believer in the divine authority of Chris
tianity ; by proving to him that whatever are the difficulties in
believing that the Old and New Testaments proceed from, or record
the acts of, a perfectly wise and good being, the same and still greater
difficulties stand in the way of the belief, that a being of such a
character can have been the Maker of the Universe. He considered
Butler’s argument as conclusive against the only opponents for whom
it was intended. Those who admit an omnipotent as well as perfectly
just and benevolent maker and ruler of such a world as this, can say
little against Christianity but what can, with at least equal force, be
retorted against themselves. Finding, therefore, no halting place in
Deism, he remained in a state of perplexity, until, doubtless, after
many struggles, he yielded to the conviction that, concerning the
origin of things, nothing whatever can be known. .... These
particulars are important, because they show that my father’s rejec
tion of all that is called religious belief, was not, as many might sup
pose, primarily a matter of logic and evidence ; the grounds of it were
moral still more than intellectual. He found it impossible to believe
that a world so full of evil was the work of an Author combining
infinite power with perfect goodness and righteousness.”
While he impressed upon his son from the first that the man
ner in which the world came into existence was a subject on
which nothing was known—
“ He at the same time, took care that I should be acquainted with
what had been thought by mankind on these impenetrable problems.
I have mentioned at how early an age he made me a reader of ecclesi
astical history ; and he taught me to take the strongest interest in the
Reformation, as the great and decisive contest against priestly tyranny
for liberty of thought.”
In this negative state of opinion on religion which one of the
critics of the Autobiography gravely attributes to the want, on
the part of both father and son of a comprehension of the higher
mathematics, Mr. Mill grew up.
“ I looked (he says) upon the modern exactly as I did upon the
ancient religion, as something which in no way concerned me. It did
not seem to me more strange that English people should believe what
I did not, than that the men I read of in Herodotus should have done
so. History had made the variety of opinions among mankind a fact
familiar to me, and this was but a prolongation of that fact.”
Of unbelievers (so called) as well as of believers, Mr. Mill
observes, there are many species, including almost every variety of
moral type, many of the best of the former being more generally
religious in the best sense of the word, than those who exclusively
arrogate to themselves the title. They repudiate all dogmatism,
and especially dogmatic atheism, which they regard as absurd;
�John Stuart Mill.
137
but they deny that beings endowed with reasoning faculties
are justified in permitting themselves to receive as true the
character and acts commonly attributed to an Omnipotent
Author of all things, who created the human race with the
infallible foreknowledge, and therefore with the intention that
the great majority of them were to be consigned to terrible and
everlasting torment.
“Though they may think the proof incomplete that the universe is
a work of design, and they assuredly disbelieve that it can have an
Author and Governor who is absolute in power as well as perfect in
goodness, they have that which contributes the principal worth of all
religions whatever, an ideal conception of a Perfect Being, to which
they habitually refer as the guide of their conscience ; and this ideal
of good is usually far nearer to perfection than the objective Deity of
those who think themselves obliged to find absolute goodness in [one
whom they are taught to believe is] the author of a world so crowded
with suffering and so deformed with injustice as ours.”
In this aspect, the argument, however orthodox believers
are disposed to repudiate it, ought to be regarded even by
them according to its manifest design, as an effort to vindi
cate the Divine Ideal. It is the belief of those who thus argue
that a low and imperfect conception of the Being which is
adored, radically vitiates the standard of morals, and causes
fictitious excellences to be set up and substituted for genuine
virtues. It is true that—
“ Christians do not in general undergo the demoralizing consequences
which seem inherent in such a creed, in the manner, or to the extent
which might have been expected from it. The same slovenliness of
thought, and subjection of the reason to fears, wishes, and affections,
which enable them to accept a theory involving a contradiction in terms,
prevents them from perceiving the logical consequences of the theory.”
Another cause through which such consequences areavoided may
be found in the great counteracting principles that are embodied
in the Christian doctrine, and which teach forbearance, love of
others, and self-sacrifice.
These, the fundamental teachings of
Christianity, apart from dogma, few would appreciate better than
Mr. Mill. He found in them the corroboration of the doctrine
he advocated. “In the golden rule,” he says, “of Jesus of
Nazareth we read the complete spirit of the ethics of utility. To
do as you would be done by, to love your neighbour as yourself,
constitute the ideal perfection of utilitarian morality.”
Mr. Mill attributes one bad consequence to this part of his
education. In giving him an opinion contrary to that of the
world, his father thought it necessary to give it as one which
could not be prudently avowed to the world. This lesson of
keeping his thoughts to himself at that early age was attended
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John Stuart Mill.
with some disadvantages, though his limited intercourse with
strangers, especially such as were likely to speak to him on
religion, prevented him from being placed in the alternative
of avowal or hypocrisy. Looking at the present advance in the
liberty of discussion since the time of which he was speaking,
he thinks that few men of his father’s intellect and public spirit,
with such intensity of moral conviction, would now withhold his
opinions from the world, unless in cases, becoming fewer every
day, in which frankness would risk the loss of subsistence, or be
an exclusion from a sphere of usefulness to which the individual
was particularly suited. On religion—
“ The time appears to have come, when it is the duty of all, who
being qualified in point of knowledge, have on mature consideration
satisfied themselves that the current opinions are not only false but
hurtful, to make their dissent known; at least, if they are among
those whose station or reputation, gives their opinion a chance of
being attended to. Such an avowal would put an end, at once
and for ever, to the vulgar prejudice, that what is called, very
improperly, unbelief, is connected with any bad qualities either of
heart or mind. The world would be astonished if it knew how great
a proportion of its brightest ornaments—of those most distinguished
even in popular estimation for wisdom and virtue—are complete
sceptics in religion; many of them refraining from avowal, less from
personal considerations, than from a conscientious, though now in my
opinion a most mistaken apprehension, lest by speaking out what
would tend to weaken existing beliefs, and by consequence (as they
suppose) existing restraints, they should do harm instead of good.”
As years have passed on, the evidences of the truth of this
view of the progress of thought have multiplied. Mr. Mill
mentions the well-remembered collision of his friend Frederick
Maurice with orthodox opinion, and the penalty to which he
submitted rather than recognise a doctrine utterly inconsistent
with a Divine benevolence. Between himself and Sterling the
distance in opinion we find was always diminishing. Still later
the author of “Literature and Dogma,’1 setting out from a
starting-point as distant as the poles, and pursuing an entirely
different route, has sought like him to raise an ideal conception
of a true Divine Guide. What is the object of that moral and
intellectual culture which Mr. Mill has laboured to prove the
most suitable for mankind, other than that ihev should be taught
to know, “the best that has been thought and said in the
world ?” In what does the Ideal of Perfection, to which
he refers as the best guide of the human conscience, differ
from that “ Enduring Power, not ourselves, which makes for
righteousness ?”
Turning to philosophy let us see what was the especial object
�John Stuart Mill.
139
which Mr. Mill had in view in his examination of that of Sir
William Hamilton. And here the first thing that strikes the
reader is, that even in his most abstract works, those apparently
of a nature purely speculative, and falling within the region of
metaphysics, he had chiefly, if not wholly, in view a great and
practical end. He did not seek merely to establish a barren
theory of remote application, but to assert a truth which to the
extent to which it was accepted and influenced conduct, might
have a practical result in the consideration of the conditions of
human existence. It was nothing less than this which led him
to attack the foundation of a system, that theoretically denies
the effect of the conditions of existence upon the moral as
well as the intellectual state of society, and thus goes far
to discourage and cripple real efforts for improvement.
“ The difference between these two schools of philosophy, that of
Intuition and that of Experience and Association, is not a mere
matter of abstract speculation; it is full of practical consequences,
and lies at the foundation of all the greatest differences of practical
opinion in an age of progress. The practical reformer has continually
to demand that changes be made in things which are supported by
powerful and widely-spread feelings, or to question the apparent
necessity and indefeasibleness of established facts ; and it is often an
indispensable part of his agreement to show, how those powerful
feelings had their origin, and how those facts came to seem necessary
and indefeasible. There is therefore a natural hostility between
him and a philosophy which discourages the explanation of feelings
and moral facts, by circumstances and associations, and prefers to treat
them as ultimate elements of human nature ; a philosophy which
is addicted to holding up favourite doctrines as intuitive truths, and
deems intuition to be the voice of Nature and of God, speaking with
an authority higher than that of reason. In particular, I have long
felt that the prevailing tendency to regard all the marked distinctions
of human character as innate, and in the main indelible, and to ignore
the irresistible proofs that by far the greater part of those differences,
whether between individuals, races, or sexes, are such as not only
might, but naturally could be produced by differences in circumstances,
is one of the chief hindrances to the rational treatment of great social
questions, and one of the greatest stumbling blocks to human
improvement. My father’s Analysis of the Mind, my own Logic,
and Professor Bain’s great Treatise, had attempted to re-introduce a
better mode of philosophizing, latterly with quite as much success as
could be expected; but I had for some time felt that the mere
contrast of the two philosophies was not enough, that there ought to
be a hand-to-hand fight between them, that controversial as well as
expository writings were needed, and that the time was come when
such controversy would be useful.”
The treatise on Liberty Mr. Mill regards as likely to sur
vive longer than anything else he has written, with the possible
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John Stuart Mill.
exception of the Logic. It stood pre-eminent in his estimation,
not only from its intrinsic importance, but as the last and most
elaborate result of the joint labours of himself and his wife, and
consecrated to her memory. None of his other writings was
either so carefully composed or sedulously corrected. “ After it
had been written as usual twice over, we kept it by us, bringing
it out from time to time, and going through it de novo, reading,
weighing, and criticising every sentence.”
The joint revision, which was to have been the work of the
winter of 1858-9, was frustrated by Mrs. Milks death. Its pub
lication was his first undertaking after that event. It is, he
says, the text-book of a single truth—the importance to man
and society of a large variety in types of character, and of giving
full freedom to human nature to expand itself in innumerable
and conflicting directions. A danger was that the growth of social
equality, and of a submission to public opinion, should impose
on mankind an oppressive yoke of uniformity in opinion and
practice. The doctrine of Individuality, the right and duty of
self-development, asserted by insulated thinkers from age to age,
worked out in the labours of Pestalozzi, and having among its
promulgators Wilhelm von Humboldt, Goethe, De Tocqueville,
and others less known but not less ardent in its cause, was with
modifications and differences of detail embodied in this work.
It was, moreover, in direct conflict with Positivism. Agreeing
with Comte that from the necessity of the case, the mass of man
kind, even including their rulers, must accept many of their
opinions on political and social matters, as they do on physical,
from the authority of those who have made those subjects their
especial study ; that Europe during the Middle Ages had greatly
profited by the distinct organization of the spiritual power, and
the moral and intellectual ascendancy once exercised by priests
would naturally pass into the hands of philosophers, he yet repu
diated with his utmost energy the conclusion that a corporate
hierarchy should be formed of the latter. He could not see in
such a body any bulwark against oppression, or security for good
government. The “Systeme de Politique Positive” he regarded
as the most complete system of spiritual and temporal despotism
which had ever emanated from the human brain, except possibly
that of Ignatius Loyola. “ The book stands a monumental
warning to thinkers on society and politics, of what happens
when once men lose sight in these speculations, of the value of
Liberty and Individuality.” The Essay on Liberty has recently
been the subject of an able and appreciative article by Mr. John
*
Morley, to which we may refer our readers.
* Fortnightly Review, August, 1873, pp. 234-256.
�John Stuart Mill.
Ill
On Political Economy, especially in the distinction between
the laws of the production and distribution of wealth, Mr. Mill’s
later views were a material modification of his earlier ones. The
capacity to learn and unlearn, which he regards as essential to
real progress, one of his reviewers describes as a constant state
of vacillation, and an absence of any firm standing ground. Mr.
Mill had no fear of such reproaches. In the days of his most
extreme Benthamism he tells us that he had seen little further
than the old school of political economists, into the possibilities
of fundamental improvement in social arrangements. He sub
sequently became less indulgent to ordinary social opinion, and
less willing to be content with secondary and more superficial
improvements. Any diminution of the evil involved in the fact
that while some are born to riches, the vast majority inherit
nothing but poverty—except such amelioration as might result
from a voluntary restraint on the numbers of the latter—had
before appeared chimerical. While still repudiating the tyranny
of the society over the individual which most Socialistic systems
involve, he came to look forward to a time when the division of
the produce of labour will depend less on the accident of birth,
and it will be more common for all to labour strenuously
to procure benefits that shall not be exclusively their own, but
shall be shared by the society of which they are members. The
capacity of all classes to learn by practice to combine and labour
for public and social purposes, and not solely for narrowly inte
rested ones, had always existed, and was not hindered by any
essential difficulty in the constitution of our nature. Why should
it be more difficult to persuade a man to dig or weave for his
country than to fight for it ? In the gradual formation of such
opinions, and their publication in the second and third editions
of the Principles of Political Economy, we must not pass over
the share which Mr. Mill attributes to his wife. No one who
knew him will feel surprise at the place which her memory fills
in the Autobiography. Few narratives appeal more powerfully
to every mind sensitive to human affections than the story of
their partnership of thought, of feeling, concurrent labour, and
entire existence ; and in truth there seem to have been qualities
existing in each which made their association with one another
eminently valuable. One happily possessed that which the other
needed. The chapter on Political Economy which Mr. Mill
believes has had the most influence on opinion,—that on “ The
Probable Future of the Labouring Classes,” he informs us is entirely
due to his wife. She pointed out the need of such a chapter,
and the imperfection of the book without it. It certainly
deals with that part of the subject in which the reflections of
an acute woman, conversant with the social necessities of the
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John Stuart Mill.
people around her, would be likely to be of great value. Tho
roughly sensible of the folly of premature attempts to dispense
with the inducements of private interest in social affairs, they
welcomed all experiments, such as co-operative societies, which
whether they succeeded or failed, would be an education for
those who took part in them, by cultivating their capacity for
acting upon motives pointing directly to a more general good.
