Socialists and Communists, who with the modern philosophy establish society on the 'registered experience' of the kitchen and the larder, are insisting with emphatic reverberation of dynamite and loud oratory, that the interest of the many should take precedence of the enjoyment of the few. Who shail eat, and who shall be eaten?' That is the problem which is 'organizing and consolidating' itself in the union of labourers versus capitalists all the world over-a problem not to be presented in this tiger fashion except when, thanks to the Data of Ethics' and its congeners, we may exclaim with the Roman orator :—

'O Justice, thou art fled to brutish beasts,

And men have lost their reason!'

Would it not be well to return, then, as we are advised in this timely volume, to the true principles of government, to the Conservatism which builds the social edifice, and keeps it standing from age to age in righteousness; to the sovereignty of the moral law over states and cities no less than individuals? Art is degraded, Mr. Lilly tells us with indignant and scathing thetoric, marriage defiled in that 'common sewer of the realm' the Divorce Court, politics a game of factions, property and labour forms of anti-human competition, and money the great god whom our fathers would have scorned to worship, but who sets the feet of his princes on the neck of ancient monarchies. It is an indictment of the largest, and requires some modification. Mr. Lilly brings in evidence a disheartening array of facts, but he overstates his case, and thus leaves an impression which he probably did not intend to convey. The whole world is not enslaved to self-interest, greed, lust, and luxury. We rejoice to know that there are multitudes who give no heed to Utilitarian preaching and to the defenders of Benevolence,' whose main achievement has been with specious phrases to loosen the bonds of order and discredit the moral traditions inherited from a ruder, it may be, but from a less cynical and self-indulgent time.

The coming generation must take up the great problem of to-morrow,-What are the just laws of the acquisition and distribution of that wealth which modern science and civilization have created? Will they enter on it, their eyes bleared with selfishness and their mouths full of abstract formulas, while their consciences are unexercised in judging on the rule of 'Right for Right's sake,' and the foreboding is strong within them that, in the end, the struggle for existence will have its way and justice prove but a word of two syllables in the war of facts? Have we gained only thus much by listening to the syllo

gisms of motive grinders who assume certain propensities of human nature,' and from them synthetically deduce the science of ethics and of politics? But we must not attribute to Mr. Spencer or the other associates of his school a creative influence which they have not wielded. Their popularity signifies not the triumph of new and original ideas, but that a wave of Lucretian materialism has swept over England, threatening to submerge the foundations on which our national greatness was built These masters of the sentences, who inspire the morning leaders and shine in all the magazines, profess, indeed, that their Greatest Happiness principle is the golden rule of the New Testament. But Altruism as construed in their philosophy means the corrupting of one's neighbour as oneself in the base pursuit of pleasure. It is right to seek the happiness of others; but to seek happiness is not the definition of Right. The Christian rule is founded on love of justice and moral good not on pleasure. Neither for ourselves nor for others ought we to wish that a man should be Epicuri de grege porcus.' thus Mr. Sidgwick and those who hold with him, that because Clarke or Kant laid down a universal rule of Benevolence they must have been Utilitarians after all, are simply arguing, as neither Kant nor Clarke did, that the matter of an ethical formula determines its authority, instead of perceiving that it is the authority, exercised by intuition upon experience, which stamps and sanctions the matter adapted to it.*

And

Truly, the question of the Sphinx remains and is daily confronting us, not whether we ought to do Right, but what is the Right which we ought to do? An ethical system,' it has been well said, 'may supply laws, general rules, guiding principles, but who is to apply them to a particular case? Whither can we go, except to the living intellect, our own or another's?" And, therefore, no science of life has been or can be written.† But a great and decisive difference will make itself felt when judgment is to be given, between those minds which apprehend Duty as a law self-certified, 'true and righteous altogether,' and those wherein it seems to be but pleasure under a mask, a more cunning but not a less selfish Egoism. Human nature has not been constructed on the single scale of pleasure for self, offspring, and fellow-citizens.' As in the animal kingdom morphological relations are to be maintained without respect to any agreeable sensations' which the subject of them may feel, in like manner the relations of justice and equity must be preserved amongst men, and feeling is subordinate to their

*Sidgwick, pp. 358, 364.

Grammar of Assent,' p. 354. maintenance.

maintenance.*

Even Mr. Spencer is driven to insist upon the laws of virtue, irrespective of private reckonings as to results. But we shall not know what virtue is, and still less shall we practise it in the face of difficulty, unless with Leibnitz we stedfastly acknowledge that Right is moral power, and Duty moral necessity,' and that these are ultimate, not derived from premisses lying beyond them. Not that we shall be satisfied with a Judaic conception of law pressing upon us from without (into which error Kant may perhaps have fallen), nor that Right and Duty are not destined, by a certain instinct of transformation, to pass into the Heaven of perfected love where 'I and Thou' cease to contend with one another. For in the 'kingdom of final causes,' over which rules one God, one law, one element,' each is for all and all for each. The Religion of

