frontiers of Natal. It seems to me that these complaints are altogether unreasonable, and that, according to the published accounts, more aid than we had a right to expect has been obtained from these native contingents, considering how hastily they have been raised, and how little time there has been for training them. But if instead of these untrained levies we had had properly organised bodies of men who for two or three years had been under regular military discipline, we cannot doubt, from what we know of the qualifications of the Kafirs for military duty and their capability of being trained, that their services would have been invaluable. Nor would there have been the slightest difficulty in creating in the last twenty years a force of this description which might now have become a large one. Beginning on a small scale, Kafir lads from the missionary schools might have been enlisted and formed into pioneer companies. Under European officers they might have been instructed both in the use of arms and in labour. Very low pay would have been necessary for them, and they might, by the judicious employment of their labour in making roads and in public works, have been made to earn more than the money they would have cost. At the end of four or five years they might have been settled in villages, in cottages built by their own labour, in situations in which their labour would have been available for the white farmers, and with the obligation of taking arms again to defend the colony in times of danger. They would have found wives for themselves in the girls brought up in the missionaries' schools, and each village of this sort, with its chapel, its school, its hospital, and its police station, would have become a centre of civilisation and a post of defence for the colony.

There is, I trust, nothing visionary in believing that great results might be attained by acting judiciously on the policy I have endeavoured to describe, and that a noble field is open for British enterprise and philanthropy in South Africa. If peace and order are only maintained, we may rely on the exertions of missionaries and merchants, without direct assistance from the Government (which would probably do more harm than good by interfering), to spread Christianity, civilisation, and commerce through this vast territory. A policy having this for its aim would, I am persuaded, be a better and wiser one, even looking merely to our selfish and pecuniary interests, than that which has of late years been popular in Parliament, though I doubt whether it has gained equal acceptance in the country. But I cannot admit that this question is to be considered only as one of money. Nations, like individuals, have their duties, which they cannot, without guilt, neglect; and this country, by its power and by the position it has voluntarily assumed in Africa, has incurred responsibilities which it is not at liberty to throw off. Sixty years ago, in consequence of an address from the House of Commons, the eastern part of the Cape Colony was settled by emi

The

grants sent out from this country at the public expense. settlers have grown to a large body of people, who have accumulated much wealth and attained considerable prosperity in spite of the dangers they have been exposed to from the uncivilised tribes in the midst of which they were planted. By the unwise arrangements of the British Government of the day, the original settlers were thinly scattered over a wide district, which greatly aggravated the danger of their position, and brought upon them heavy losses in former wars. They have not even yet attained a position of security; and I must contend that, considering how they have been brought into this position, the mother country is not entitled to disclaim its responsibility for their protection. We have also a duty towards the coloured races. There would be at least a fair probability of saving them, by the means I have pointed out, from the usual fate of coloured people among whom European colonists have settled; but this can only be hoped for if the control of the British Government is maintained. Should it be withdrawn, the jealousies and animosities of race and colour (not a little aggravated by recent events) are almost certain to increase, and to lead, sooner or later, to a war of colour which in the end could hardly fail to result in the extermination of the weaker and less civilised race, notwithstanding its great superiority in numbers. Is England justified in deliberately taking a course calculated to bring about such a result?

GREY.

ON SENSATION

AND THE UNITY OF

STRUCTURE OF SENSIFEROUS ORGANS.

THE maxim that metaphysical inquiries are barren of result, and that the serious occupation of the mind with them is a mere waste of time and labour, finds much favour in the eyes of the many persons who pride themselves on the possession of sound common sense; and we sometimes hear it enunciated by weighty authorities, as if its natural consequence, the suppression of such studies, had the force of a moral obligation.

In this case, however, as in some others, those who lay down the law seem to forget that a wise legislator will consider, not merely whether his proposed enactment is desirable, but whether obedience to it is possible. For, if the latter question is answered negatively, the former is surely hardly worth debate.

Here, in fact, lies the pith of the reply to those who would make metaphysics contraband of intellect. Whether it is desirable to place a prohibitory duty upon philosophical speculations or not, it is utterly impossible to prevent the importation of them into the mind. And it is not a little curious to observe that those who most loudly profess to abstain from such commodities are all the while unconscious consumers, on a great scale, of one or other of their multitudinous disguises or adulterations. With mouths full of the particular kind of heavily buttered toast which they affect, they inveigh against the eating of plain bread. In truth, the attempt to nourish the human intellect upon a diet which contains no metaphysics is about as hopeful as that of certain Eastern sages to nourish their bodies without destroying life. Everybody has heard the story of the pitiless microscopist, who ruined the peace of mind of one of these mild enthusiasts by showing him the animals moving in a drop of the water with which, in the innocency of his heart, he slaked his thirst; and the unsuspecting devotee of plain common sense may look for as unexpected a shock when the magnifier of severe logic reveals the germs, if not the full-grown shapes, of lively metaphysical postulates rampant amidst his most positive and matter-of-fact notions.

By way of escape from the metaphysical Will-o'-the-wisps generated in the marshes of literature and theology, the serious

student is sometimes bidden to betake himself to the solid ground of physical science. But the fish of immortal memory, who threw himself out of the frying-pan into the fire, was not more ill advised than the man who seeks sanctuary from philosophical persecution within the walls of the observatory or of the laboratory. It is said that'metaphysics' owe their name to the fact that, in Aristotle's works, questions of pure philosophy are dealt with immediately after those of physics. If so, the accident is happily symbolical of the essential relations of things; for metaphysical speculation follows as closely upon physical theory as black care upon the horseman.