Speaking of this work, he says :—
“ It was chiefly her influence that gave to the book that general tone
by which it is distinguished from all previous expositions of political
economy that had any pretensions to being scientific, and which has
made it so useful in conciliating scientific minds which those previous
expositions had repelled. This tone consisted chiefly in making the
proper distinction between the laws of the production of wealth, which
are real laws of nature, dependent on the properties of objects, and the
modes of its distribution, which, subject to certain conditions, depend
on human will. The common run of political economists confuse these
together, under the designation of economic laws, which they deem
incapable of being defeated or modified by human effort ■ ascribing the
same necessity to things dependent on the unchangeable conditions of
our earthly existence, and to those which, being but the necessary con
sequences of particulai' social arrangements, are merely co-extensive
with these: given certain institutions and customs, wages, profits, and
rent will be determined by certain causes ; but this class of political
economists drop the indispensable presupposition, and argue that these
causes must, by one inherent necessity, against which no human means
can avail, determine the shares which fall, in the division of the pro
duce, to labourers, capitalists, and landlords. The ‘ Principles of
Political Economy’ yielded to none of its predecessors in aiming at the
scientific appreciation of the action of these causes, under the conditions
which they presuppose; but it set the example of not treating those
conditions as final. The economic generalizations which depend, not on
necessities of nature, but on those combined with the existing arrange
ments of society, it deals with only as provisional, and as liable to be
much altered by the progress of social improvement.”
An observation is often made that Mr. Mill was not a practical
politician. Indeed, his more virulent detractors have not shrunk
from attributing to him an “ utter incapacity to grapple with
practical legislation or the real business of life.” The ground of
this conclusion is not very difficult to discover. It arises from a
radical difference in the sense of duty. To those who measure
the value of the business of life, and the practical character of those
who undertake it, by the immediate prospect of success, by the
probability of their acquiring some personal distinction or profit,
in fact, by the question whether the work is likely “ to pay,”
Mr. Mill’s labours will naturally appear mistaken and absurd.
We can fancy the supreme contempt with which such critics
�John Stuart Mill.
113
must have read in the Autobiography, “the idea, that the
use of my being in Parliament was to do work which others were
not able or not willing to do, made me think it my duty to come
to the front in defence of advanced Liberalism, on occasions when
the obloquy to be encountered was such as most of the advanced
Liberals in the House preferred not to incur.” Mr. Mill was one
of those who are dissatisfied with human life as it is, and whose
feelings are wholly identified with its radical amendment. With
such there are two main regions of thought, one that of ultimate
aims, the constituent elements of the highest realizable ideal of
human life; the other that of the immediately useful and
practically attainable. Some test of the value of these criticisms
may be found by selecting one or two of the principal subjects
within the domain of politics, to which a portion of the labours
of Mr. Mill have been directed. For this purpose let us take,
first, the general question of Government, in the aspect in which
it is presented to modern inquirers ; and secondly, the legislation
affecting the proprietorship or occupation of land.
First, on government, Mr. Mill thought that in his father's
“Essay on Government,” the premises were too narrow, and
included but few of the general truths on what, in politics, the
important consequences depend. He was dissatisfied with the
answer to the criticisms of Macaulay, and thought a better reply
would have been, “I was not writing a scientific treatise on
politics, but an argument for Parliamentary reform.” His pro
gress in logical analysis subsequently helped him to a different
conception of philosophical method as applicable to politics, of
the pedantry of adopting and promulgating asystematized political
creed. He acquired a conviction that the true system of political
philosophy was something much more complicated and manysided than he had previously had any idea of, and that its object
was to supply, not a set of model institutions, but principles from
which the institutions suitable to any given circumstances might
be deduced. This train of thought produced a clearer conception
than he had ever before had of the peculiarities of an era of
transition in opinion, and he ceased to mistake the moral and
intellectual characteristics of such an era for the normal attributes
of humanity. He looked forward to a period of unchecked
liberty of thought, and unbounded freedom of individual action
in all modes not hurtful to others, combining the best qualities
of the critical with the best qualities of the organic times.
A complete view of his most matured opinions on the subject
will be found in the Considerations on Representative Govern
ment. The problem stated is the combination of complete
popular control over public affairs, with the greatest attainable
perfection of skilled agency. James Mill, as well as his son,
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John Stuart Mill.
were in comparison with others who hold democratic opinions,
comparatively indifferent to monarchical or republican
forms; and, in this work, the existence of a constitutional
monarchy—with an hereditary king—is considered, as in many
cases, a favourable condition for the attainment of good govern
ment. He may, by his position, have an interest in raising
and improving the mass, under circumstances such as those
which make up a great part of the history of the English Par
liament. In other cases where none, or only some fraction of
the people feels a degree of interest in affairs of State necessary
to the formation of a public opinion, and the suffrage is only
used by the electors to serve their private interest, or that of
the locality, or of particular persons, of whom they are adhe
rents or dependents, the selfish and sordid factions of which
the assembly is likely to be composed, if struggling for the Pre
sidency or chief place in the Government, would, as in the case
of Spanish America, keep the country in a state of chronic revo
lution and civil war. A despotism of illegal violence would be
exercised by a succession of political adventurers, and represen
tation would have no effect but that of preventing that stability
of government by which some of the evils of a legal des
potism are mitigated. In such a case, the struggle for place—
under an hereditary king—would be far less mischievous. The
tranquillity of Brazil, as compared with that of the other parts
of the South American continent, is an illustration of this argu
ment. In our own government, Parliament virtually decides
who shall be Prime Minister, or who shall be the two or three
individuals from whom the Prime Minister shall be chosen,
without nominating him, but leaving the appointment of the
head of the administration to the Crown, in conformity with the
general inclinations which the Parliament has manifested. This
initiative method, in the formation of the executive government,
seemed to Mr. Mill to stand on as good a footing as possible. In
this conclusion he will have the sympathy of most of the English
people, who will not readily be persuaded that the periodical
election of a President would be an improvement in Govern
ment.
The evil effect produced on the mind of any holders of power,
whether an individual or an assembly, by the consciousness of
having only themselves to consult, was the consideration which
appeared to him of the greatest weight in favour of a second
chamber. Without it the majority in a single assembly, might
easily become overweening and despotic. It was this which
induced the Romans to have two Consuls. In every polity there
should be a centre of resistance to the predominant power. If
any people, possessing a democratic representation, are, from
�John Stuart Mill.
145
their historical antecedents, more willing to tolerate such a centre
of resistance in the form of a second Chamber or House of
Lords than in any other shape, this constitutes a strong reason
for so constructing it. It did not, however, appear to him
the best or most efficacious shape. Of such a body, the con
struction of the Roman Senate seemed to be the best example.
He suggests how a chamber of statesmen might be formed of
the heads of the Courts of Law ; those who had been Cabinet
Ministers ; the more distinguished chiefs in the Army and Navy ;
the diplomatic servants of long-standing; governors of colonies
and dependencies. In England it was highly improbable, from
its historical antecedents, that any second chamber could possibly
exist which is not built on the foundation of the House of
Lords; but there might be no insuperable difficulty in adding
the classes mentioned, to the existing body, in the character of
peers for life.
It is in the constitution of the Representative Assembly that
his hopes of good Government depend, and he devotes a chapter
to the consideration of its infirmities and dangers. The greatest
among these is the delivery over of the management of public
affairs to the representatives of a numerical majority alone, and the
placing of all the unrepresented classes at their mercy. It is as
possible, and as likely, for this numerical majority, being the
ruling power of a democracy, to be as much under the dominion
of sectional or class interests, or supposed interests, as any other
ruling power. The constituencies to which most of the highly
educated and public-spirited persons in the country belong—those
of the large towns—are in great part either unrepresented or mis
represented. This had been thought irremediable, and from
despairing of a cure, people had gone on for the most part to
deny the disease. An attempt to obtain a somewhat more true
representation, proposed by Earl Russell in one of the Reform
Bills, met with no support. The late Mr. Marshall subsequently
suggested the method of the cumulative vote, to rescue at least
some portion of a constituency from the tyranny of the numerical
majority. This system is now tolerably well understood from the
experience of the school board elections, and consists in enabling
the electors of every constituency, having more than one represen
tative, not only to give, as before, one vote to each person to be
chosen, but, instead of that, to give all their votes to one, or dis
tribute them as they please among the candidates. The effect of
this system may be made clearly intelligible in a few words, which
will show also its infirmities, as a vehicle for bringing into the
elected body any complete expression or representation of the
individual thought or study of the members of a large community.
Thus suppose 100 persons are about to elect a committee of 4 to
[Vol. CI. No. CXCIX.J—New Series, Vol. XLV. No. I.
L
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John Stuart Mill.
settle some business which concerns them, and that 21 out of the
100 place their confidence in A, while 51 prefer B, C, D, and
E, as those through whom their interests will be better secured.
Under the old system, the latter might have elected the whole
committee ; and not only the 21 desiring to be represented by A,
but as many as 28 others might have been excluded from any
voice in their deliberations.
With the cumulative system,
every voter may give his 4 votes to any one or more candidates,
and thus 21 persons may give their single candidate 84 votes;
the other 79 persons cannot altogether poll more than 316 votes,
one of their candidates at least must, therefore, be left with no
more than 79 votes, and the election of the candidate of the
united 21 is thus secured. It will be thus seen that though it is
a great improvement on the exclusive majority system, it yet re
quires that the holders of opinions differing from the majority
shall combine and adhere rigidly together in voting for the same
person in order that their success may be certain. If one or two
of the 21 had failed to poll for their candidate, the efforts of all
the rest of the 21 might be thrown away; or the 79, not
submitting to direction, may, if there were more candidates than
5, have less representatives than they are entitled to by their
numbers. Meetings, verbal and written communications, and the
guidance of party leaders are necessary ; and every sort of mani
pulation may thus be brought to bear. If the voter does not
approve of the candidates presented to his constituency, he is
helpless ; and if he does, he cannot, without placing himself in
the hands of the party leaders or agents, be certain that his
vote will have any effect.
The method of popular election, which has since been known
under the various appellations of the Minority, Personal, Propor
tional, and Preferential, system, had been put forward in a crude
form in 1857, and in its matured shape in 1859.t This
*
system effected the object that Mr. Mill had thought desir
able as an antidote to the exclusive representation, and there
fore exclusive rule of local majorities, and was at the same
time subject to none of the infirmities and inconveniences of the
cumulative system, inasmuch as it enabled every single elector,
while he exercised the most extensive choice practicable, to give
an independent vote, with the certainty that it will not be thrown
away. The scheme was made known to Mr. Mill in 1859, after
the publication of his “Thoughts on Parliamentary Reform,” and it
immediately obtained his assent and adoption. After a careful
* “ The Machinery of Representation.” Maxwell, 1857.
j- “A Treatise on the Election of Representatives, Parliamentary and
Municipal.” Longmans, 1859.
�John Stuart Mill.
147
examination of the proposed plan, in a letter suggesting an
*
alteration in a matter of detail, he said that it appeared to him
“ to have exactly, and for the first time, solved the difficulty of
popular representation, and by so doing to have raised up the
cloud of gloom and uncertainty that hung over the futurity of
representative government, and therefore of civilization?’ In a
conversation on the subject which took place a few weeks after
wards Mr. Mill expressed his belief and expectation that the idea
of such an improvement as was proposed would soon have a pro
minent place in the minds of statesmen and reformers ; and those
who were present have not forgotten that almost his first inquiry
was, whether the plan had been brought to the attention of
Mr. Gladstone. “ Had I met with the system,” Mr. Mill says,
in his Autobiography, “ before the publication of my pamphlet,
I should have given an account of it there. Not having done
so, I wrote an article in Fraser’s Magazine, reprinted in my
miscellaneous writings, principally for that purpose. In his
“ Considerations on Representative Government,” he devotes the
greater part of a chapter to this subject.t After explaining the
mode in which the votes would be given and counted, and re
ferring to Mr. Fawcett’s pamphlet on the system, he explains its
immediate result, that all parties sufficiently numerous to be en
titled to be represented would be sure of being so ; that the re
presentation would be real and not merely nominal, or what is
called “ virtualthat the tie between the elector and represen
tative would commonly have a strength, value, and permanence
now unknown ; that while localities would secure adequate atten
tion, general andnational interestswould be paramount; that every
person in the nation honourably distinguished among his country
men would have a fair chance of election, and with such
encouragement such persons might be expected to offer them
selves in numbers hitherto undreamt of; that when the electors
were no longer reduced to Hobson’s choice, the majorities would
be compelled to look out and put forward men of higher calibre,
and their leaders could no longer foist upon the people the
first person who presents himself with the catchword of the party
in his mouth, and three or four thousand pounds in his pocket;
that it would correct the tendency of representative government
towards collective mediocrity; that though the representatives of
the majorities would be the most in number, they must speak
and vote in the presence and subject to the criticism of their
opponents, and before the public.
* March 3, 1859.
f Chapter vii. “True and Talse Democracy i Representation of All, and
Representation of the Majority only.”
L2
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John Stuart Mill.
11 The multitude have often a true instinct for distinguishing an able
man when he has the means of displaying his ability in a fair field
before them. If such a man fails to obtain any portion whatever of his
just weight, it is through institutions or usages which keep him out of
sight. In the old democracies there were no means of keeping out of
sight any able man : the bema was open to him ; he needed nobody’s
consent to become a public adviser. It is not so in a representative
government; and the best friends of representative democracy can
hardly be without misgivings that the Themistocles or Demosthenes
whose counsels would have saved the nation, might be unable during
his whole life to obtain a seat. But if his presence in the represen
tative assembly can be insured, or even a few of the first minds in the
country, though the remainder consists only of average minds, the
influence of these leading spirits is sure to make itself sensibly felt in
the general deliberations, even though they be known to be in many
respects opposed to the tone of popular opinion and feeling.............
