equally trustworthy that scope will be afforded in a future life for the full manifestation of that justice? And here it may be asked, whether, in the passage in which it is argued that what we see by the light of reason here gives us no "very strong assurance of compensation and retribution hereafter," the real basis of Butler's argument is not inverted? Is it not the very fact that nature seems not uniformly to discriminate between virtue and vice; that we are unable to trace here the full development of that righteous administration whose beginnings are SO clearly manifest, which, failing to harmonize with our deepest innate convictions, suggests most strongly that what we see here is but a little section of a great circle sweeping through the eternities? The sense of incompleteness and failure conflicting with that conviction of absolute righteousness which แ the constitution of our nature" compeis us to cherish, creates a presumption of a future state of rewards and punishments strong as our faith in "the veracity of our nature and of the power which we suppose to uphold it."

Up to this point the aim has been to show that the kind of evidence of a future state called "moral," and derived from the premonitions of conscience, is equally valid, so far as appears, for the objective reality of those things which are needed to satisfy many other universal and ineradicable convictions. Into the underlying question, which readily suggests itself, what, after all, is conscience, if not the faculty whose function it is to gather up, so to speak, and enforce the moral lessons logically derivable from the facts of nature and of human life, we do not propose to enter, save as it may incidentally come up in the course of the following remarks. It can scarcely be supposed that so advanced a thinker as Mr. Goldwin Smith really intends to teach that conscience has a discriminating as well as admonitory power; that its office is to reveal any objective truth intuitively discerned, unless it be the one great truth that we are responsible for our actions. This one great axiom must, of course, underlie all its monitions, just as other intuitively discerned axioms must underlie all other knowledge. But if this be so, then how is the conclusion to be avoided that the evidence of a future state given by conscience is as truly inferential as that derived from our ideas of Justice,

Goodness, &c.? Those who have confidence in the veracity of our nature will not regard that evidence as less trustworthy in itself on this account, while the way is left open for its reinforcement from a hundred sources.

The compatibility of a thorough reliance upon moral evidence with a full acceptance of the doctrine of evolution, is the crowning logical difficulty suggested by the article before us. The present writer is conscious of no prejudice against this doctrine, which. certainly contains, at the least, a large admixture of truth. On the contrary, he is fully prepared to accept it as soon as the missing links are discovered, and its teachings can be reconciled with other undoubted facts given us in and through the constitution of our nature. And certainly that evolution is not very hard to accept which can be shown to be reconcilable with, 1st, genuine free will; 2nd, a conscience which is more than the principle of individual or tribal self-preservation; 3rd, a belief in real, personal immortality. Into the large question of the truth or falsity, or the probable admixture of the two, in evolution, it would be quite out of place to enter here, even if time and space did not forbid. The shape of the theory itself varies, probably, with the cast of each containing mind. We are simply concerned to know the particular shape it assumes in the mind of the writer of the article before us, that we may be aided in our attempt to harmonize the apparent contradictions that puzzle us. Unfortunately, the scanty materials at hand are insufficient to afford us such knowledge. 'Around us we see animals, some of them probably representing our immediate physical progenitors, passing their lives within the narrow circle of their own impressions, which is the universe to them, in total unconsciousness of that larger universe which a more developed reason and the appliances of science have opened to us." "It is conceivable that as from the inorganic was evolved the organic, and from the organic, humanity, so humanity itself may pass into a higher phase, such as we denominate spiritual life." From the passages which we have italicized in the above extracts, the author's view in regard to the general law of development upward, from the lowest primordial forms, is tolerably clear. What is not indicated is his conception of the power which originates and rules over this develop

ment, for he can scarcely impugn the veracity of our nature by ignoring causal instinct and taking refuge in nescience pure and simple. Does to his view "the vista of evolution recede into the simply mechanical," and is it "intersected at dimly seen stages by entering lights, first of chemical affinity, then of life, and finally of consciousness? We need not stay to urge, in the graphic words of Martineau, "This supplies the 'when' but not the whence' of each. Something more is needful if you would show that it is the product of its predecessor. Instead of advancing from behind, it may have entered from the side. You cannot prove a pedigree by offering a date."* More to our point is it to ask how, when the new lights which have entered either from behind or at the side predominate so as to give to the whole scene its shape and shade and colour, is it possible still to view it in its pristine aspect. To be more specific, how can evolution in its course develop a thinking being with a genuine freedom of will-a power, that is, of choice and action which is something more than the exact product of the interplay between organization and environment-and be evolution still? Solong as we plant our feet firmly upon necessitarian principles, however we may be forced to ignore or belie the testimony of our own consciousness, we may succeed in avoiding this logical pitfall. But the moment that stage of evolution is reached when a living, independent will struggles into freedom from the thrall of blind forces and surroundings, from that moment evolution is no longer lord of nature. A rival power enters, and the autocracy becomes henceforth a Spartan kingship. The destiny of the race is henceforth wrought out, not by evolution, but by "evolution and effort," as Mr. Goldwin Smith himself puts it in his closing paragraph. Nor, it must be admitted, if this utterance puts him outside the pale of orthodox Evolutionism, is he alone in his heresy. No less distinguished an apostle of the doctrine than Professor Huxley says, that in order to perform one's duty in this world of misery and ignorance "it is necessary to be fully possessed of only two beliefs-the first, that the order of nature is ascertainable by our faculties to an extent which is practically unlimited; the second,

