govern the attainment of knowledge and the direction of conduct. It may be that the hindrances offered to the entry of truth into the mind by selfishness, prejudice, and passion are such as to require a divine influence for their removal. But that divine influence is not to be supposed to operate in derogation of regular mental laws. It may be needed to remove barriers out of their way, and to open up the field for their action; for these laws do not of themselves carry and impart the capacity or disposition to obey.

In these remarks I have dealt with authority at large, and irrespective of its application to any particular subject-matter. Let me now approach the contested part of the inquiry, as it has been handled by Sir J. Stephen.

He begins with a summary of my summary of the work. I must, for my own safety in waiving a detailed examination, make a general remark. He disputes the accuracy of my account, rather than attempts to disprove it. He supports his impeachment by reference to the difference between my habits of mind and those of Sir George Lewis; might he not better have withheld the assignment of a cause until he had verified, from Lewis's text, his allegation of the effect? I will make no retaliatory references to habits of mind. There is no profession, for example, more liable, as Mr. Burke has noticed, to entail peculiarities of mental habit, than the distinguished and noble profession of an advocate; but without doubt Sir James Stephen has taken care to purge himself of all these peculiarities. I therefore simply decline to acknowledge this general portraiture of the summary as corresponding with my original. Fortunately for our readers, they have now the means of judging this plea and counterplea, by that resort to the work on their own behalf which it was my 'general object' to suggest.

5

Farther on, Sir James Stephen becomes more definite in his criticism. He places in parallel columns the admirable passage, with which Lewis opens his fourth Chapter, and the lines in which I have endeavoured to compress that passage into about one-fourth of its length. In passing from the one to the other, I am indeed painfully conscious of descent, but my opponent holds:

1. That I seem to miss the point of the passage, which is written to contrast the growth of scientific with the growth of religious opinion.

2. That I likewise add to the passage, by imputing to Lewis the notion that the mere gradual growth' of traditive systems' invests them with trustworthy authority.'

On reference to the page, the reader will see that for neither of these allegations is there any real ground. Lewis does not here say a word of the contrast between two kinds of growth, scientific

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'Essay, p. 66.

and religious. He describes the conditions of scientific growth, and these alone, from a state of crudity to a state of maturity. The forms of this growth, stated in eighteen lines, I have indicated, and could do no more than indicate, in two, as collection, purgation, adjustment, and enlargement or advance.' He then says: A trustworthy authority is thus at length formed.' And then we arrive at the important passage: This description, however, is not applicable to religion, or at least is only applicable to it within certain limits.' That is to say, having described the true conditions of scientific growth, he must, in due order, proceed to consider whether at all, and if at all how far, these conditions are found in the case of religion. But up to this point the description is absolutely general; it might have been written by Thomas Aquinas, or it might have been written by John Mill: of either comparison or contrast there is not a trace in the passage.

Next, with respect to the second criticism. I have pointed out that Lewis here shows authority to be not that of individuals only: as if with a prevision that he would, in the vicissitudes of time, be handled by writers who treat the vast and varied subject of mental and moral evidence as if it were confined within the close and pewlike barriers of evidence merely legal; and handle authority at large as if it were only and always the testimony of A, B, and C, or even of A only, in a witness-box. Instead of which, it sometimes is like the cairn, made of stones varied in shape and size, that represent the contributions of hands unknown and innumerable; contributions, of which many are in themselves insignificant, while their aggregate is broad, solid, lofty, and defies the storm. Or, again, it is the solemn psalm, or, if this be too theological, the united shout of a vast congregation of men, in which the value of the several voices is infinitely diversified, but the few thoroughly discordant notes are lost and neutralised in the unison of the loud acclaim. In the passage cited, I describe the growth of traditive systems, without specifying that I mean only such traditive systems as are scientific. Accordingly my opponent steps in and says I have ascribed authority to the mere gradual growth' of traditive systems. With all respect, I have done no such thing. My passage is short; but the patience of my critic, I fear, failed him before he had arrived at the end. Lewis, having at the outset supplied the needful limitation of his meaning to such systems as are scientific, concludes with saying 'a trustworthy authority is thus at length formed.' I, not having in my very brief abstract previously supplied that limitation, supply it in giving the conclusion, and say 'a trustworthy authority may at length be formed.' There is no more vestige, therefore, here of 'mere gradual growth' than there was under the former head of an imaginary contrast; and both my addition to Lewis and my deviation from him have vanished, as I think, away.

Still, as we are now at close quarters, and it is a question of modes of interpreting the language and representing the thoughts of others, I must follow my opponent himself into these rather slippery departments; I hope without departing in any way from the tones of equity and kindness, which he has invariably maintained.

TEXT OF ARTICLE, p. 272. 'Fact is defined' p. 1. (i.e. in the work of Sir Geo. Lewis): 'Anything of which we obtain a conviction from our internal consciousness, or any individual event or phenomenon which is the object of sensation.'

NOTE ON ARTICLE, p. 273.

This exactly corresponds to the definition of fact given in the Indian Evidence Act, s. 1:

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"Fact" means and includes, 1. any thing, state of things, or relation of things capable of being perceived by the senses. 2. Any mental condition of which any person is conscious.

'I am responsible for this definition.'