This portion of the assembly would also be the appropriate organ of a
great social function, for which there is no provision in any existing
democracy, but which in no government can remain permanently un
fulfilled without condemning that government to infallible degeneracy
and decay. This may be called the function of Antagonism. In every
government there is some power stronger than all the rest; and the
power which is strongest tends perpetually to become the sole power.
Partly by intention, and partly unconsciously, it is ever striving to
make all other things bend to itself, and is not content while there is
anything which makes permanent head against it, any influence not in
agreement with its spirit. Yet, if it succeeds in suppressing all rival
influences, and moulding everything after its own model, improvement
in that country is at an end, and decline commences. Human im
provement is a product of many factors, and no power ever yet consti
tuted among mankind includes them all; even the most beneficent
pow’er only contains in itself some of the requisites of good, and the
remainder, if progress is to continue, must be derived from some other
source. No community has ever long continued progressive, but while
a conflict was going on between the strongest power in the community
and some rival power: between the spiritual and temporal authorities;
the military or territorial and the industrious classes ; the king and the
people; the orthodox and religious reformers. When the victory on
either side was so complete as to put an end to the strife, and no other
conflict took its place, first stagnation followed, and then decay. The
ascendancy of the numerical majority is less unjust, and on the whole
less mischievous, than many others, but it is attended with the very
same kind of dangers, and even more certainly ; for when the govern
ment is in the hands of one or a few, the many are always existent as
a rival power, which may not be strong enough ever to control the
other, but whose opinion and sentiment are a moral, and even a social,
support to all who, either from conviction or contrariety of interest,
are opposed to any of the tendencies of the ruling authority. But
when the democracy is supreme, there is no one or few strong enough
for dissentient opinions and injured or menaced interests to lean upon.
�John Stuart Mill.
149
The great difficulty of democratic government has hitherto seemed to
be, how to provide in a democratic society what circumstances have
provided hitherto in all the societies which have maintained themselves
ahead of others—a social support, a point d’appui, for individual
resistance to the tendencies of the ruling power ; a protection, a rallying
point, for opinions and interests which the ascendant public opinion
views with disfavour. For want of such a point d'appui, the older
societies, and all but a few modern ones, either fell into dissolution or
became stationary (which means slow deterioration) through the exclu
sive predominance of a part only of the conditions of social and mental
well-being.
11 Now, this great want the system of personal representation is fitted
to supply, in the most perfect manner which the circumstances of
modern society admit of. ... . The representatives who would be
returned to Parliament by the aggregate of minorities, would afford that
organ in its greatest perfection. A separate organization of the instructed
classes would, if practicable, be invidious, and could only escape from being
offensive by being totally without influence. But if the elite of these
classes formed part of the Parliament, by the same title as any other of its
members—by representing the same numberof citizens,the same numeri
cal fraction of the national will—their presence could give umbrage to
nobody, while they would be in the position of highest vantage, both for
making their opinions and counsels heard on all important subjects,
and for taking an active part in public business. Their abilities would
probably draw to them more than their numerical share of the actual
administration of government; as the Athenians did not confide re
sponsible public functions to Cleon or Hyperbolus (the employment
of Cleon at Pylos and Amphipolis was purely exceptional), but Nicias,
and Theramenes, and Alcibiades, were in constant employment both
at home and abroad, though known to sympathize more with oligarchy
than with democracy. The instructed minority would, in the actual
voting, count only for their numbers, but as a moral power they would
count for much more, in virtue of their knowledge, and of the influence
it would give them over the rest. An arrangement better adapted
to keep popular opinion within reason and justice, and to guard it
from the various deteriorating influences which assail the weak side
of democracy, could scarcely by human ingenuity be devised. A de
mocratic people would in this way be provided with what in any
othei’ way it would almost certainly miss—leaders of a higher grade
of intellect and character than itself. Modern democracy would have
its occasional Pericles, and its habitual group of superior and guiding
minds.”*
Subsequently in Parliament, in moving, as an amendment to
Mr. Disraeli’s Reform Bill, the introduction of clauses for the
distribution of seats according to the proportional system, Mr.
Mill brought it forward in an expository and argumentative
* “ Considerations on Representative Government.”
3rd edit. p. 148-152.
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John Stuart Mill.
speech * The House was, however, as might be expected, un
prepared for its consideration. The debate is not, however,
uninteresting, as much perhaps for what was not, as for what
was, said. Mr. Mill, in his Autobiography, adds on this sub
ject : —
“ I was active in support of the very imperfect substitute for that
plan, which in a small number of constituencies, Parliament was
induced to adopt. This poor makeshift had scarcely any recommen
dation, except that it was a partial recognition of the evil which it
did so little to remedy. As such, however, it was attacked by the
same fallacies, and required to be defended on the same principles,
as a really good measure; and its adoption in a few parliamentary
elections, as well as the subsequent introduction of what is called the
Cumulative Vote in the elections for the London School Board, have
had the good effect of converting the equal claim of all electors to a
proportional share in the representation, from a subject of merely
speculative discussion, into a question of practical politics, much
sooner than would otherwise have been the case.”
The view which Mr. Mill took of the absolute need of this
change in the method of creating representative bodies, is in no
small degree justified by the attention which it has since received
in our ownf and in nearly every other country where free institu
tions exist.£ Its fundamental principle is, in fact, a corollary of
that oi Individuality. It puts forward in a practical shape the
necessity of freedom for individual action. It liberates every
voter from the condition of being an instrument of those around
him, and enables him to bring all he knows and feels,—his matures!
judgment, to his aid in the choice of the man in whose hands he
would place power. We know that there are many who are
ignorant or stupid, and to whom this discretion would be of little
use. It is enough to say that they would be no worse off than
they now are, and could do far less harm in corrupting and
degrading the constituency of which they are a part. On the
other hand, there are large numbers whose intelligence and
public spirit ought not to be wasted and lost to the nation. A
careful observer of the English mind and manners, and one who
certainly takes no optimist view of the present or future condi
tions of society, in his latest publication, remarks that “no nation
in the world possesses anything like so large a class of intelli* “Hansard’s Parliamentary Debates,” 30 May, 1867, vol. clxxxvii. pp.
1343-1362.
t See “ The Debate on Mr. Morrison’s Bill—Hansard’s Parliamentary De
bates,” vol. ccxii. pp. 890-926
+ “ The Election of Representatives, Parliamentary and Municipal.” A
Treatise. By Thomas Hare. 4th edit. Appendices A to 0, pp. 292-380.
See also on the Empirical Character of the Three-cornered Constituency
Clause, and the Cumulative Vote.—Ibid. pp. 16-19. Longmans, 1873.
�John Stuart Mill.
151
gent, independent, and vigorous-minded men in all ranks of life,
who seriously devote themselves to public affairs, and take the
deepest possible interest in the national success and well-being
while he truly adds that, “the character of our public men is
the sheet-anchor on which our institutions depend. So long as
political life is the chosen occupation of wise and honourable
men, who are above jobs and petty personal views, the defects
of Parliamentary Government may be endured ; but if the per
sonal character of English politicians should ever be seriously
lowered, it is difficult not to feel that the present state of the
constitution would give bad and unscrupulous men a power for
evil hardly equalled in any other part of the world.”* The
safeguard surely is to place it distinctly and certainly in the
power of every intelligent and vigorous-minded elector to give a
vote which shall secure the return of a wise and honourable man.
Secondly, on the Land Laws. A pamphlet, entitled “England
and Ireland,” published before the season of 1868, after an argu
ment to show the undesirableness, for Ireland as well as for
England, of separation, contained a proposal for settling the
land question by giving to the tenants a permanent tenure, at a
fixed rent, to be assessed after due inquiry by the State :—
“If no measure short of that which I proposed would do full jus
tice to Ireland, or afford a prospect of conciliating the mass of the
Irish people, the duty of proposing it was imperative; while if, on
the other hand, there was any intermediate course which had a claim
to a trial, I well knew that to propose something which would be
called extreme, was the true way not to impede, but to facilitate a
more moderate experiment. It is most improbable that a measure
conceding so much to the tenantry as Mr. Gladstone’s Irish Land
Bill, would have been proposed by a Government, or could have been
carried through Parliament, unless the British public had been led to
perceive that a case might be made, and perhaps a party formed, for
a measure considerably stronger. It is the character of the British
people, or at least of the higher and middle classes who pass muster
for the British people, that to induce them to approve of any change,
it is necessary they should look on it as a middle course : they think
every proposal extreme and violent unless they hear of some other
proposal going still further, upon which their antipathy to extreme
views may discharge itself. So it proved in the present instance;
my proposal was condemned, but any scheme for Irish Land Reform,
short of ruin, came to be thought moderate by comparison. I may
observe that the attacks made on my plan usually gave a very incor
rect idea of its nature. It was usually discussed as a proposal that
the State should buy up the land and become the universal landlord;
though, in fact, it only offered to each individual landlord this as an
* “ Parliamentary Government.” By James Eitzjames Stephen, Q.C. Con
temporary Review, Dec. 1873, p. 3.
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John Stuart Mill.
alternative, if he liked better to sell his estate than to retain it on
the new conditions ; and I fully anticipated that most landlords would
continue to prefer the position of landowners to that of Government
annuitants, and would retain their existing relation to their tenants,
often on more indulgent terms than the full rents on which the com
pensation to be given them by Government would have been based.”
With regard to the English land system, Mr. Mill says that
the criticisms of the St. Simonians had some effect in showing
the very limited and temporary value of the old political economy,
which assumes all the rules affecting private property and
inheritance as indefeasible facts, and the abolition of entails and
primogeniture—the freedom of production and exchange, as the
dernier mot of social improvement. The question here, as in
other subjects, was the way in which all practicable ameliorations
could be justly and wisely aided, by the promulgation of
sound principles and adopting the means best suited to lead
to their application. Asserting emphatically the value of
private property as the root of industry, the ultimate object
appeared to be that of uniting the greatest individual liberty
of action with a wide diffusion and accessibility of the owner
ship of land—the raw material of the globe. With this view
Mr. Mill took the chief part in framing the programme of the
Land Tenure Reform Association, to which he gave his name and
cordial support. We find in this programme the result of a
careful study both of what he thought desirable, and what he
deemed at once possible—the distant ideal, and the course to be
immediately taken towards its accomplishment, or to bring us
nearer to a better condition of things. It contains all that is
comprehended in the words “free land” as recently interpreted,
but it does not stop there. Concurring with those who believe
that merely opening the ownership of land to competition in the
money market, however valuable it may be in one of the aspects
of economical improvement, would do but very little towards
placing it under the control of the workman or giving him a
direct interest in it; he regarded it as an indispensable condition
that some part of the land of the kingdom should be placed
within the reach of the industrious labourer, so as to be attainable
in the shape of property of reasonable duration. The programme
of the Association consists of ten articles. The earlier clauses
contain the old tenets of the “free land” reformers. We will
take the clauses in their inverse order, the last seven being
especially the work of Mr. Mill. A prominent object, we find, is
the mental culture of the classes which have the least opportunity
for such improvement, by encouraging and fostering their tastes
for rural scenery, for history, and art. The things to which he
felt himself so greatly indebted—the love of nature and of
�John Stuart Mill.
153
beauty, and the cultivation of the power of recalling in the
imagination what is memorable and great in former ages, he
would bring home to all, as things not to be forgotten in the
daily struggles for material results. The programme (X.) claims
the preservation of all natural objects or artificial constructions
attached to the soil, of historical, scientific, or artistic interest;
that (IX.) the less fertile lands, and especially those within reach
of populous districts, should be retained in a state of wild
natural beauty, for the general enjoyment of the community, and
the encouragement in all classes of healthful rural tastes, and
of the higher order of pleasures. The next clauses deal with
land already belonging to the public, or dedicated to permanent
uses, not of a private character. They ask (VIII.) that land of
which Parliament alone can authorize the inclosure shall be
retained for national uses, compensation being made for manorial
and common rights; that (VII.) lands belonging to the crown,
to public bodies, or charitable and other endowments, be made
available to be let for co-operative agriculture, and to small
cultivators, as well as for the improvement of the dwellings
of the labouring classes; and no such lands to be suffered (unless
in pursuance of those ends, or for exceptional reasons) to pass
into private hands. To protect such lands from alienation to
private uses, which is rapidly taking place ; to obviate all legal
impediments to a voluntary dedication of land to public objects,
and to secure their prudent and productive administration under
skilled district agents of local appointment, exercising their
powers without partiality to any class, Mr. Mill approved the
action of the Association in the preparation and introduction
of the “Public Lands and Commons Bill/’ of 1872 His view of
*
endowments it is known differed materially from that of Turgot.
It forms the subject of the first article in his “Dissertations and
Discussions/
Notwithstanding, he observes, the reverence due
to that illustrious name, it is now allowable to regard his opinion
of that subject as the prejudice of the age. Mankind are
dependent for the removal of their ignorance and defect of
culture, mainly on the unremitting exertions of the more
instructed and cultivated, to awaken a consciousness of this
want, and to facilitate the means of supplying it. “ The
instruments for the work are not merely schools and col
leges, but every means by which the people can be reached,
either through their intellect or their sensibilities, from
* See “ Hansard’s Parliamentary Debates,” vol. ccxii. p. 583. (Erroneously
printed as “ Commons’ Protection, &c., Bill ”) 3 July, 1572.
t “The Kight and Wrong of Stale Interference with Corporation and
Church Property.” Published in The Jurist for May, 1833.
�154
John Stuart Mill.
preaching and popular writing, to national galleries, theatres,
and public games. Here is a wide field of usefulness open to
foundations.”