Duty, austere and rugged as the granite foundations of the world, must be clothed upon with living loveliness, with that Christianity which is the incarnation of moral beauty and 'the only æsthetic religion,' as Schiller believed. Nevertheless,

when a man losing his life thus shall find it, and self-sacrifice, or 'renunciation,' shall appear as the necessary condition of a true human ascent from a universe of pain and strife to an Empyrean of existence without shadow and without alloy, sub specie æternitatis, it will not cease to be as certain as it now is, that Benevolence is nothing else than Right extending its sway over the brotherhood of created things, and that love which is not founded and rooted in justice has no moral value. It was of this law, and all that is contained therein, that Hooker wrote the ever-memorable words: 'Her seat is the bosom of God, her voice the harmony of the world: all things in Heaven and Earth do her homage; the very least as feeling her care, and the greatest as not exempted from her power.' †

* Martineau, vol. ii. pp. 344-354.

Eccles. Polity,' Book I.

ART.

ART. IV. The Life and Letters of Adam Sedgwick. By J. Willis Clark and T. McKenny Hughes. 2 vols. London, 1890.

TH

HIS is, in several ways, a very interesting and useful memorial of a remarkable man; but it might, we venture to say, have been doubled in interest, and more than doubled in utility, if it had been halved in length. No one would object to a couple of volumes or even more being dedicated to a biographical portraiture, when the subject has stood high above the mass of mankind,-a king of thought or action by whom new fields of knowledge have been opened, new conditions of society inaugurated, or the course of the world perma nently changed. But until human life shall be lengthened, or a considerable portion of its crowded interests eliminated, two huge volumes, containing nearly twelve hundred pages, must be pronounced inordinate for the record of even the foremost of the lower rank whether of thinkers or workers, however useful they may have been in their generation, or large the troop of friends in whose affections their departure has left a vacant place. Had the old Hebrew Ecclesiastes,' or the writer of his Epilogue, lived in this day of monster biographies, it may be easily conjectured that his complaint of the numerousness of books would have been supplemented by a sarcastic growl at their bulk. All parties suffer from this undue prolixity of literary commemoration. The quality of the volumes is deteriorated, their circulation contracted, the reader of them bored; while the object of the cult himself, instead of being presented in clear and sharp outline which stamps itself on the memory, becomes attenuated into a confused and washy image, indistinctly discerned and readily forgotten.

In the case before us, the mischief may be partly due to the fact that the work is the joint production of two authors, one of whom undertook the biography proper, and the other the science; in practical independence of each other, we should guess, and light-hearted irresponsibility for the resulting bulkiness. At any rate there is no room here for pleading in excuse that while the bereavement is recent, and the sense of loss bitter, it is difficult to restrict the volume in which affectionate admiration loves to pour itself forth. The lapse of seventeen years was surely ample enough to allow the cooler judgment to control the effusiveness of the heart.

The pictorial illustrations with which the letter-press is enlivened are significant of the scale on which the work is constructed. Besides four portraits or sketches of the subject of the memoir, we find one of his father, another of John Dawson,

Dawson, the remarkable old surgeon-mathematician with whom he read for a few months before entering Cambridge, and a third of Dr. Woodward, the founder of the Geological Professorship of which Sedgwick was the seventh tenant. Then we have two views of the street of his native place, the little town of Dent, and another of the vicarage in which he was born, a drawing of the farm-house in which he lodged while he was a boy at Sedbergh school, a sketch of the old doorway of the school, a view of the house at Norwich occupied by him when in residence as Canon of the Cathedral, and another of a fountain erected to his memory at his birth-place. All this may possibly afford gratification to leisurely readers with whom time is no object, but it can scarcely be called business. Still more flagrant is the waste of room caused by prefacing the biography with a chapter of forty-four pages devoted to the geography, history, and social characteristics of the vale of Dent; and by taking occasion of Sedgwick's election to the Woodwardian Professorship to fill another long chapter with notices of its founder, and of the first six occupants of the Chair. One may be thankful that a line has been drawn somewhere in the range of possible topics, and that the record of Sedgwick's election on the foundation of Trinity has not been expanded into a history of the great College, with notices of its royal founder. Speaking more generally, we should say that the letters selected for publication, charming as many of them are beyond all other contents of the work, are twice as many as are needed to exhibit the writer's personality and character; and that a great deal of space besides is needlessly taken up by trivial details of geological tours, which really afford neither instruction nor entertainment. Occasionally, too, a more severe reticence would have been desirable about unedifying and long-buried contentions, notably the quarrel with Sir Roderick Murchison, and the war of pamphlets with Dr. French, the Master of Jesus College. The account given of the latter incident has, we notice, elicited, and we fear with reason, an indignant protest from one of Dr. French's representatives.

Having thus despatched the least grateful portion of our critical task, from which as wielding for the nonce the bâton of the literary police we have not thought it right to shrink, we pass on with relief to the more pleasing part of our office. While endeavouring to arrive at an estimate of Sedgwick's character and achievement, it must be borne in mind that his bringing up was an entirely rude and rustic one, among the hardy dalesmen of the north-west corner of Yorkshire where it Vol. 172.-No. 343.

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