One need but mention such fundamental, and indeed indispensable, conceptions of the natural philosopher as those of atoms and forces: or that of attraction considered as action at a distance; or that of potential energy; or the antinomies of a vacuum and a plenum; to call to mind the metaphysical background of physics and chemistry; while, in the biological sciences, the case is still worse. What is an individual among the lower plants and animals? Are genera and species realities or abstractions? Is there such a thing as Vital Force? or does the name denote a mere relic of metaphysical fetichism? Is the doctrine of final causes legitimate or illegitimate? These are a few of the metaphysical topics which are suggested by the most elementary study of biological facts. But, more than this, it may be truly said that the roots of every system of philosophy lie deep among the facts of physiology. No one can doubt that the organs and the functions of Sensation are as much a part of the province of the physiologist, as are the organs and functions of motion, or those of digestion; and yet it is impossible to gain an acquaintance with even the rudiments of the physiology of sensation without being led straight to one of the most fundamental of all metaphysical problems. In fact, the sensory operations have been, from time immemorial, the battle-ground of philosophers.

I have more than once taken occasion to point out that we are indebted to Descartes, who happened to be a physiologist as well as a philosopher, for the first distinct enunciation of the essential elements of the true theory of sensation. In later times, it is not to the works of the philosophers, if Hartley and James Mill are excepted, but to those of the physiologists, that we must turn for an adequate account of the sensory process. Haller's luminous, though summary, account of sensation in his admirable Prima Lineæ, the first edition of which was printed in 1747, offers a striking contrast to the prolixity and confusion of thought which pervade Reid's Inquiry, of seventeen years' later date. Even Sir William Hamilton, learned historian and acute critic as he was, not only

1 In justice to Reid, however, it should be stated that the chapters on Sensation in the Essays on the Intellectual Powers (1785) exhibit a great improvement. He is, in fact, in advance of his commentator, as the note to Essay II. chap. ii. p. 248 of Hamilton's edition shows.

failed to apprehend the philosophical bearing of long-established physiological truths; but, when he affirmed that there is no reason to deny that the mind feels at the finger points, and none to assert that the brain is the sole organ of thought, he showed that he had not apprehended the significance of the revolution commenced, two hundred years before his time, by Descartes, and effectively followed up by Haller, Hartley, and Bonnet in the middle of the last century.

In truth, the theory of sensation, except in one point, is, at the present moment, very much where Hartley, led by a hint of Sir Isaac Newton's, left it, when, a hundred and twenty years since, the Observations on Man: his Frame, his Duty, and his Expectations, was laid before the world. The whole matter is put in a nutshell in the following passages of this notable book :-

External objects impressed upon the senses occasion, first on the nerves on which they are impressed, and then on the brain, vibrations of the small and, as we may say, infinitesimal medullary particles.

These vibrations are motions backwards and forwards of the small particles; of the same kind with the oscillations of pendulums and the tremblings of the particles of sounding bodies. They must be conceived to be exceedingly short and small, so as not to have the least efficacy to disturb or move the whole bodies of the nerves or brain.3

The white medullary substance of the brain is also the immediate instrument by which ideas are presented to the mind; or, in other words, whatever changes are made in this substance, corresponding changes are made in our ideas; and vice versâ.4

Hartley, like Haller, had no conception of the nature and functions of the grey matter of the brain. But, if for white medullary substance,' in the latter paragraph, we substitute 'grey cellular substance,' Hartley's propositions embody the most probable conclusions which are to be drawn from the latest investigations of physiologists. In order to judge how completely this is the case, it will be well to study some simple case of sensation, and, following the example of Reid and of James Mill, we may begin with the sense of smell.

2 Haller, amplifying Descartes, writes in the Primæ Lineæ, CCCLXVI.—' Non est adeo obscurum sensum omnem oriri ab objecti sensibilis impressione in nervum quemcumque corporis humani, et eamdem per eum nervum ad cerebrum pervenientem tunc demum representari animæ, quando cerebrum adtigit. Ut etiam hoc falsum sit animam inproximo per sensoria nervorumque ramos sentire.' DLVII. -Dum ergo sentimus quinque diversissima entia conjunguntur: corpus quod sentimus: organi sensorii adfectio ab eo corpore: cerebri adfectio a sensorii percussione nata: in anima nata mutatio: animæ denique conscientia et sensationis adperceptio.' Nevertheless, Sir William Hamilton gravely informs his hearers :-'We have no more right to deny that the mind feels at the finger points, as consciousness assures us, than to assert that it thinks exclusively in the brain.'-Lecture on Metaphysics and Logio, ii. p. 128.-'We have no reason whatever to doubt the report of consciousness, that we actually perceive at the external point of sensation, and that we perceive the material reality.'-Ibid. p. 129.

• Observations on Man, vol. i. p. 11.

Ibid. p. 8. The speculations of Bonnet are remarkably similar to those of Hartley; and they appear to have originated independently, though the Essai de Psychologie (1754) is of five years' later date than the Observations on Man (1749).