His article on this subject, first published in 1833, shadowed
forth the policy which has now, in spite of the opposition of
bodies and persons interested in retaining local patronage, and
influence arising from the power of dealing with estates, and
selecting beneficiaries, been partially adopted by the Govern
ment and Parliament. The only point as to which Mr. Mill’s
opinions had undergone a change was on the question of the
utility of endowments being held in the shape of land. In the
essay referred to, he spoke of the evils of allowing land to pass
into mortmain—adding that trustees ought to have no concern
with the money, except applying it to its purposes. Their time
and attention should not be divided between their proper busi
ness and the management of landed estates. He now felt that
the only objections to the application of the produce of land to
the uses of endowments would be obviated altogether by sepa
rating the management of the property from the administration
of its income. If the management were placed under competent
local agents, having charge of large districts, responsible alike to
the public and the several institutions, and always accessible to
the offers of cultivators and tenants of all classes, vast tracts of
land in the country, and extensive areas covered with houses in
cities and towns, would be opened to co-operative associations
and others, whom the prejudices of private owners, in favour of
fewer or more wealthy occupiers, might exclude. The Bill therefore
proposed to repeal the mortmain Act of George II., which pre
vents land only from being devoted to charitable uses, leaving
all other property to be so disposed of. It is not surprising that
the House ■was unprepared for such a measure. It is only
after repeated agitation that it is likely to succeed; but such
tentative proceedings are obviously the practical course. A
reform bill was introduced many successive years before it passed.
It will, some day, probably be thought wrnrth while to appoint a
committee or commission to examine the subject. It will be
found that nothing could be more moderate or just than the
proposed measure : it secured the interests of the objects of the
trust, and left the trustees unencumbered with alien duties, and
at liberty to employ their undivided attention exclusively to the
business of making the best use of the fund.
*
The great im* This subject is discussed in a Paper read at the Social Science Associa
tion, on the 27th Jan. 1873—“On Lands held by Corporations, and on the
Policy either of their Alienation or of Providing for their Management with
regard to the Public Utility.”
�John Stuart Mill.
155
pediment in the way of measures such as these, is the fact that
almost every constituency contains a few persons, forming a
compact body of much influence, whose importance in the loca
lity may be lessened by the withdrawal of public property from
their control. Mr. Fitzjames Stephen, in the article before
referred to, points out the power of a small knot of persons in a
constituency to turn the balance against any candidate who
has the courage to take an independent view differing from
*
them.
The two next articles of the Land Tenure Programme (V. VI.)
are for the encouragement of co-operative agriculture and the
tenancies of small cultivators. Of the remaining clause (IV.),
proceeding from Mr. Mill, the claim of the State to intercept
by taxation the unearned increase in the rent of land, it is un
necessary here to say much. It has, perhaps, been subjected to
more adverse criticism than any other part of the programme;
but it exhibits the elaborate care with which, in any great
change, he endeavoured to guard existing interests. All who
have read or heard the explanation which Mr. Mill has repeat
edly given of this suggestion know well that not the value of
one farthing, of any realized or existing property, would be taken
thereby from any proprietor. To characterize the proposal,
therefore—as has been done recently—as one involving the
virtual confiscation of the estates of the great landowners, and
whereby, as regards the present, most landed proprietors would
be reduced to ruin, is a gross misrepresentation.
So much space has been occupied in thus attempting to
convey a just idea of the vast field over which Mr. Mill’s labours
have extended, and upon which his autobiography, is full of
interest and instruction, that a multitude of subjects must still
remain untouched. Of his work on the Subjection of Women,
and in the cause of extending to them the political franchise,
we need not speak. They have been more or less discussed
in most houses and families.
In December, 1859, appeared “A Few Words on Non-Inter
vention,”! in which he pointed out the situation of Great Britain,
“ as an independent nation, apprehending no aggressive designs,
and entertaining none, seeking no benefits at the expense of
others, stipulating for no commercial advantages, and opening
its ports to all the world; yet, finding itself held up to obloquy
as. the type of egotism and selfishness, and as a nation which
thinks of nothing but outwitting and outgeneralling its neigh* Contemporary Review, December, 1873, pp. 6, 7.
f Fraser’s Magazine, vol. lx., p. 766.
�156
John Stuart Mill.
hours. This was the continental estimate of English policy.
What was the cause of this ? First, was it not our common
mode of argument for or against any interference in foreign
matters, that we do not interfere in this or that subject ‘ because
no English interest is involved ?’ Secondly, how is the impres
sion against us fostered by our acts ? Take the Suez Canal—a
project which, if realized, would give a facility to commerce, a
stimulus to production, an encouragement to intercourse, and
therefore to civilization, which would entitle it to high rank
among the industrial improvements of modern times. Assume
the hypothesis that the English nation saw in this great benefit
to the world a danger, a damage to some peculiar interest of
England—such as, for example, that shortening the road would
facilitate the access of foreign navies to its Oriental possessions,
that the success of the project would do more harm than good
to England—unreasonable as the supposition is. Is there any
morality, Christian or secular, which would bear out a nation in
keeping all the rest of mankind out of some great advantage,
because the consequence of their obtaining it may be, to itself,
in some imaginable contingency, a cause of inconvenience ? If
so, what ground of complaint has the nation who asserts this
claim, if in return the human race determines to be its enemies ?
In the conduct of our foreign affairs in this matter, England had
been made to appear as a nation which, when it thought its own
good and that of other nations incompatible, was willing to pre
vent others even from realizing' an advantage which we ourselves
are to share.” The subsequent history of the Suez Canal has
proved the errors of English diplomacy here pointed out. The
remainder of the article on the few and rare cases—if any—in
which interference in the domestic affairs of one nation by
another is permissible, has probably not been, and will not be,
without its influence in the subsequent and future history of the
world.
Mr. Mill’s sympathy with the downtrodden and oppressed,
whether as slaves, while there still existed a slave power in
America, or in the condition of their emancipated brethren in
Jamaica, is well known. He saw from the first, as many
clear-sighted persons in our country did—though perhaps they
formed a minority—that the Civil War in America “ was an
aggressive enterprise of the slave owners, under the combined
influences of pecuniary interest, domineering temper, and the
fanaticism of a class for its class privileges—to extend the terri
tory of slavery.” A passage in his article on “ The Contest in
America,”*
justifyingthe determined course taken by the North, is
* Fraser’s Magazine, Jan. 1862.
�John Stuart Mill.
157
worth quoting as an emphatic rejection of a misplaced feeling of
humanitarianism—a feeling which in a fitting case no one would
have respected more than he. He says : —“I cannot join with those
who cry Peace, Peace. I cannot wish it should be terminated
on any conditions but such as would retain the whole of the
territories as free soil. War in a good cause is not the greatest
evil which a nation can suffer. War is an ugly thing, but not
the ugliest of things; the decayed and degraded state of moral
and patriotic feeling which thinks nothing 'worth a war is
worse.”
There are some who say they find in this Autobiography evi
dence of self-sufficiency and self-glorification, and that it is
defaced by egotism ' Such charges appear amazing, not only to
those who remember Mr. Mill's entire freedom from self-asser
tion, and readiness to attribute to others even the merit of works
or suggestions proceeding from himself, but to the readers of the
Autobiography, who find throughout instances of the same selfabnegation. He is only bold and uncompromising in the asser
tion of what he deems right. Instead of egotism, he is, at other
times, charged with sentimentality and weakness in ascribing
such praise to others. One distinct proof of the absence of any
thought of self-sufficiency or egotism is found in a passage in the
Autobiography which hasprobably no parallel inanyother personal
memoir : “ Whoever,” he says, either now or hereafter, may
think of me, and of the work I have done, must never forget
that it is the product, not of one intellect and conscience, but of
three.” It is a painful example of the low pitch to which lite
rary criticism may at this day sink, to read a comment on it such
as this: “All touches of natural affection have been sedulously
kept under or suppressed ; his brothers and sisters are only men
tioned as annoyances or checks to progress.”* So far from
* The tone of complacent triumph with which the author of an Article in
Fraser’s Magazine, for Dec. 1873, acquaints his readers of the “rapid change
of the public mind concerning Mr. Mill,” and of the “ startling collapse of his
reputation which has happened,” since, as he says, Mr. Mill’s admirers met the
“mildest protest” against his fame with “clamour and abuse,” might provoke
a smile. He has probably reiterated this announcement so many times that at
length he fancies himself “the public,” as the three tailors in Tooley Street
styled themselves, “ We, the people of England.” It will, however, be a
somewhat curious chapter in the literary annals of the day, if he should inform
his readers in some future paper when and whence this “ mildest ” of protests
issued, and who were the “audacious” delinquents who tried, and how, to
put down discussion. Was it put down because the answer was so complete
that nothing was left to be said ? At present, however, those who listen to
every breath relating to the venerated object of their regard, have heard only
of one unjust attempt to cast reproach on a pure and honourable life, which,
when indignantly challenged, was found to be utterly unsupported by even the
pretence of evidence. It cannot, however, but be regretted that a periodical
�158
John Stuart Mill.
his brothers and sisters being mentioned as hindrances, Mr. Mill
tells us expressly that, from the discipline involved in teaching
them, which after his eighth year his father required, he derived
the great advantage of learning more thoroughly, and retaining
more lastingly, the things which he was set to teach. The
insinuation that natural feeling was wanting, leads us to borrow
a passage from the current number of the Workman’s Magazine
(p. 385): “ It was our good fortune,” says the writer, “ to know
Mr. Mill in early life. One of our class-fellows at University
College was James Bentham Mill, a younger brother of John,
and we (the younger ones) soon became very intimate friends.
Strong mutual sympathies led to interchanges of visits during
the long vacations and after we had left the college, so that we
had frequent opportunities of seeing and conversing with the
elder brother in his pretty cottage home at Mickleham, where
the whole family spent all the summer months for several years.
. . . John Stuart Mill was, of course, then unknown to fame,
but we well remember the impression he made on us by his
domestic qualities, the affectionate playfulness of his character
as a brother in the company of his sisters, and of the numerous
younger branches of the family.”
Without further noticing comments such as that which has led
us to introduce this reminiscence, it seems strange, as a corre
spondent of the Spectator touchingly remarks, “ to hear accused
of heartlessness and coldness in his affections the man over whose
grave a chorus of friends has just been pouring the strains of
sorrowing love and gratitude, to hear of the ‘ meagre nature,’
‘ the want of homely hopes,’ £ the monotonous joylessness ’ of him
whose delight in nature and in music, whose knowledge of flowers,
whose love of birds, whose hearty happiness in country walks,
with friends, whose long genial talks with those friends, have
been so variously and beautifully delineated.”
We are able to add to that chorus another strain issuing from
the voices of some who, a few years ago, visited him in his
southern home, and there learnt his genial powers of participa
tion and sympathy with various and dissimilar tastes. Mr. Mill’s
fondnessfor natural studies and appreciation of historic associations
had taken him much through Provence and Languedoc, parts
of which they visited with him. None failed to be struck
with the uncommon degree of affection and reverence with
which he and his step-daughter were met in their neighso high in character as Fraser's Magazine should have admitted into its columns
an Article that, first misrepresenting Mr. Mill, both as respects his words and
works, then proceeds to draw unfounded inferences from them, which nothing
but a prurient imagination could have suggested.
�John Stzuirt Mill.
159
bourhood, and journeying with them was made doubly plea
sant from their cordial and warm reception by those to whom
they were known. Mr. Mill’s conversation carried all vividly
back to the Roman and mediaeval days, of which the ruins in the
country round Avignon reminded him. Under his guidance
every spot became replete with interest: “ One day we traversed
the hills above Vaucluse'”—we copy from the journal of one to
whom Mr. Mill was before unknown—“over the mountains, among
the wildest stony paths, through gorges, over dwarf box, lavender,
thyme, cistus, rosemary, fragrant as it was crushed under our
feet, botanizing, talking, till finally we descended, as the day
closed, to Petrarch’s fountain. Whether visiting the flourishing
town of Carpentras, or ascending Mont Ventoux, he directed
attention to a multitude of interesting objects, taking himself
the most laborious part and exhibiting no symptom of fatigue/’
“ Apart from the charm of his converse,” writes another, “ there
was the unceasing kindness with which he pointed out to one the
rarer flowers, to another the geological formation, and again the
peculiar construction of the several ancient remains; and all saw
and felt his delight at having brought them to the summit of the
hill, on which stands the excavated and almost deserted town and
castle of Les Baux, at a moment ■when they could behold the
beauties of the lovely light of sunset shedding its glory over the
valley of the Rhone.”
“ The life of one,” says the writer we have quoted, “ who lives
and strives in opposition to the ideas of his age, will scarcely be
expected to be a very bright and cheerful one ; but it is noble in
stead, and many a one will feel that for such nobleness he would
exchange all that the world calls pleasant.” We have gathered
enough from Mr. Mill’s works, and the testimony of others, to
show that a career of unselfish devotion to the highest object on
which man can be employed—the welfare of his fellow creatures
—is consistent with every rational enjoyment of life, while it
incalculably increases the capacity to enjoy it.
�
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John Stuart Mill
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Hare, Thomas [1806-1891]
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Place of publication: [London]
Collation: p. 122-159 ; 22 cm.
Notes: A review essay of Mill's Autobiography, London: Longman, Green, Reader, and Dyer. 1873. The attribution of reviewer and name of journal from Virginia Clark's catalogue. Includes bibliographical references. From the library of Dr Moncure Conway. From Westminster Review 45 (January 1874).
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Autobiographies
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John Stuart Mill
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175
CT 52/
Art. VII.—Lamarck.
]. Philosophie Zoologique. 2 vols. Paris: 1809.
2. Histoire Naturelle des Animaux sans Vertèbres.
Paris: 1816—1822.
7 vols.
rpHE reception which Lamarck’s writings have met with in
[
this country has been somewhat peculiar. The views con
tained in his work, the “ Philosophie Zoologique,” were strongly
opposed to the opinions on theology and philosophy generally
prevailing here at the time of its publication, and the work was
in consequence for some fifty years attacked or ridiculed by
nearly every author who noticed it. After the publication of
Mr. Darwin’s work on the Origin of Species, theories of evolution,
from being denounced as irreligious, or ridiculed as fantastic,
came into favour with a large and influential number of scientific
men ; some who had been loudest in condemning Lamarck being
as forward in supporting Darwin. Lamarck’s position was, how
ever, little improved by the change. The opponents of Dar
winism often directed their blows against Lamarck, but its adhe
rents seldom cared to defend him, but rather passed over his
speculations as unimportant or erroneous. They naturally did
not wish to have their own views confounded with those of one
who had been so frequently attacked. It is true that Lamarck
can have no claim to be considered as even foreshadowing Mr.
