élite of the profession; and, what is perhaps more to the point, it contains a considerable admixture of men, the nature of whose practice has given them a wider acquaintance with the lay world, and with the data upon which legislation must practically be based, than falls to the lot of large numbers of the profession absorbed from the first in their local professional avocations, and unavoidably prone to exclusively professional views.

The view of the Medical Council was expressed in June 1875, when they reported to the Lord President that the Council are not prepared to say that women ought to be excluded from the profession.' Nothing could be more accurate, in my opinion, than this implied statement of the question, which was nothing less or other than this: • Shall women be excluded by law?' And nothing could be wiser than their conclusion as the expression of opinion of a body responsible to the public for the whole medical profession of the country. That sentence was the coup de grâce to the medical, and indeed to all other, opposition to the women's claim. Had the Council taken a different view, the claim of the women might have been postponed and evaded for yet a little time; it could not, I believe, have been defeated. But now the concession is made with the assent of the great representative body of the profession, and that representative body is placed in altogether truer relations with Parliament and Government and public opinion than might otherwise have been the case, to the great benefit, in all probability, of its own future influence in legislation and administration. Her Majesty's Government has been marked in its deference to the Medical Council, and rightly so; for it is in the interests of the public as well as of the profession that Parliament and Government, in questions affecting a great profession, should be able to deal with it with the aid and intermediation of a body of men so distinguished and so competent, and with something of the training in life which is necessary to larger legislative views. The Government did well to act through such a body; and although Lord Sandon's help seemed from time to time to be given with a certain timidity and reserve, I willingly acknowledge the obligations in this matter of women to him, and, I should like to add, to Lord Beaconsfield, whose real interest in the subject, as a woman's question, I have not been able to doubt.

Of the Royal Free Hospital, and of its chairman, what can I say more or better than that, in their own words, they have done that which was 'just and right,' save this also, that they have done it in the best way? We shall have a real experiment now, and a conclusive and convincing answer, for our time, to the question, Do women want this, or do they not?'

6

One thing more remains to record. These pages will, I think, have presented to the reader's mind evidence of a tough and persistent and continuous struggle. Such struggles do not persist and

succeed, according to my experience, without the accompanying fact, the continuous thread as it were, of one constant purpose and dominant will. Dr. Sophia Jex-Blake has made that greatest of all the contributions to the end attained. I do not say that she has been the ultimate cause of success. The ultimate cause has been simply this, that the time was at hand. It is one of the lessons of the history of progress that when the time for a reform has come you cannot resist it, though, if you make the attempt, what you may do is to widen its character or precipitate its advent. Opponents, when the time has come, are not merely dragged at the chariot wheels of progress-they help to turn them. The strongest force, whichever way it seem to work, does most to aid. The forces of greatest concentration here have been, in my view, on the one hand the Edinburgh University led by Sir Robert Christison, on the other the women claimants led by Dr. Sophia Jex-Blake. Defeated at Edinburgh, she carried her appeal to the highest court, that most able to decide and to redress, the High Court of Parliament representing the nation itself. The result we see at last. Those who hail it as the answer which they sought have both to thank, in senses and proportions which they may for themselves decide.

JAMES STANSFELD.

4

REJOINDER ON AUTHORITY IN MATTERS
OF OPINION.

HAVING long believed that no small mass of opinion was in this our day running very wild on the subject of Authority, both in itself and in its relation to human, thought and action, I thought myself fortunate in being able, four months ago, to invite public attention to a work by Sir George Lewis, which had never obtained the amount of attention it seemed to me to deserve.

It was, I believe, with surprise and a startled emotion that many readers found themselves confronted with an adverse witness, whom they had counted as their own; and I could not have complained, if it had been their first thought that I had been purloining the aid of his calm and weighty judgment. I am therefore pleased to find that Sir James Stephen, who has grappled more methodically than others (as far as I know) with my statements, only finds it difficult to agree with me that Lewis has written this and that, and mainly relies upon the proposition that he ought not to have so written; that the passages I have cited are in direct opposition to a great number of other passages' which lay deeper in his mind, and which ought to overrule hasty expressions into which he had been casually betrayed.

I think myself to be thus possessed of an advantage over my courteous though formidable antagonist, in that he is compelled in a measure to assail the consistency of Sir G. Lewis, and to show that, for once, he did not duly measure the sense of the words he used; whereas I am able to acknowledge that he is thoroughly coherent, and pay to his work, which I only seek further to develope, a tribute of less reserved admiration.

The principle of authority I take to be this: that the mass and quality of assent to a proposition in some minds may be, without examination of the grounds, a legitimate ground of assent for other minds, in matters of knowledge, and in matters of voluntary action.

