"All right, my boy; we'll square it off so. God bless you!" and the old man gave the young one a grip of his hard old hand. He was a little touched in spite of himself; and after Cis had left the room he sat still looking after him out of the window, as the boy wandered idly on to the drive in front of the house. "Well, well, I suppose he and I don't understand each other; he's a wellintentioned lad too, and Juliet Blair would improve him wonderfully; but he's an awful sawney. Dear, dear, dear! what a pity, what a sad pity, Georgie wasn't the boy!"

(To be continued.)

"I

S that all?" we can fancy many a disappointed reader exclaiming as he lays aside the May number of THE CANADIAN MONTHLY, after finishing Mr. Goldwin Smith's article upon "The Immortality of the Soul." "Can it be that all our fond hopes of immortality, all our cherished convictions that the grave is not the goal of life-that these minds, busy with 'thoughts that wander through eternity,' are destined to have a wider scope than that afforded by 'this bank and shoal of time,' have no broader and surer foundation than this?" Feeble proof shakes confidence like faint praise. When one finds the whole contents of three out of four possible classes of evidence of the soul's immortality ruthlessly swept aside as worthless, and the fourth attenuated to the slender thread of a conviction which, however "universal and ineradicable," begins in obscurity and ends in unfathomable mystery, it is no wonder if he be left trembling lest his most precious faith be about to undergo perpetual eclipse. It is true proof is proof. One clear demonstration is as good as fifty. But within the sphere of probable evidence-the only kind attainable upon such a question as that of the soul's immortality-to find the weight of the argument, which is naturally and necessarily cumulative, lessened by the summary rejection of one kind after another, until but a single one is left, is to have created in one's mind a dread, if not a presumption, that that kind, too, may be destined in the hands of the next analyst to be weighed in the balance and found wanting.

But what if it should be? Is not such a suggestion a cowardly attempt to forestall the judgment and becloud the real issue? Should not the great guiding principle in such an investigation be, not regard to the exigencies of a creed, or deference to a cherished conviction, but simple loyalty to truth? What possible interest can we have in deceiving ourselves or others in such a matter? Why fear the TRUTH, or shun it,

even though it should threaten to cut from under our feet the foundation of everything most surely believed, and even crush out beneath the ruins the last pulsations of the throbbing heart of faith? True, if such a result were possible, and the conclusions of some of the wise men of the day correct, one might query whether it were not more philosophical to hug a sweet delusion till the swift-coming end rather than, sadly wise, to plod the weary way to darkness under a crushing burden of gloomy, dismal truth. But from such a philosophy the deepest instincts of our nature recoil; much more the instinct of a faith which enters the Unseen, and lays hold on immortality and its Author, who is TRUTH.

Our age is often said to be an intensely practical one. It is well that truth does not compel us to accept the statement without giving to the meaning of the word "practical" a scope wide enough to take in all those great questions of faith and morals which, touching as they do at every point the burning problems of human origin and destiny, and so giving shape and colouring to all our views of life and duty, are preeminently the practical questions for men. Is there a personal author of the universe? Is the world in which we live under the government of a living, omnipresent Will? Is the conscious human soul a perennial flame enkindled and sustained by the breath of an Eternal Source of life, or is it but a transient spark struck out in the play of mysterious, but mindless, natural forces? What is the relation of this sensitive soul to that unending future which, strive as it may, it finds itself utterly unable to do away with in thought? These and the like questions are surely the most intensely interesting, and, assuming the barest possibility of gaining any light upon them, the most intensely practical, that can engage our at tention. They are all too solemn to be made themes for cavil, or for the display of attempted expertness in intellectual cut and

fence. Of these truths the writer desires to keep himself constantly reminded in carrying out a purpose which has hitherto been unavoidably delayed, by presenting some difficulties which have been suggested by the article referred to. And in so doing, he cannot refrain from expressing his gratification that Canada is at length able to sustain a Magazine in which such questions may be fully and fearlessly discussed. The fact augurs well for her intellectual future.

"What, after all, is truth?" The reply furnished by the article in question is admirable. Whatever truth may be to the highest intelligence, to us it cannot be other than "that which when put before us we are, by the constitution of our nature, under the necessity of believing." Belief of every Belief of every kind must ultimately "rest upon our faith in the veracity, so to speak, of our nature and of the Power which we suppose to uphold it." We would gladly accept this, the only sound basis for a true philosophy, as the guiding principle in the following remarks.