Darwin’s theories on Natural Selection, atavism (the recur
rence to the form of a remote ancestor), cross-breeding, or many
other principles adduced to explain the origin of the animals
now existing. Yet, on the other hand, Lamarck must be con
sidered as the first great naturalist who believed and endeavoured
to prove that all animals now living are descended from those
previously existing, however different the forms of the two may
be. While Cuvier and most of the naturalists and geologists of
his times were continually inventing cataclysms, convulsions,
and separate creations, to account for the actual condition of the
globe and the races which inhabit it, Lamarck steadfastly refused
to believe in any such general catastrophe, and ascribed the for
mation both of modern species and the features presented by the
earth’s crust to the continuous and slow operation of the natural
agents which he saw still working. By slight modifications, and in
conformity with a regular law of progress, highly organized beings
had, he declared, been moulded and developed out of the simplest
forms. The laws which Lamarck laid down, the causes to which
he referred these changes and modifications, were real and active ;
�176
Lamarck.
and, although he may have exaggerated their importance and
power of producing the results he attributed to them, yet this is
an error which he shares with nearly every great discoverer.
Not only is every one tempted to overrate the importance and
sphere of operation of a principle first discovered by himself, but
unless principles were overrated there would be but little chance
of the real importance of many of them being recognised. It is
frequently only by endeavouring to explain every phenomenon
by a single cause that phenomena not to be so explained are
investigated, and that the existence of other causes becomes ap
parent ; so that errors in our conception of the nature of the
cause first known are detected.
But Lamarck’s merit is not confined to his early perception of
the uniformity and gradual upward progress of nature. He first
arranged the animal kingdom in two great branches, one com
prising annulate animals, or those whose bodies are divided
into segments, such as insects, worms, prawns, and the like; and
the other branch comprising polyps, mollusks, and vertebrate
animals, which last he believed to be derived from the mollusks.
With proper allowance for the great advance of our knowledge of
the lower forms of animals made since the days of Lamarck,
this arrangement is substantially the same as that adopted by
Professor Huxley, in his treatises on “ Comparative Anatomy,”
London: 1864; and “Classification,” ibid. 1869; with, how
ever, some important exceptions. In these works the ver
tebrates stand by themselves, instead of being placed in the
molluscous branch. The theory that vertebrates are descended
from mollusks had, however, even before the publication
of the last work, been advanced by Haeckel, in Germany, in
consequence of the researches of the Russian naturalist,
Kowalevsky, which showed a great resemblance to exist between
vertebrates and ascidians in the early stages of their develop
ment. These last are a family of animals' of low organization,
which were at first classed with polyps, but afterwards placed by
Lamarck in a class intermediate between the latter and the
mollusks with bivalve shells.
Lamarck himself, however,
looked for forms intermediate between mollusks and vertebrates
in.a much more highly organized order, the naked-gilled sea
slugs.
In geology, although Lamarck’s views are often extremely
speculative, yet he always insisted on the continuous nature of
geological changes, and attributed the present forms of hill and
valley to the continual wearing action of rain and atmospheric
changes, a theory which, in a modified form, finds advocates
among many of the ablest living geologists. Physics and
meteorology were treated by him with even greater boldness
�Lamarck.
177
and industry, although but little success. He seems to have
believed in an atomic theory, but to have been led by the old
doctrines of phlogiston and caloric to indulge in many rash
speculations on the nature and effects of those imponderable fluids,
by the action of which he, like most physicists and chemists
of that time, endeavoured to explain the phenomena presented
by heat, electricity, and the other natural forces. He built on
the theories of chemistry in vogue when he began his scientific
studies, and persistently refused to recognise the merit of the
admirable reasoning and researches of Lavoisier and his followers.
In Botany, Lamarck’s works are numerous, and were, when
published, of considerable value. The first scientific work he
published was the “ Flore Française
in it he altogether
abandoned the prevailing system of Linnæus, and established
another equally artificial, but which, by the principle of dual or
dichotomous division, led more quickly to the determination of
the species and genus of any particular plant. This system,
which is said to have been created in six months, was in its turn
abandoned by its author, who afterwards adopted the views of
Jussieu, the founder of the Natural System of botany, by whom
the later additions of the “ Flore Française” were brought out,
either alone or in conjunction with Lamarck. The other
botanical works of Lamarck consist chiefly in descriptions of
genera and species. (See the “Dictionnaire de Botanique,” and
the “ Illustration des Genres,” both parts of the “ Encyclopédie
Méthodique”), in which he seems to have displayed some of the
ability he afterwards showed in the “Histoire Naturelle des
Animaux sans Vertèbres.”
It is this last work, and that on the fossil shells found in the
beds round Paris, that have chiefly kept alive the reputation of
Lamarck. His great contemporary, Cuvier, considers the de
termination of the genera and species in these works as his
great and peculiar merit, and affects to pity him for being led
to the conclusion that, after all, these genera and species were
but artificial creations useful to systematists, but not existing
in nature. (Eloges iii. 199.) It is certainly impossible not to
admire Lamarck when we consider that the publication of
this great and laborious work was only begun when he had
already reached his seventieth year; and that he was in his
fiftieth year when he began the study of the invertebrata,
which he undertook, not because he was particularly attracted
by it, but because, as the last appointed in the Cabinet du
Roi, he had, on its reconstruction, to content himself with
the subject least pleasing to his colleagues. When once he
had entered upon it he pursued it with unflagging energy
in spite of old age and failing sight.
Always ready to
[Vol. CII. No. CCI.]—New Series, Vol. XLVI. No. I.
N
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Lamarck.
improve and modify his theories and classifications, he con
tinued, year after year, to introduce such new groups and
divisions as were suggested by the researches of Cuvier, or other
anatomists, while he laboured by studying the forms preserved
on the various museums to subdivide these groups into natural
families and genera ; and at the same time he constantly struck
out more distinct and bolder theories on the general nature of
living beings. The same indomitable resolution and calm
courage which made him, at seventeen, abandon his prospects
in the church, and set out to join the French army ; which made
him, immediately after his arrival (when the death of all the
officers around him had placed him in command), refuse to re
treat from the post assigned to him on the battle-field until he had
received the order from his general ; which afterwards led him
a second time to abandon his career, and endeavour, in a humble
position to gain the means for a medical education, sustained
him in the penury and blindness which were the lot of his old
age. If the same qualities have sometimes led him to too
daring flights of imagination, or too great confidence in the cor
rectness of his own views, or if they7 have given an air almost of
arrogance to his statements, we must remember that without
them Lamarck would never have accomplished his splendid
achievements in science.
It is but a small part of his voluminous writings that we now
propose to examine. The discussion of the details of the cha
racters of families and genera which he founded is unsuited for
these pages. His divisions and distributions have lost much of
their value. It is of the essence of such arrangements that they
should, by increasing our knowledge of the forms comprised in
them, serve as a foundation on which to build yet better distri
butions, by which after a time they are superseded. The enormous
number of new forms which have been recognised, and the great
advance in our knowledge of anatomy made in consequence of
the improved microscopes and means of observation at our dis
posal, have rendered Lamarck’s divisions inadequate to represent
the animals and plants of which he treated as we now know them ;
and a critical examination of his system would be interesting
only to persons studying the forms described in Lamarck’s writ
ings. On biology, however, Lamarck has written much which
must always be interesting to students of the history of science
as a part of human progress, and is perhaps particularly so at
present. He was one of the first to recognise the importance of
studying biology as a whole, which he speaks of in his “ Histoire
Naturelle” (vol. i. p. 49), as “une science particulière qui n’est
encore fondée, qui n’a pas même de nom, dont j’ai proposé
quelques bases dans ma Philosophie Zoologique, et à laquelle je
�Lamarck.
179
donnerai le nom de Biologie.” His views on this subject were
first published in two volumes—one published in 1797, under
the title of “ Mémoires de Physique et ¿’Histoire Naturelle;”
and the other published in 1802, under the title of “ Recherches
sur ^Organisation des Corps Vivans." They were afterwards
much expanded and developed in his £i Philosophie Zoologique,”
published in 1809, which he refers to as a new edition of the
££ Recherches,” and in the introduction, forming the greatest
portion of the first volume of the ££ Histoire Naturelle des Ani
maux sans Vertèbres,” published in 1815. It is to these two last
works that we shall refer.
Like other evolutionists Lamarck considers that living beings
for several series, the different individuals composing which, vary
insensibly one from another, so that all divisions—such as
classes, orders, and genera, and even species—are products not
of nature, but of art. The best of such divisions have artificial
limits, and none are really isolated, although from our ignorance
of the connecting forms they may appear so to us ; but if all races
of living beings were known to us, all our present classes, orders,
and genera would be merely families of different sizes, and it would
be very difficult to assign limits to these divisions. So far there
fore art is an essential element in the construction even of a
natural system. But besides this necessary use of convention,
many systematic distributions (such as the systems of Linnæus in
Botany, of Fabricius in Entomology, and the distribution of
Birds and Fishes in Lamarck’s own time), are entirely arti
ficial, and not in conformity with nature, whose order is single,
unique, and essentially without division in each organic
kingdom.
Lamarck might have mentioned his own classification of plants
as one of the most striking instances of an artificial distribution.
He does not define an artificial distribution, nor does he explain
what he means by conformity to nature. Several of his expressions
convey the idea that he inclined to the views of Bonnet and the
Greek philosophers, who believed in a single, uninterrupted chain
of beings. These views, however, he in the ££ Histoire Naturelle”
(vol. i. p. 129), when pressed by Cuvier, distinctly disavows. In
fact, he does not seem to have considered what principles ought
to govern a natural distribution. Most systematists since
Lamarck have adopted one of the three principles following :—•
(1) Conformity to a general type or plan of organization ; (2
relationship or descent ; (3) complexity of structure. Agassiz,
in his “ Essay on Classification” (ch. ii.), discusses the subject
at some length. He lays down, that conformity to type is the
principle which should determine the division of the animal
kingdom into primary branches or sub-regna ; while the division
N 2
�180
Lamarck.
into classes ought to be regulated by the different ways in which
the type of each branch is worked out in the animals composing
it; and the further subdivision into orders should depend on the
complexity of organization in each class. He thus considers that
there are three different kinds of large divisions of animals proper
to be made, and differing from each other in essence, and not
merely in the extent or number of species comprised in them.
Lamarck, on the other hand, considers all divisions larger than
genera to be merely families of greater or less extent, and agrees
with Agassiz only in considering that external form should be the
criterion of specific difference.
Cuvier, Oken, Von Baer, and Owen, all endeavour, more or
less, to arrange animals according to type; while Huxley,
Haeckel, and most of the zoologists who have adopted the views
of Darwin, found their systems on a different principle—that of
relationship, or nearness in descent; and they generally assume
that uniformity of type, even in small details, can only exist in
closely-related animals. This certainly cannot be considered as
proved, and is opposed to the views of Owen, Mivart, and Bas
tian. Lamarck himself gives two tables of relationship accord
ing to descent—one at the end of his “ Philosophie Zoologique,”
and. the other in the supplement to the introduction to his
“Histoire Naturelie” (vol. i. p. 457). They differ considerably
from each other, but altogether from the classification he adopted;
and, as this classification was sketched out by him in his courses
of lectures long before the publication of either of these works,
and was retained in them, it is clear that he did not consider
genealogy to be the true principle on which to found a natural
system. While absolutely rejecting, at least in the “ Histoire
Naturelle,” the theory of a single uninterrupted chain of beings,
he still appears to found his system on it. He nowhere recog
nises anything like a type or plan of organization, and is gene
rally guided merely by the principle of complexity of organiza
tion.. Agassiz (“ Essay on Classification/’ p. 134), well observes
of his system, that it combines abstract conceptions with struc
tural considerations, and an artificial endeavour to arrange all
animals in a continuous series. He himself seems to have felt
the artificial nature of his method, and to have become some
what dissatisfied with the results. (See the supplement to the
introduction to his Hist. Nat., vol. i. p. 451.)
Lamarck considers all classifications formed by reasoning from
a single organ to be unsatisfactory, and that the variations of the
most important organs ought to carry the greatest weight in de
termining the relationship of animals. Thus the organs of .sen
sation and respiration are better guides than those of circulation ;
and the organs of sensation, which give rise to the most eminent
�Lamarck.
181
■faculties, are to be preferred to those of respiration. He criti
cises Aristotle’s division of animals into those with blood and
those without blood ; and while approving of the division, thinks
the characters ill chosen. In his doctrine as to the importance
in classification of the organs of feeling, he agrees with Dr. Grant
and Professor Owen, who also found their divisions of the Animal
Kingdom on the characters of the nervous system. Lamarck’s
division into Apathetic, Sentient, and Rational animals, is really
founded, however, not on the organs of sensation themselves, but
on their functions or faculties.
In the Hist. Nat. i. 324, Lamarck gives further explanations
of his views of the art of making fit divisions of animals. The
principles he lays down are, first, that animals must be grouped
according to some system which is not an arbitrary one, that
the series must then be divided, and the proper rank of each divi
sion determined; secondly, that in performing these operations,
attention must be paid to the following relationships:—(1) The
relations between individuals of the same species. These are the
closest, and consist in peculiarities of form. (2) The relations
between animals of the same group. These must be determined
by considering, not the external form only, but also the whole
interior organization in every part. (3) The relations between
the groups themselves, which must be arranged in order accord
ing as they differ more or less from man. (4) The relations be
tween unmodified organs. The commonest organs are the most
important for fixing the rank of the division. Of two different
plans of the same organ, the one most analogous to the plan of
the organ in a superior group entitles its professor to a rank
superior to that of the possessor of the organ formed with less
analogy to such plan. Thus, as gills have a greater analogy
to lungs than the branching air tubes or tracheae by which
insects breathe, it follows that animals breathing by gills
have a higher rank than those breathing by tracheae, but a
lower rank than those breathing by true lungs. (5) The rela
tions between organs modified by use or circumstance, so that
the plan of nature is disguised. Everything done by nature has
a higher value than what has been effected by external circum
stances. The distinction here drawn between nature and cir
cumstances is one that Lamarck continually dwells on; and we
shall recur to it hereafter. The third principle is that we ought
to begin with the lowest organism, with the object of making the
order of our distribution conformable to that of Nature, who
works upwards by degrees from the lowest forms.