The definition of authority cannot perhaps be better given than in a passage near the end of the work of Lewis. It is the influence which determines the belief without a comprehension of the proof.'' Although Lewis is limited by his title to matters of opinion, his

1 Essay, p. 369.

definition includes principles and rules of human conduct, and all matters about which a doubt may reasonably exist;' consequently, all fairly disputable matters of fact. His work is, therefore, largely conversant with the sphere of action; and, though his title is accurate, it will not, without due attention to his definition, be accurately understood.

It excludes, on the one hand, matters of certainty; on the other hand, matters of compulsion. In matters of certainty (whether they are few or many, I do not now inquire, but I believe them to be few), authority passes out of view; and in matters of compulsion, opinion need not be considered.

Authority, however, is not an ideal or normal, but a practical or working, standard. It may be thought, in the case of a being whose nature is based on intelligence and freedom, to present an anomaly: it certainly presents a limitation. But not (in mathematical phrase) a constant limitation. There is no point, at which we may not throw back the boundary, and enlarge the sphere of direct knowledge, and of conviction and action founded thereupon. There is no point, at which we ought not to so throw it back, according to our means and opportunities. Life should be spent in a strong continuous effort to improve the apparatus for the guidance of life, both in thought and action. We must ever be trying to know more and more what are the things to be believed and done. In pursuing this end, the exercise of free intelligent thought may, indeed, greatly enlarge the sphere of authority. For example, in learning facts of physical science, as when we inquire about the results obtained by the Challenger;' or in becoming more largely acquainted with the laws of health from the mouth of a judicious physician. This duty, however, is covered and overlapped by another duty: the duty of constantly endeavouring, within the limit of our means, to corroborate or test authority by inquiry, which finally means to supplant trust by knowledge. And this duty is supreme. But it is insidiously dogged by the danger of mistaking the limit of our means, and thus supplanting trust, not by our knowledge, but by our ignorance dressed out in the garb of knowledge.

6

Some advantage has been taken of my having compared authority to the crutch3 which we use as a substitute for a missing or a halting limb; on the ground that the man must himself move the crutch. My antithesis, however, is not between the crutch and the man, but the crutch and the limb. To place the antithesis between the crutch and the man is the re-introduction of that old confusion of thought which places reason in antagonism to authority, and which Lewis has endeavoured to explode. If we resolve the figure into fact, reason is the man; and the question is whether, in the absence or imperfection of his limb, which is knowledge, and which alone expresses the fullest

2 Essay, p. 3.

Nineteenth Century, p. 293.

development of his nature, he shall use his crutch, which is authority.

Or, varying the illustration to meet the taste of the objector, I may compare authority to a carriage in which we may properly take our places to perform long distances that we cannot achieve on foot. But, of course, there is excess as well as defect in the use of authority; and of this excess we are guilty when we suffer the love of knowledge to grow cold, when we cease to court the genial warmth imparted by a real basking in the sun of Truth, and when we are satisfied with a lazy, servile acquiescence in the opinions of other men. The proper function of authority is to enlarge, not to contract, our horizon. It is the function of a telescope, which enables us to see what without it we could not see at all; but what, if we could see it with the naked eye, we should, I suppose, see better.

While authority, as between men and man, is in the nature of a substitute for observation and reflection, the two methods are likewise susceptible of combination in every varying degree. Much knowledge, which we have erroneously believed to be complete, proves itself, in process of time or thought, to be incomplete; but authority, resting as a stay behind it, may bring the aggregate of evidence up to the point which justifies or requires belief or action as the case may be. And, on the other hand, where authority by itself reaches a certain way, but is not so clear or constant as to supply a full-formed motive, an independent examination, in itself partial, may supply confirmatory considerations which fill up the void. Evidence ought to be sufficient, but need not be homogeneous. It may be made up of direct and indirect; the direct evidence of inquiry, which places us mentally in contact with the thing to be received, or the indirect evidence of authority, which gives a mediate contact with it, through the minds of others. In all these modes and shapes of the question, it is implied that the knowledge is not perfect, and that the authority is not absolute. Even in their combination, they will commonly form no more than a preponderance of reason on behalf of what is proposed for our acceptance. But this preponderance is all that can generally be had; in other words, we fall back upon the great dictum of Butler, that probable evidence is the guide of life.

As by the conditions of our nature we can rarely (at most) have access to absolute knowledge, so we have in this inquiry no concern with absolute authority. The only absolute authority, as between men and man, is that which commands and enforces action, for example, that of the State. And we are not now contemplating that absolute authority over the mind, which lies not between men and man, but between God and man. For whatever Revelation and Inspiration be, we of this day do not claim to be in the condition of their immediate receivers. The mode of our own personal access to what they have conveyed must be considered as subject to the general laws which