The views presented under the head of "Physical" evidence are suggestive of one difficulty of some magnitude. Taking the verdict of a matured judgment as the test of truth, the presumption against ninetynine one-hundredths of all the ghost stories and tales of spirit rappings and table tippings is strong enough to warrant their summary dismissal. But how are the existence and the almost universal prevalence of such beliefs to be accounted for, apart from the supposition of some background, however remote, of reality? What theory of development can account for their origin? What principle of natural selection explain their survival? We take the spiritualistic absurdities of the day as but the modern representatives of a type with which, in other forms, every age has been familiar. Granted a substratum of fact, in past, even in primeval history-a postulate which includes, of course, the existence of a spirit-world enfolding the world of matter and capable of affecting its phenomena, and so manifesting itself to a kindred human spirit-and the process by which distorted traditions of ancient verities might become fruitful sources of modern hoaxes and hallucinations is comparatively easy to understand. But to account, on the one hand, for the framing of such conceptions as those spirit apparitions and revelations, and, on the other, for the

credulous receptivity with which they have been so generally embraced, consistently with the theory that every such conception is but the "baseless fabric of a vision," if such a fabric could be baseless; that the whole vast mass of alleged "supernatural" manifestations, put into the crucible of scientific investigation, will utterly vanish, leaving no trace of any reality outside the world of sense, would seem to require a credulity even greater than that of the most enthusiastic disciple of the "mediums." To show that any one of a thousand specific legends bears the stamp of absurdity may be easy, while to account for the origin and persistence of the mythical tendency in the race, so as to eliminate every superhuman element from the history of the mystic foretimes, is by no means so easy.

The same train of remark is applicable to the objection urged against Butler's argument, drawn from the alleged indiscerptibility of the soul as "immaterial." That argument is manifestly worthless, because based upon an assumption in regard to that which transcends the sphere of our knowledge, and so cannot be the subject of affirmation or denial. But what better ground has the "presumption that the functional activity will end when the organization is dissolved?" What logical basis can all the researches of modern science furnish for such a presumption? Nay, is it not in the very nature of things impossible that legitimate grounds for such a presumption can be reached ? "The existence of a disembodied spirit must be supersensual, and of anything supersensual it is impossible to produce sensible evidence." Grant it, does not the statement hold true negatively as well as positively? Is it not, by parity of reasoning, equally impossible to produce sensible evidence of the non-existence of such a spirit? The ready answer, that no one can be asked to prove a negative, will not apply here. The presumption in question is really a negative. Again, the burden of proof does not necessarily fall upon the believer in a separate and surviving soul, since the problem is not one in which a positive quantity is set over against zero, but against another positive quantity. This latter quantity is the sum— may we not rather say the product ?-of all those factors in "the constitution of our nature," which compel us to believe that there is that in us which will survive what we call

death. How far those factors have a determinate value, we do not now stay to inquire; but it may be remarked in passing, that an important one of them is, that "universal and ineradicable" conviction to which Mr. Goldwin Smith himself assigns so large a value in the latter part of his essay. But what we wish to emphasize just here is this. The "modern developments of embryology and natural history" leave the question of the existence of a soul distinct from and surviving the bodily organs just where they find it, because it is a question entirely beyond their reach. The sum of facts present to Butler as to Spencer is that of the manifestations of functional activity, not when, but before the organization is dissolved. Modern science has certainly made valuable discoveries as to the relation of the brain to the mental functions, and has thus narrowed the field of observation, but it has changed no essential condition of the problem. Can it be shown to be even probable that the organization of the brain is not often as perfect the moment after death as the moment before? Does not, then, the fact that the functional activity in such cases. ceases before the organization is dissolved, prove that activity to be conditioned upon something else, which eludes the edge of the keenest scalpel? The nature of this something, this mysterious life-principle, has hitherto just as effectually baffled the quest of modern physiology as of ancient metaphysics.

Before leaving this point, it may not, perhaps, be presumptuous to ask whether the argument based upon the assumed impossibility of spirit manifesting itself to sense does not contain something very like a petitio principii? If such a thing as a human spirit, as ordinarily conceived, exists at all, it is mainly known to us through its relations to matter and its power of affecting it. The fancied necessity for a tertium quid to bridge the chasm between the two, so as to render interaction possible, was the offspring of a purely gratuitous assumption in the metaphysical mind. If spirit dwells in matter, interpenetrating its substance and using its properties for its own purposes, communication with spirit included, why need we suppose this moulding and controlling power over matter to be lost as soon as the connection with a particular organ is dissolved? Clearly such an assumption transcends the do

main of science. We are still in the region of mystery. And so long as the most advanced physicists are constrained to admit, with Professor Tyndall, that "the passage from the physics of the brain to the corresponding facts of consciousness is unthinkable," the theory of a separate and spiritual soul, in some way-to us mysterious, but, for aught we know, to higher intelligences perfectly simple and natural-interpenetrating and vitalizing the mind's material organ, creating all the phenomena of thought and feeling and will, is just as consonant with all the scientific facts yet known as any other possible hypothesis.