The artificial nature of these principles clearly appears, and
has to a considerable extent influenced Lamarck’s arrangement.
However, like all persons who have laid down principles for clas
�Lamarck.
182
sifying animals, he does not attempt to follow out strictly his
own theories. He appears inclined to adopt a genealogical
arrangement, but to have been beguiled by a wish to carry out
his principles, and also by vague ideas of the tendency and
designs of Nature.
The following is the arrangement given by Lamarck, both in
the “ Philosophie Zoologique” and the first volume of the “ Histoire Naturelie.”
APATHETIC ANIMALS.
1.
2.
3.
4.
Infusoria.
Polyps.
Kadiaria.
Worms.
(Epizoa.)
/
Invertebrate Animals.
I
{
-rr j. i z a • i
Vertebrate Animals.
'
SENTIENT ANIMALS.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
Insects.
Araehnida.
Crustacea.
Annelids.
Cirrhipods.
Mollusks.
INTELLIGENT ANIMALS.
11.
12.
13.
14.
Fish.
Reptiles.
Birds.
Mammals.
I
J
The true principles on which a natural system should be
founded must of course depend on the connexion between the
beings to be classified. If Lamarck be correct in his doctrine
that animals form a series on a number of branching series, each
consisting of broadly distinguishable forms, it is difficult to see
how any other principle than that of relationship or descent can
be applied; and the lower limits at least of the divisions insti
tuted must, in such a case as Lamarck has pointed out, be arbi
trary. The higher limits, however, of many divisions would be
strictly marked out conformably to nature by the extent to which
development has advanced. Man would still mark out one of
the boundaries of the class Mammalia, although, if all connecting
forms were known, it might be impossible to draw any but a con
ventional boundary between reptiles and mammals. If, however,
Mr. Mivart's view of the nature of the Animal Kingdom be the
more correct one, type must be a leading principle in natural
systems, though even in this case it might be difficult to assign
�Lamarck.
183
due limits to the divisions. It might be found that many forms
partook of more than one type, and could only be arranged in one
class rather than another, according to which type appeared to
preponderate. In order to judge of Lamarck’s classification we
must, therefore, examine his theory of living beings.
Species and varieties, he considers, are like other divisions of
animals, arbitrary and not natural. All forms have their origin
in the simplest organized bodies which Nature is continually pro
ducing by spontaneous generation, and are derived from them
by insensible alterations, so that animals make a branching
series, which is continuous, except where forms are lost. The
organs of an animal are modified by time and favourable cir
cumstances. New species arise when the surroundings are
changed, as when a plant, orginally a native of a moist plain,
comes.to grow on a dry hill-side. They may also, in some cases,
be derived from hybrids. These changes of circumstances are
not, however, the only cause of the formation of new species, for
Lamarck in many places attributes to nature a continual power
or tendency to develop new and more highly organized bodies.
Thus he says (Phil. Zool. p. 221) :—
“ Il sera en effet évident que l’état où nous voyons tous les animaux
est d’une part le produit de la composition croissante de l’organisation,
qui tend à former une gradation régulière ; et de l’autre part qu’il est
celui des influences d’une multitude de circonstances très différentes,
qui tendent continuellement à détruire la régularité de la composition
de l’organisation.”
Some passages might even lead one to suppose that Lamarck
looked on nature as working by insensible gradations to a pre
appointed end, and as being hindered, and the symmetry of her
plan impaired, by circumstances.. Thus he explains the absence
of a hard external skeleton in mollusks by the supposition that
Nature in them is preparing to form the internal skeleton of
vertebrates ; and therefore lays aside the hard shell provided for
insects and crustaceans (Phil. Zool. p. 316 ; Hist. Nat. i. 147).
He puts forward similar hypotheses to explain the absence of
articulated limbs among annelids, or red-blooded worms (which,
like Cuvier, he places above insects), and the absence of a double
gangliated cord in mollusks (Phil. Zool. 313, n. 316). In the
Hist. Nat. i. 133, he says :—
‘‘ Le plan des operations de la Nature à l’égard de la production des
animaux, est clairement indiqué par cette cause première et prédominante
qui donne a la vie animale le pouvoir de composer progressivement l’orga
nisation, et de compliquer et perfectionner graduellement, non seule
ment 1 organisation dans son ensemble, mais encore chaque système
d organes particulier, a mesure qu’elle est parvenue à les établir ....
Mais une cause étrangère à celle-ci, cause accidentelle et par conséquent
variable, a traverse ça et là l’exécution de ce plan sans néanmoins le
�184
Lamarck.
détruire, comme je vais le prouver. Cette cause effectivement a donné
lieu, soit aux lacunes, réelles de la série, soit aux ramaux finis qui en
proviènnent dans divers points et en altèrent la simplicité, soit, enfin, aux
anomalies qu’on observe parmi les systèmes d’organes particuliers des
différentes organisations.”
This second cause is found in the very different circumstances
in which the various animals are placed.
On the other hand, an even greater number of passages from
Lamarck’s writings might be adduced to show that both his
primary and his secondary causes are alike due to the effect of
circumstances. The increasing complexity of organism being
perhaps, as in Mr. Herbert Spencer’s theory, caused by the
residual, and, to borrow an image from astronomy, secular
effects of numerous opposing circumstances. Lamarck’s general
theory of life as dependent on the action of subtle fluids
is given elsewhere, but there is nothing in it to show
anything like an intention in nature to pass from one type to
another, or to explain her disuse of organs already brought to a
high degree of complication. On the contrary, he generally
speaks (Hist. Nat. Introd. Part 3) as if all changes, and con
sequently all advance, were due to the effect of circumstances,
new wants, and the action of his subtle fluids, caloric and elec
tricity. Nor is there anything in his account of nature to
countenance the theory of intelligence or design in her.
Although in other parts of his works he appears to regard her
as a Demiurgus, an intelligent but subordinate and finite being,
fashioning the world, both animate and inanimate, according to
her will ; yet when he comes to treat of nature herself (Hist.
Nat. Intr. Part 6) it appears that she is nothing but motion and
a collection of laws. But a law in physics is really nothing but
a way of grouping or describing, more or less accurately, all the
similar phenomena presented by bodies ; and however general
it may be, and however many apparently different effects it may
explain, still always remains nothing but a statement, that
different bodies behave or move in a similar manner. Lamarck’s
definition of nature, in fact, amounts to saying that she is a col
lection of facts or phenomena presented by bodies.
Life, again, is described by him (l.c. p. 311) as having neither
intention, end nor will, as blind and limited, and existing only by
the will of a superior and infinite Power. Nature is distinct
from the material universe (p. 314), and consists (p. 319), first, of
motion, and, secondly, of all the constant and immutable laws
which regulate the movements and changes of bodies. He
attacks the notion (which he says is that of most persons),
that nature and God are the same, and declares that God is the
all-powerful Creator of nature, while nature is not a being or an
�Lamarck.
185
intelligence, but an order of things everywhere subjected ; and
that design or will is not to be attributed to her, but that the
appearance of it is derived from the operation of fixed laws
originally combined for the purpose or end which her Supreme
Author had in view. This is the case among animals, in whose
formation he refuses to admit the action of Cuvier’s final causes.
He says :—
“En effet dans chaque organisation particulière de ces corps, un
ordre de choses préparé par les causes qui l’ont graduellement établi,
n’a fait qu’amener par des développemens progressifs de parties, régis
par les circonstances, ce qui nous paraît être un but, et ce qui n’est
réellement qu’une nécessité. Les climats, les situations, les milieux
habités, les moyens de vivre et de pourvoir à sa conservation, en un
mot les circonstances particulières dans lesquelles chaque race s’est
rencontrée ont amené les habitudes de cette race ; celles-ci y ont plié
et approprié les organes des individus ; et il en est résulté que l’har
monie que nous remarquons partout entre l’organisation et les habi
tudes des animaux, nous paraît une fin prévue, tandis qu’elle n’est
qu’une fin nécessairement amenée” (p. 324).
It appears on the whole, therefore, that if Lamarck did in any
way, like Mr. Mivart, conceive a vital force working indepen
dently of, and often against circumstances, his views were illdefined and confused. Though he often mentions nature as a
force which gradually perfects the organs of animals, yet he
dwells at greater length and more clearly on the power of cir
cumstances in modifying them. He lays down, that circum
stances create new wants in the intelligent animals, and produce
changes in the nutrition and other vital actions of plants. Thus,
changes in the latter are brought about by differences in the
amount of moisture in meadows, or by cultivation in gardens.
The leaves of the Ranunculus aquatilis, which grow under water,
are of a quite different character to those growing in the air.
In the higher animals new wants are created by changed circum
stances, and produce new actions ; and, as the employment of
an organ strengthens and enlarges it, while the disuse of an organ
makes it deteriorate, the organs become thus altered in an indi
vidual subjected to a different set of external circumstances, and
these alterations are (at least, if both parents be affected in a
similar way) preserved in the offspring. It is therefore, accord
ing to Lamarck, an error to suppose that the nature or condition
of an organ has led to its employment for a particular purpose ;
the real fact being that its employment has modified the organ,
and fitted it better to perform the duty required of it. He gives
(Phil. Zool. vol. i. p. 248), several instances of organs modi
fied by use or disuse. Thus the teeth of whales, the eyes of the
mole, the feet of serpents, have been deteriorated or lost by dis
�186
Lamarck.
use. The head of acephalous mollusks has on the other hand
been lost by a somewhat different cause, the excessive develop
ment of the mouth. The shortening of the intestines of drunkards
he also attributed to disuse. On the other hand, the webs be
tween the toes of water birds, the feet of perchers, the long legs
of waders, the tongue of the woodpecker, the legs and neck of the
giraffe, and the hind legs of the kangaroo, are all instances of organs
augmented and developed by excessive use; while the hoofs of
many quadrupeds, the formation of the sloth, and the peculiar
position of the eyes of the flat fish, are examples of the modifi
cations of organs produced by the peculiar manner in which they
are used.
It is not at first evident how use could furnish webs to the
toes of swimming bir ds or animals, as the immediate effect of the
resistance of the water would rather be to wear away and de
stroy all excrescences or webs on the foot. Perhaps Lamarck
considered their development as an effect of over-nutrition, or as
produced by continual streams of nervous fluid directed to the
toes in swimming, producing a swelling or turgescence of the
tissues, and forming channels, and thus pushing out the tissues
covering the toes.
Lamarck extended his views to men, whom he considered as
descended from the quadrumana. The difference in their struc
ture was caused by men losing their habit of climbing trees, and
being compelled during many generations to walk on their hind
legs. Having obtained the mastery over other races, men took
possession of all the spots which suited them, drove other ani
mals into deserts, and thus arrested their development, while
they multiplied their own wants, and, consequently, their mecha
nical powers (Industrie) and faculties; and thus increased the
distance between themselves and other animals. An erect posi
tion, he says, is sometimes assumed by the chimpanzee, and does
not seem even now altogether natural to man, as is shown by
the unwillingness of a fat, paunchy child to walk or stand. This
is, we believe, the only place where Lamarck shows any percep
tion of the law established by Mr. Darwin—that the young ani
mal seems often not to have acquired the characteristics separat
ing the adult from the neighbouring forms from which it has
been developed.
The argument in favour of the fixity of species drawn from
the fact that the mummies of animals found in Egypt present
the same characters as existing animals, is not, according to La
marck, conclusive. It proves only that species in Egypt have
not varied for the last three or four thousand years, which is not
surprising ; as the climate and external circumstances affecting
the animals in question have remained unaltered, and it is only
�Lamarck.
187
by changes of circumstances and length of time that new species
or varieties are produced. Lamarck thinks that no species have
been actually lost, except some large land animals extirpated by
man. Other species, which seem to have disappeared, have
really left descendants, but they, owing to continual changes of
level and climate in different parts of the earth, have assumed
forms different from those of their ancestors. There is therefore
no evidence of any general catastrophe by which all the species
in existence at one time were destroyed, although there have
been many local catastrophes.
Lamarck gives two tables showing the origin and .descent of
animals. The one in the “ Philosophic Zoologique,” ii. 463, the
other, six years later, in the “Histoire Naturelle,’ i. p. 457. In
the first, Lamarck makes two branches of the animal kingdom,
which are, however, of very different importance. The first
branch comprises the Infusoria, Polyps, and Radiaria (sea urchins,
star fish, jelly fish, &c.) or nearly all the forms classed by Cuvier as
Radiata, with the exception of intestinal worms. These, together
with Planaria, Gordius and Nais, make up Lamarck s class of
worms, which forms the root of his second branch, and from which
he derives all the higher forms of animals.. These .again make two
branches, one composed of insects, spiders, lobsters, and other
segmented animals with jointed limbs, the other of the annelids
or ring-worms, the cirrhipeds or barnacles, and the mollusks.
From the last the vertebrates spring. First fishes, then reptiles,
then birds, and from these the mono-treme mammals, the duck
bill and echidua. The other mammals, however, he derives,.not
from birds, but from reptiles, from which he considers amphibious
mammals, such as the seal and the manatee to have.sprung.;
while they in their turn gave rise to the three remaining divi
sions—the unguiculate or clawed, the ungulate or hoofed, and
the cetacea or whales. It is obvious, therefore, that Lamarck
did not consider the lowest mammals to be necessarily the
earliest developed, since he derived cetaceans by a process of
degradation from amphibious mammals.