Now here I am willing to join issue. Instead of an exact correspondence, I propound that there is here a striking, nay a glaring, and a scarcely measurable difference. My opponent limits fact, when not capable of being perceived by the senses, to a mental condition of which any person is conscious.' He seems to be entangled in that which was the contracted philosophy of Locke, the nihil in intellectu quod non prius in sensu, with no other supplement than that charitable addition which appeared to some to be sufficient, the nisi intellectus ipse. The function of the individual mind, when not concerned in dealing with what the senses have imported, is limited to the perception of itself, in its various parts, and in the interaction of those parts. There is either no spiritual or no material world, apart from sense, or, if there is, we have no faculty of perceiving it, or at the least of perceiving it in such a way and with such evidence as to promote any of its phenomena to the high dignity of fact. If this be the true theory of metaphysics, then indeed I cannot wonder at any amount of struggle to get rid of authority as applicable to religion; but those who may succeed in the attempt will, I apprehend, get rid of a good deal besides authority, and even of a good deal besides religion.

When I turn to the definition of a fact as it has been given by Lewis, I read it in a very different sense. A fact, apart from sensible fact, is anything of which we obtain a conviction from our internal consciousness.' Has not Sir James Stephen been misled by the mere use of the word consciousness? When Lewis wrote these words, did he mean that there was no one thing of which we could obtain a conviction from our internal consciousness excepting of some form of our own mental condition individually? And this, be it recollected, as a privilege reserved to each man for himself. It is only within himself, and of himself, that, according to this singular theory, he can have what I may call fact-knowledge. For, so soon as he attempts to convey this knowledge to another, the thing reported loses caste, and

cannot rise above the order of an image, a rumour, a conjecture, or a dream. Within each man, and as to what forms part of himself, there is a true objectivity; but to any other man this becomes merely subjective, for of the mind of another we can have no fact-knowledge. The narrow store of mental facts allowed to us is given only for our own enjoyment, like the miser's hoard. There is no free trade in this kind of facts, no exchange of them free or otherwise, and what we see in ourselves we cannot verify by observation of others, for we have no faculty wherewith to observe what is beyond our minds. The very form of Lewis's expressions seems to me to show that he had no such limitation in his view. It would surely have been inaccurate, almost absurd, to speak of anything' thus at large, of which we obtain a conviction from our consciousness, if our consciousness were something that could have no object except itself. Plain enough, then, in the particular passage, his meaning becomes plainer still from a comparison of two passages in p. 72. He speaks, in one of them, about our experience as limited to things 'derived either from internal consciousness or external sensation.' But immediately before he speaks of matters within the subjects of consciousness or intuition, not within the range of the senses;' and the context renders it indisputable that the compass of the two passages, the one affirmative in form and the other negative, is identical. Dealing then with them as with an equation, we find that he sometimes speaks of intuition as a faculty co-ordinate with consciousness, and sometimes, in language of insufficient precision, uses consciousness in a wider sense for mental perception at large, and makes it cover both.

But Sir James Stephen seems to pass by Lewis's reference to intuition as of no account. It is only by this Draconic process of annihilating intuition that he is enabled to raise an inference in favour of his doctrine of conflicting passages, and thereby to extinguish Lewis's declaration that his principle of authority legitimately embraces the being of God, and the acceptance of Christianity.' But it is surely better to abide by all his own words, and find him coherent, than, by shutting some of them out of view, to convict him of inconsistency.

Sir James Stephen proceeds to say: "The two passages quoted from Sir George Lewis by Mr. Gladstone do not state in terms the propositions to which Mr. Gladstone considers them to be equivalent, but they do hint at and suggest them.'

The reference seems to be not quite accurate. There are no two passages quoted' by me, and considered to be equivalent to two propositions of Lewis. I have quoted one passage, and have made out another piecemeal. With this preface, let us consider the question of equivalence.

I. We have in the Essay, p. 69, the passage which I quote. After

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citing, with manifest approval, a passage from Bishop Burnet, beginning with That there is a God,' and after admitting many diversities both among the philosophers and in the popular systems of old, Lewis says:In the substantial recognition of a Divine Power, superhuman and imperceptible by our senses, all nations have agreed.'

The discussion thus closed by himself, I sum up as follows, in the strictest conformity (I believe) with the rules of Lewis in the Treatise: The consent of mankind binds us in reason to acknowledge the being of God.'

Under this head all that is allowed me by my critic is that Lewis's proposition hints and suggests.' This is a scanty-shall I say stingy? -admission. Allowing for brevity, which was an object all through, my proposition is a simple reproduction of the proposition of Lewis, together with its contextual matter. If so, he does not hint or suggest, but asserts, what I have asserted. In his analytical table of contents 10 his own summary is: All nations agree in recognising the existence of a God.'

II. The second proposition relates to Christianity. Here I have made not a quotation, but a construction, out of the text of Lewis. On referring to it again, I see that, so far from having exaggerated, I have erred rather by enfeebling the text. It is fairly represented by the following, which I present as an alternative form:"All the civilised nations of the modern world . . agree, not merely in believing in the existence of a God . . . but in recognising some form of the Christian religion. . . . That is to say, all nations whose agreement on a matter of opinion has any real weight or authority.' My summary 12 is :-The consent of mankind similarly binds us to the acceptance of Christianity.'

12

Apart from the meaning of the word Christianity, which I proceed to define and discuss, I again say that my short proposition is a short, clear, irrefutable, and inevitable reproduction of the longer form in which Lewis has stated the proposition; and that he does not hint or suggest, but in stringent terms asserts, that which I have undertaken to assert for him.

And now we come to the real gist of Sir James Stephen's paper. All that has gone before, all attempts to establish that my account departs from the sense of my author's words, are (in military language) so many feints; and I cannot blame nor wonder at any amount of anxiety to avoid losing the benefit of a great 'authority in matters of opinion.' We now come to the true attack; and it is really not an attack upon my commentary, but upon the text of Lewis. Sir James Stephen proceeds as follows:

$ They (the passages) are, however, if taken as asserting what they suggest,

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10 Essay, p. vi.

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