A very serious difficulty in connection. with the remaining portion of Mr. Goldwin Smith's essay is that of ascertaining upon what principle of selection he proceeds in dismissing, at a glance, the classes of evidence labelled "Metaphysical" and "Theological," and retaining that called "Moral." The inquiry is not about names, but things. The moral evidence which alone is relied upon as valid, is defined as "the universal and ineradicable conviction that our moral account is not closed by death." That is, we cannot as individuals rid ourselves of the conviction that it will make a difference to us hereafter whether we have done good or evil in this life; hence there is a strong presumption that we shall in some way consciously survive the physical dissolution which we call death. To the validity of this reasoning no one can object who assents to the philosophical principle laid down. If truth is that which "we are by the constitution of our nature under the necessity of believing," a belief so universal and persistent as the one in question comes clearly within the definition. Its rejection as worthless would lead logically to the rejection of all positive truth, the testimony of the senses included, and land us in a region of philosophic idealism, or more correctly still, nihilism. But why limit the moral evidence to this single conviction? The argument derived from the possession by the soul of such ideas as those of Goodness, Truth, &c., is regarded as little better than a philosophic reverie. "To give it any substance, we must be assured that Universal Ideas have an existence independent of the soul which participates in them." Yet a little further on we are told, "We have the ideas of eternity and infinity; we

have them as strongly and ineradicably as any ideas whatever," and the possession of these is taken as proof that "physical science, which presents to us everything under the conditions of time and space," is not any considerable approach to a complete knowledge of the universe." Now, in what does the force of this argument consist? Does it imply an objective reality corresponding to those ideas, and "independent of the soul which participates in them?" The writer would not quarrel with that position. But as he is not seeking to establish an hypothesis, but simply stating logical difficulties, the question is in what way that evidence differs from that derived from the possession of such other universal ideas as those of Absolute Justice, Goodness, &c. If by moral evidence is meant that based upon our instinctive faith, stronger than any mere intellectual persuasion, in the veracity and reliability of our own nature, why does not the same argument hold equally good in reference to any universal idea whatever? Probably this is what is meant by the "argument really moral," which is said to lurk under the form of the metaphysical, though we fail to find it appearing elsewhere. But may we not go much further? Is, for instance, our

conviction that we are under the rule of an Omnipotent Will, one whit less "universal and ineradicable" than that which Mr. Goldwin Smith accepts as the sole valid evidence of our immortality? It may not exist, it is true, in infants or in savage and degraded races, "except in a form corresponding to the general lowness of their conceptions." But if the destiny of man is wholly "wrought out by evolution and effort," surely one would think the experience and observation of all time could hardly have failed to discover it, or at least to recognise the truth and hold it fast whenever it was revealed by some keen-sighted Leucippus or Lucretius. But no; those apostles of Positivism who have appeared from time to time along the ages are but the exceptions which prove the rule. Swiftly and surely the human mind. has reverted to its deities and its hecatombs. The victims upon ten thousand heathen altars and the voices from ten thousand mosques and pagodas and Christian temples attest the universal verdict. We may try the experiment upon the individual. Let us go out into the crowd, and taking any thought

ful common man by the hand, lead him aside and ask him to look back carefully over his past life, to mark well its leading incidents, and say whether it appears to have been mainly shaped either by uniform laws or by the energy of his own will. Will he not tell us that while, on the one hand, he has been conscious of acting every moment as a free agent, and while, on the other, he has felt himself constantly hedged in, on the right hand and on the left, by great moral and social laws, every retrospect but forces upon him more strongly the conviction that his course had been, after all, shaped in accordance with what he now recognises as the design of an overruling Intelligence, by circumstances and influences which his utmost sagacity was utterly powerless either to foresee or to control; that here his path was walled across and a new way marked out for him; that there all the currents of thought and feeling were mysteriously turned into a new channel; that just at this point an apparently trivial event left its mark upon his whole subsequent life; while anon some sudden catastrophe brought confusion to all his plans. Hence he is ready to exclaim, with that great student of human life, who has crystallized in imperishable speech so many of the teachings of nature and experience-

"There's a divinity that shapes our ends, Rough-hew them how we will."

That these words express the practically universal conviction of the race will scarcely be denied. The men of science who repudiate it are scarcely more numerous than those who discard the alleged anticipations of conscience in regard to a future state. Logical strictness would probably require the classes to be identical. At any rate, if such an immortality as that of the Comtists is any evidence of the persistence of the one conviction, the worship, "for the most part of the silent sort, at the altar of the Unknown," of a Huxley and his followers, is equally valid in regard to the other.

Let us vary the illustration for a moment. If the universal and ineradicable conviction that our moral account is not closed by death may be accepted as trustworthy testimony to the reality of a future life, how can we refuse to take the conviction, equally universal and ineradicable, that Infinite Justice is at the helm of affairs, as evidence