The view presented of the probable descent of animals in
Lamarck’s second table is a great improvement on the first. He
still keeps two great series of animals, but they are better con
nected than those of the first table. The first series commences
with Infusoria, from which Lamarck supposes the Polyps, to have
sprung. These give rise to two different classes. First, the
Radiaria; and, secondly, Ascidians, and through them to the
acephalous and other Mollusks. Except that Lamarck includes
Cuvier’s Echinoderms in his Radiaria, instead of giving a posi
tion near the worms, a modern evolutionist could object but little
to this part of the table. The second, or articulate series, is
�188
Lamarck.
not in such close conformity with modern ideas. The worms
give rise to two classes, Annelids (ringed red-blooded worms) and
Epizoa (parasites generally found attached to the eyes or gills of
fish). These Epizoa Lamarck believed to be the source from
which insects and the other Articulates with jointed limbs were
derived. The Cirrhipeds (Barnacles) Lamarck rightly places
with these animals, although Cuvier long after continued to class
them among Mollusks, in consequence of the resemblance of their
shells to those of Bivalves. Lamarck himself so far gives im
portance to this resemblance as to place Cirrhipeds above Crus
taceans, in accordance with his theory of the importance of
organs analogous to those of a superior class. The Vertebrates
are here placed by themselves, unconnected with either series
of invertebrate animals, although from several passages of the
“ Histoire Naturelie” it appears that Lamarck had not aban
doned his theory that they were derived from the Mollusca.
In the first chapter of the second book of his ££ Phil. Zool.”
Lamarck endeavours to define the class of inanimate bodies. He
recurs to the subject of the difference between them and living
beings in the first volume of his ££ Histoire Naturelie des Animaux
sans Vertebres,” where his views are given at greater length, and
in some respects with more precision. In the “ Philosophie Z.oologique” he considers that inorganic substances are distinguished
by having no individuality, by many of them being homogeneous
(wholly solid, liquid or fluid), by their having no need of movement
or nutrition, by their increasing by juxta-position, and not by in
tussusception, and by their not originating from germs or being
subject to death. From this definition it is impossible to know
whether or not Lamarck intended to include substances derived
from living beings, such as wood, wax, &c., in the class he was
defining. All the characters he mentions are mere negations of
characters of living beings, and might be more forcibly and con
cisely expressed by the words “ inorganic” and “ not living.
Homogeneity, while it cannot be predicated of all inorganic sub
stances, is a property (so far as our present knowledge extends)
of some organic beings. An Amoeba has all the appearance of a
particle of animated jelly, and has a better claim to be called
homogeneous than granite or most rocks, and as good a claim, as
wax or butter. In fact, it is evident that Lamarck, at the time
he was writing this definition, had living beings in view, and
would, had he cared to frame a logical work, have defined them
instead of inorganic bodies. It would perhaps .be as easy to
make a satisfactory definition of unelectrified bodies as of . inani
mate or inorganic bodies. Many of the latter are subject, to
forces producing crystallization, but this, though a positive
character, cannot be predicated of colloids such as gum, &c. One
�Lamarck.
189
common character is indeed attributed to all minerals by
Lamarck—that of being derived from dead animals or plants.
Stated broadly, as by him, this is an impossibility. He shows
himself that the material constituents of all living beings were
once inorganic. So that the old problem of the hen and the egg
appears in an insoluble form.
In the second chapter of the Philosophie Zoologique, book ii.,
Lamarck attempts a definition of life, which he represents as pro
ducing various phenomena that yet do not constitute it. Life, he
says (p. 403), in the parts of a body which possesses it, is an order
and state of things which allows organic movements therein;
these movements, which constitute active life, result from the
action of a stimulative cause which excites them. This is not very
clear. He goes on to lay down that active life requires stimuli,
and a state of things which bestows the faculty of obeying them.
This state of things consists in the existence of supple parts formed
of cellular tissue and of liquid parts. The necessary exciting
causes are to be found in the various subtle (imponderable) fluids
which permeate all things, and which are in a continual state of
agitation, produced by the motion of the earth, the varying posi
tions of the heavenly bodies, and the seasons. Of such fluids the
most important, perhaps the only ones concerned in producing
life, are caloric and the electric fluid. To plants and to the lower
animals the fluids in the surrounding media are sufficient to fur
nish the necessary stimuli; but in higher animals a continual
production and renewal of the exciting fluids goes on. Some
change even seems to take place in the nature of the fluids, the
electric fluid being, as it were, animalized and converted into
galvanic and nervous fluids. In plants only the liquid portions
are acted on by the exciting causes, and their movements are pro
bably due to caloric. In animals, however, the caloric produces
swellings and contractions of the soft tissues as well as movements
of the liquid parts. The caloric of higher animals is, according
to Lamarck, derived from arterial blood.
It is to the important part played by heat that Lamarck attri
butes the great development of living beings in summer-time and
in tropical climates. Water, light, and air, in addition to heat,
are essential to the production of living beings. The phenomena
of torpidity and hybernation are due to a loss of caloric; but in
hybernating animals this loss is only partial, as is shown by the
fact that, if the cold be increased, the animal awakes and becomes
very restless. The chief effect of caloric on animated beings is to
produce “ orgasme”—a sort of tension or swelling, perhaps allied
to tonicity. This “ orgasme” exists in the soft parts of animals,
and also, though obscurely, in plants, in which, however, it never
gives rise to irritability, which is a power of moving in answer to
�3 90
Lamarck.
an external stimulus, rapidly and repeatedly, or as often as the
stimulus is applied. The want of irritability is the great mark,
by which plants are to be distinguished from animals, but
they also differ in having no digestive faculty, in their mode
of growth, and in their chemical characters.
In the first volume of the Histoire Naturelle Lamarck again
takes up the subject, and defines vegetables as being (1) unable.to
contract suddenly and repeatedly as often as a stimulus is applied
to them ; (2) unable to displace themselves ; (3) having only their
liquid parts capable of motion ; (4) being without special internal
organs, although possessing a number of vessels and canals; (5)
without digestion, but only elaboration of the fluids which nourish
them; (6) having displacement of fluid, but no circulation; (7)
having two growths, one ascending, the other descending,
from a vital nodus (noeud vital), situated at the origin of the
root; (8) tending to grow perpendicular to the plane of the
horizon ; (9) being generally compound.
The motions of plants he considers to be due to mechanical
causes, such as the action of elastic fluids, of springs (as in the
action of certain plants in discharging their pollen), or to the
action of the sun in drying up or driving away the fluids in par
ticular parts. Some of the motions, like those of Conferva) and
Oscillatorise, are slow, and not altered by external stimuli; while
others, as in the case of the sensitive plant, can only be repeated
after long intervals.
The facts established since the time of Lamarck show the
futility of his theories. It is impossible to distinguish the
movements of the cilise of Zospores, or of the amoebifonn poi
sonous matter of the nettle from those of the cilise of infusoria
or of Amoeba. The second and third of Lamarck’s characters
are incorrect; the fifth and sixth are only verbal. How does
elaboration differ from digestion, or circulation from displace
ment ? The other characters are neither true of all plants, nor
peculiar to them : and even if they were, they are not sufficiently
important to separate plants from animals.
Animals, according to Lamarck, are distinguished by nine
characters, generally corresponding to the characters of plants
already enumerated. The first and second, fifth and eighth, con
sist in the possession of irritability and the power of moving.
The third character is that animals execute no movements
without stimulus, and can repeat such movements as often as the
stimulus is employed; while, according to the fourth character,
the movements show no comprehensible relation to their cause.
The other characters are that animals are nourished by foreign
compound substances, which they generally have the power of
digesting; that they present great disparities in the composition
�Lamarck.
191
of their organization, and that they have no tendency to grow
vertically.
It appears to us that definitions, in order to be useful, should
consist either in a short explanation or description of the essential
characters of the class, or in a description of one or more cha
racters to be found in each member of the class, and serving as a
test whether a given object does or does not belong to the class.
In the second case it is important that the test should be accu
rate, but not that the character chosen should be important. Of
this nature are the characters serving to discriminate between
neighbouring genera in Zoology. In the first case, however, the
characters chosen should be important; and if possible should dis
close the essence, the actual nature and reason for existence of the
class. This can hardly ever be done, except in pure mathematics
and artificial or verbal sciences, such as Grammar, Heraldry, or
Rhetoric. Our definitions share in the imperfections of our
knowledge; and all we can do, when seeking to define a class of
the components of which we know as little as we do of animals,
is to take the characters which seem to be the most important
and most universal, and state them as clearly and concisely as is
possible. So long as the real nature of matter, of space, and of
force is unknown, it is impossible to understand properly or
define adequately life or feeling. The definitions can be but
provisional, and in such it is not absolutely necessary that the
characters chosen should be accurately coextensive with the class.
Judged from this point of view some of Lamarck’s characters
are, for his time, as important and indicative of the real nature
of the class as any that could be chosen. In particular, the
character which attributes to animals the power of executing
movements, not communicated but excited, and bearing no com
prehensible relation to their exciting cause, and the character which
lays stress on the stream of matter continually flowing through
the bodies of living beings, appear to us especially good. It is in
teresting to compare Lamarck’s definition of animals with Mr.
Herbert Spencer’s definitions of Life, which he says (“ Principles of
Biology,” p. 74) consists in “ the definite combination of heteroge
neous changes, both simultaneous and successive, in correspon
dence with external coexistences and sequences;” or (p. 80) “the
continuous adjustment of internal relations to external relations.”
These definitions are very ingenious, but do not throw much
light on the nature of life, or of the effects produced by it; nor
do they afford a test by which to decide whether a given sub
stance is or not endued with life. Mr. Spencer himself admits
that the characters are not strictly coextensive with the class;
indeed he holds that no characters can be strictly coextensive
consistently with the doctrine of Evolution.
�192
Lamarck.
Living beings are produced by generation, which Lamarck holds
may be either spontaneous or from parents similar to the off
spring. Director spontaneous generations take place continually
among the simple forms to be found at the beginning of the
animal and vegetable series, and most other animals and plants
are derived from these earliest forms. Being ignorant of the eggs
both of Polyps and Infusoria, he argues in favour of the occurrence
of direct generations from the destruction which, during a rigorous
winter, must overtake all the inhabitants of freshwater pools.
He at one time considered that direct generation occurred only
among the lowest forms, but he was later induced to believe that
intestinal worms, and even external parasites of comparatively
high organization, might be generated directly from corpuscles
formed in the animals infested, and analogous in some degree to
the corpuscles which reproduce the form of the parent. He thus
recognises the two sorts of direct generation which Dr. Bastian
has called respectively Abiogenesis, generation from inorganic
matter ; and Heterogenesis, or generation of a new and distinct
animal or plant from organic matter or living bodies. Dr. Grant
in his “Tabular View of the Animal Kingdom” (London, 1861),
declares it is impossible to draw any definite line of demarcation
between the various cells which build up one of the higher
animals such as blood corpuscles, bone cells, &c., and the lowest
isolated and independent animals. Mr. H. Spencer also pro
pounds a somewhat similar theory, considering higher animals to
be aggregates of the second or even third order, built up out of cells
or aggregates of the first order.
(Principles of Biology, ii.
p. 77-112.) These views, however, are by no means the same as
those of Lamarck, whose parasites spring from germs and not
from cells. According to the observations of Pouchet and Bastian,
a germ-like period of quiescence is the invariable precursor of
every great heterogenetic change in any living body, and the
particles from which the new being will arise are at first aggre
gated together so as to present the appearance of an egg or germ,
which Pouchet calls the spontaneous egg. If the correctness of
these observations were established, it would be a curious corrobo
ration of Lamarck’s surmise.
Lamarck goes on to explain the production of the simplest
organic forms by direct generation. Gelatinous and mucilaginous
bodies are alone fitted to receive life. Into the mass of these the
ambient subtle fluids penetrate, increase the interstices, and
produce a cellular tissue, in which various fluids and liquids can
enter and move. Caloric here plays the most important part.
The lower animals are entirely formed of this cellular tissue. In
the higher animals and plants this tissue is modified. Vessels
are wrought in it by the motion of fluids ; membranes, such as
�193
Lamarck.
bark and skin, are formed by its compression; and all other
organs are derived from and developed by it. Lamarck in
forming his theory seems to have confounded the areolar or
fibrous tissue enveloping the muscles and other organs with the
primordial cells from which many organs originate.
New combinations of matter are being continually formed by
living bodies, by means of their organic movements, with the aid
of the affinities or relations of matter, and the tendency which
all compound bodies have to self-destruction, a tendency which
arises from some of the combined principles in such bodies
requiring to be fixed by the restraint of an external force. Hence
come secretions and assimilations. In youth the parts of the body
are soft; nutrition is consequently more than sufficient to supply
the waste of the tissues, and the animal increases in size. As
time goes on, the softer portions of the tissues are more easily lost
or dissipated in the continual flux of matter than the harder
portions; while in the repairs effected by nutrition, the harder
portions are comparatively more numerous. Thus the tissues
gradually harden, and further growth becomes impossible. At
first the surplus nutriment collected by every part of the body
serves the reproductive faculty, and goes to form a small but
similar body. As the hardness still increases, nutrition is carried
on with greater difficulty, and at length ceases to be sufficient to
maintain the body in a state in which vital movements can be
carried on, and the animal dies. This view, which accounts for
the resemblance between parents and their offspring by supposing
that organs in the latter are formed out of particles derived from,
the corresponding organ in the former, was probably suggested
to Lamarck by Buffon’s theory of organic molecules. It is re
produced, although with many improvements and additions, in
Mr. Darwin’s theory of Pangenesis, but is much older than any
of these authors. Lucretius (Bk. iv. 1. 1212), reproducing the
atomic theory of the Greeks, says :—
Bit quoque, ut intendum similes existere avorum
Possint, et referant proavorum ssepe figuras,
Propterea, quia multa modis primordia multis
Mista suo celant in corpore ssepe parentes,
Quae patribus patres tradunt a stirpe profecta;
Inde Venus varia produeit sorte figuras,
Majorumque refert voltus, vocesque, comasque.