* "Modern Materialism," Con. Rev., March, 1876.

that our volition counts for something as a condition of the course of events."* And whatever view our experience may have led us to entertain in respect to the first of these beliefs, no one, certainly, can have studied the problem very closely without being fully possessed of the second. The subtile power

of the human will counts for very much indeed as a condition of the course of events. But the question just now is, how Professor Huxley himself would rescue the statement above quoted from the dilemma it seems to involve. Are our volitions themselves but so many factors in the eternal progression? Then the second of the above theses is nugatory, being included in the first. Is our volition a condition standing outside and independent of that ascertainable order of nature? Then the second manifestly contradicts the first. If there is a third possible assumption capable of harmonizing the two, will not some believer in the joint sovereignty of evolution and free-will charitably reveal it?

The

Many, we are aware, will be ready to answer that the above remarks are based upon an erroneous conception of what is meant by freedom of the will. We shall be treated to nice metaphysical distinctions between freedom from law and freedom from constraint, between freedom to choose or act and freedom in choice and action, and these distinctions will come even more fully from Orthodoxy than from Evolutionism. real question is not what is meant by freedom by this or that class of writers, but what is freedom? We do not suppose Mr. Goldwin Smith is guilty of the misnomer of applying the term to the acts of an agent so restricted by "motive," or anything else, that, given an accurate knowledge of character and conditions, the action of the individual in any given case might be infallibly foretold. A free will that can be harmonized with the doctrine of the abstract predictability of volition is no freedom at all. One can hardly pass from the discussion of this topic without giving utterance to a thought that readily suggests itself. If it is still claimed that, in some way which we have failed to comprehend, a genuine freedom of human will is nevertheless compatible with evolution ; if there is no irreconcilable conflict between the conception of a

# Lay Sermon on "The Physical Basis of Life."

grand development under the operation of unvarying natural law, from the time when the globe was a chaos of nebulous matter, and that of the constant activity during a considerable portion of the time, of millions of free agents- agents not only capable of modifying, obstructing, or accelerating the movements of the machinery, but constituting an important and vital part of it, and able at the same time to launch, at any moment, a consciously independent, if not absolutely new force into the sphere, what possible objection can lie against the theory of the constant presence and operation of a Supreme Will? But then, grant that, and what further need of evolution at all, save as a convenient term to denote the mode in which this Will operates? And so the circle is completed. We find ourselves again at the starting point.

The length this paper has already reached renders it necessary that the remaining points be dismissed with a word. The general principles already discussed will in the main apply here. The article under consideration takes strong ground in favour of the authority of conscience. It is more than "the principle of tribal self-preservation subtilized into etiquette." Its evidence, different in kind but not less trustworthy than that of the senses or of reason, assures us that we are "judged by an Unseen Power, under whose government it will be well with the righteous and ill with the unrighteous in the sum of things." "Conscience is the great and hitherto unshaken proof at once of the immortality of the soul and of the existence of God." Its teachings are assuredly excellent, its office sublime. But whence comes it, and who gives it this authority? Evolution; the principle of tribal self-preservation may have been its rudiment. And what was the rudiment of that? Traced to its origin, it leads us away back to a time when it was the blindest brute instinct; nay, it loses itself and us in the darkness which lies far behind the entrance of the light of the lowest animal life, and, we suppose, the simplest chemical affinity. Whence, then, we repeat, has it this authority? What bestows the authority? And when? At what point in the development? We would not stake our highest well-being upon the vati cinations of an unauthenticated seer.

And what of the immortality it foretells? Vague, it is true, and ambiguous is its voice

as that of Delphic oracle. It has not even any sure framework of personality to which it may attach the good or ill it foretells. It seems to repudiate with Mill the testimony of "the constitution of our nature," that the attribute of thought must belong to a subject. "Substance is but a general name for the perdurability of attributes. Wherever there is a series of thoughts connected together by memories, that constitutes a thinking substance." "How our existence can continue beyond death is a mystery, no doubt." A tenfold mystery, if the "we," the "ego," which is the stereotyped expression in all languages of the universal belief, strong as man's faith in the veracity of his nature, that thinking is the attribute of a subject, the act of an agent, has no objective existence. There is no longer even a thread of gossamer on which to string the series of states of consciousness which constitutes all there is of us. Memory, itself one constituent of the series, cannot be conceived as such a filament. How then is continuity possible when the organism which must be the only bond of union here is dissolved? The law of evolution is appealed to for an answer. "There can be no reason for believing that the law ceased to operate, and that the series of ascending phases of existence was closed, just at the point at which man emerged from the animal." "It is conceivable that as from the inorganic was evolved the organic, and from the organic, humanity, so humanity itself may pass into a higher phase, such as we denominate spiritual life."

But has humanity passed into this higher phase? If so, when? There must have been a time when humanity had not reached this point in the ascending scale, and so a part of humanity which has no future life. But further, humanity's memory retains no trace of the past stage when it was embodied in those animals which were its immediate progenitors. What ground of assurance then have we that humanity, as embodied in those representatives who have passed or may pass into the higher phase, will retain any nexus in consciousness to link the new life with the former? A future life which is not a conscious continuance of the present would be an unsatisfying delusion. Such a continuity to be real must be personal and individual. One marked feature of many modern speculations is the tendency to sink the individual in the mass. This is in direct