The theories all seem to rest on some materialistic idea, that a
particular force can be transmitted from one body to another by
a transmission of some of the actual particles impressed with or
moving in obedience to such force.
[Vol. CII. No. CCI.]—New Series, Vol. XLVL No. I.
0
�194
Lamarck.
After giving this account of the general effect of life, Lamarck
proceeds to discuss the principal faculties peculiar to different
animals. He commences with his usual serene conviction of the
truth of his own theories, and all facts to be deduced therefrom,
by inveighing against the folly of expecting to find organs in
animals lower in the scale of life than those in which rudimen
tary organs appear. As circulation is first sketched out in the
class of insects, it is useless to seek for anything of the sort in
Radiaria. It is equally absurd to attribute anything like respi
ratory functions to the leaves of plants. After this rather unfor
tunate beginning, he examines seven of the chief faculties. He
defines—1. Digestion, as consisting in the destruction of the
state of aggregation of the particles of aliment, and in a change
of state and quality fitting the aliment, to form chyle and to
repair the essential fluid : and 2. Respiration, as the process by
which the essential fluid is repaired, after sudden alterations of
it, where nutrition is too slow a process. The alterations intended
are those arising from the supposed sudden dissipation of caloric,
electricity, and nervous or other subtle fluids necessary for pro
ducing motion and other vital functions. Lamarck, however,
while he recognises oxygen as the most important principle of
this reparation, makes no allusion to any development of heat
from the combination of such oxygen. He divides the special
systems of respiratory organs into four sorts, which are Lungs
and Trachese, fitted for breathing air; and Branchiae and Aqui
ferous Tracheae, adopted for breathing water: the last being
found in Radiaria (echinoderms and jelly-fish). In animals
not having a definite circulation, respiration is effected in
organs diffused over the whole body,' the respired fluid carry
ing its influence to every part, and the essential fluid not
travelling further than the respired fluid. In animals having a
circulation, on the other hand, the respired fluid is admitted into
a special organ, and there is a special circulation of the essential
fluid, either complete or incomplete, within such organ. A very
slow movement of the essential fluid takes place among the
infusoria, and probably a more rapid one among the polyps.
In higher animals a separate system of organs is required to
carry on the definite circulation which these obtain. This
system is first sketched out in the Arachnida (spiders, mites, &c.),
and formed in the Crustacea. The theory—that respiration is in
tended to effect changes in the circulating fluid—seems open to
some question. The ultimate object is to provide the organs
of the body with the oxygen necessary to enable them to carry
on the vital functions, and the alteration which undoubtedly
takes place in the blood seems generally to be but a means of
carrying the oxygen to these organs. The other functions
�Lamarck.
195
Lamarck mentions are those of the muscles, of sensation, of sex,
of circulation and intelligence.
In the third part of his Phil. Zool. Lamarck develops at some
length his theory of sensation, instinct, thought and will, as
dependent on the motions of a subtle fluid, which he considers to
be probably an animalized form of electricity. He believes that
the fluids to which he attributed irritability and motion in
animals may, like their blood, become more complex and retain
able—“ contenable”—in the higher animals, although still re
maining invisible. A special fluid traverses the nerves, and
being used and lost in them, is continually being separated from
the blood of the arteries to make up the loss. The blood itself,
as we have seen, is restored by means of respiration to its former
state. The great separation of this fluid from the blood takes
place in the grey matter of the brain, and other nervous centres,
which is in a great measure composed of small arteries.
The nervous system always consists of two parts. (1) A
central mass, from which, the fluid necessary to excite the muscles
to contract, starts, and to which, the fluid conveying sensation
comes. In vertebrata this centre is probably the ring (Pons
Varolii?) of nervous matter round the continuation of the
spinal cord into the brain, the medulla oblongata, or the
medulla oblongata itself. In insects, the first bilobed ganglion
is also a centre; but these animals may have several centres.
The centres are the parts first formed, and though other parts
may be larger and more developed, this is only the effect of the
general law that exercise promotes growth. (2.) The nerves
are the second portion. They consist of a medullary pulp,
covered by a sheath, which retains the subtle fluid continually
traversing them. They are, however, open at their extremities
to enable the fluid to communicate with the various parts of the
body. The pulp is secreted from the blood, or essential fluid of
the animal. A special sheath covers every nerve-fibre, in addi
tion to the fibrous envelope of the whole. The nerves were
produced after the formation of the various centres by the move
ments of the special subtle fluid, working out channels and
passages by which more easily to arrive at the place where it
was required.
This view of the origin of nerves is not unlike the one given
by Mr. Herbert Spencer (Biology. Section 302).
Movements, when effected by irritability in the lowest animals,
are, as has been seen, due entirely to external stimuli; but Lamarck
repeatedly lays down that muscular action is always accompanied
by nervous action, of which it is the earliest and commonest
effect. In higher animals sensation or feeling is also produced
in the nervous system, and in higher animals still, which have a
o 2
�196
Zamarck.
special organ (the hemispheres of the brain or hyper-cephalon,
as Lamarck terms it)—consciousness, thought, moral feeling, and
will, also result. The precise action of the nervous system in
those animals, in which it subserves muscular action only, is not
laid down with any accuracy by Lamarck. He states that such
action may be produced in three ways—(1) by external action;
(2) by the internal feeling not regulated by the will; and (3) by
such feeling regulated to a greater or less extent by the will.
In all animals in which a nervous system exists, he considers it
probable that the internal feeling exists. Its action, however,
will be best understood by first taking the phenomena of
feeling.
The soft character of the nerves, and especially of their medul
lary pulp, renders it impossible to adopt Hartley’s view, and to
consider them as vibrating cords, or transmitting impressions by
vibrations of their component matter. They, however, all con
tain a portion of the subtle nervous fluid, which, by its move'
ments or compressions and the shocks it receives, gives rise both
to sensation and the emotions of the internal feeling. Every
impression given to any particular part produces a shock to the
whole amount of nervous fluid contained in the nervous system.
This shock is propagated along the nerve to the centre, and
thence to every part of the system, and afterwards produces a
reaction, which comes from every part of the system except the
particular nerve first affected, and is consequently propagated
along such nerve, the only one not reacting. This causes the sen
sation to be referred to the extremity of this nerve, in the part
originally impressed. On the other hand, the internal feeling is
due to a general shaking of the nervous fluid, not accompanied by
any reaction. The continual small impressions such fluid receives
give rise to the feeling of personal identity, “ le moi,” while the
more violent impressions produce actions and thoughts by send
ing portions of the nervous fluid to the brain, or directly to the
muscles. By this automatic or involuntary actions are produced,
as when a man starts at a loud sound, or flings down a hot iron.
Consciousness only arises when a part of the nervous fluid tra
verses the special organ (the hyper-cephalon), in which its move
ments leave traces of its currents. These traces produce altera
tions in the currents which afterwards traverse the same part,
and by these means feelings and moral sensibilities are produced,
which by such alteration or modification of the movements of the
nervous fluid give rise to corresponding actions. Habits in man
and the higher animals, and instincts in the lower ones, (espe
cially remarkable in insects,) are actions produced by the nervous
fluid moving along courses which have been worn out by repeated
currents flowing in the same or similar directions. The internal
�Lamarck.
197
feeling has thus a threefold faculty. First, to give notice of
sensations whereby physical sensibility is produced ; secondly, to
give consciousness of ideas and thoughts by sending portions of
the nervous fluid to move in the channels or courses already
worn in the hyper-cephalon, whereby moral sensibility is pro
duced, as hereafter mentioned; and, thirdly, to make the
animal act instinctively or involuntarily. Only a small part
of the nervous fluid is at the disposition and will of the animal,
and this part is speedily used up in continual movements or
intellectual operations, and requires to be reproduced before
the animal can go on acting or thinking. It is thus that
the sense of fatigue arises, the muscles not Jbeing themselves
altered.
Conscious will and ideas arise from the motion of the nervous
fluid in the organs of intelligence, the cerebral lobes or hypercephalon. This organ does not react on the nervous fluid. It
is composed of innumerable cavities, to which the nerve fibres
lead. The act of attention is necessary to prepare the organ to
be impressed ; without such act, an impression will be perceived,
but not felt; but when attention has prepared the channel, the
agitation of the nervous fluid originally produced by an external
object is communicated to nervous fluid which traverses the
hyper-cephalon, and engraves traces of its course on that organ.
A simple idea is thus produced, which can be recalled by the
nervous fluid being directed on the traces of the original sensa
tion, and with the aid of attention bringing back the features of
such traces to the notice of the internal consciousness. Lamarck
denies the existence of any innate ideas, though they would
almost seem to be a necessary consequence of his theories. If
the offspring bears the close resemblance to the parent which he
attributes to it, and ideas are the results of channels actually
sculptured in the brain, it would appear at least highly probable
that the child would be born with the power of reproducing all
the ideas of its parent. Lamarck considers dreams and mad
ness caused by disturbed currents of the nervous fluid traversing
various parts of the hyper-cephalon, and the traces of many
ideas uncontrolled by the internal feeling.
In forming judgments, a stream of fluid isdivided and directed by
the internal feeling on to different traces of ideas already engraved
in the brain, after tracing which, the different portions acquire as
many modifications of their original motions as there are traces
of simple ideas, and then reuniting, these different motions are
combined into one complex movement which produces the judg
ment ; complex ideas are derived from judgments, and complex
ideas and judgments of the second order are obtained from
complex ideas of the first order, in a manner similar to that in
�198
Lamarck.
which the complex ideas of the first order are derived from
simple ideas.
Will is a determination by thought, and always the effect of
a judgment. It is not really free, but the necessary result of
the previous operation, as the quotient is in an arithmetical
process. The appearance of irregularity in the workings of the
will and the enormous variations in the results obtained from
different people and at different times, arise from differences in
the organ, produced by disposition, age, health, and other
elements, all of which take part in the formation of the judg
ment. Attention is an act of the internal feeling acted on by
a want or desire which directs a part of the nervous fluid which
is at the disposition of the individual, on to the organ of intelli
gence. Preoccupation prevents this act, and then ideas or
feelings do not engrave themselves on this organ.
The first thing that strikes one after reading Lamarck’s
attempted explanation of the processes of feeling, thought, and
other acts of intelligence, is that even if it were true, it would
explain nothing. There is the same difficulty, neither diminished
nor increased, in the mind being conscious of a stream of nervous
fluid in the hyper-cephalon, as in its being conscious of the
pressure of a solid substance on the finger. It is possible, or at
least conceivable, that such a stream may be an essential link in
the chain connecting external phenomena with consciousness. It
is certain that some operation in the lobes of the brain is such
a fink, but it is highly improbable that Lamarck’s fanciful sketch
represents what really takes place, and if it did, it would throw
no light soever on the problem of consciousness. Lamarck has
described a sort of hydraulic calculating machine which requires
both to be originally set in motion and also to have its final
results read off and interpreted by an intelligent mind. .Such a
mind he seems sometimes to attribute to what he calls the internal
feeling, which, however, he often treats as only a sort of valve.
In one respect he is particularly unfortunate. He has based all
his explanations of life and intellect on theories of imponderable
fluids, like the caloric invented by Black, and the various electric
fluids. These theories had, even before Lamarck .wrote his
Philosophic, been assailed by Count Rumford. (Phil. Trans.,
A.D. 1798, and Sir Humphry Davy, Chemical Philosophy, 1812.)
They were not, however, really overthrown till Joole and Mayer,
respectively, published their viewsand experiments on the nature
of heat, about 1842-3. Lamarck was so fond of imponderable
fluids that he even considered sound to be propagated not by
air, but by a peculiar imponderable fluid, which he elsewhere
represents as a modified form of caloric. He based his theory
on the discrepancy between the observed velocity of sound and
�Lamarck.
199
that calculated for it by Newton, and refused to admit the ex
planation of Lagrange and Laplace, who showed Newton’s calcu
lations to be defective in not taking account of the action of
heat in increasing the elasticity of the air. These physical
theories of Lamarck now impart to his biological speculations a
much greater air of falseness and fancifulness than they really
deserve. In order properly to do justice to them when com
paring them with modern speculations on the same subject, they
should be as it were translated out of the language of subtle
fluids into that of transmutable forces. Lamarck has in several
eases anticipated theories which have since been advocated with
great ingenuity, but he has in such cases often disguised them
in phraseology borrowed partly from ideas now exploded, and
partly from his own imagination. His views of life generally
agree with those of Mr. Darwin and Mr. H. Spencer in so far as
they all endeavour to explain the phenomena of life by the action
of ordinary physical forces, and refuse to recognise any special
vital force or fluid. On the other hand, he held the doctrine of
the daily recurrence of spontaneous generation, which doctrine
is at the present day advanced chiefly by the advocates of the
principle that some special form of force is necessary to produce
vital phenomena. In mental philosophy, as we have seen,
Lamarck altogether rejected the doctrine of the freedom of the
will, while in religion his views seem to have been a curious
mixture of Pantheism and Deism.
�
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Lamarck
Description
An account of the resource
Place of publication: [London]
Collation: p. 175-199 ; 22 cm.
Notes: Review of "Philosophie Zoologique" and "Histoire Naturelle des Animaux sans Vertebres" by Jean Baptiste Lamarck. From the library of Dr Moncure Conway. From Westminster Review 46 (July 1874).
Publisher
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[s.n.]
Date
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[1874]
Identifier
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CT32
Subject
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Book Reviews
Creator
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[Unknown]
Rights
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<a href="http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/mark/1.0/"><img src="http://i.creativecommons.org/p/mark/1.0/88x31.png" alt="Public Domain Mark" /></a><span> </span><br /><span>This work (Lamarck), identified by </span><a href="https://conwayhallcollections.omeka.net/items/show/www.conwayhall.org.uk"><span>Humanist Library and Archives</span></a><span>, is free of known copyright restrictions.</span>
Format
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application/pdf
Type
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Text
Language
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English
Book Reviews
Conway Tracts
Jean Baptiste Lamarck
Natural history