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ON HIBERNICISMS IN PHILOSOPHY.

still as men are not born so well-feathered | confounds two ideas which are entirely as brush-turkeys, Berkeley's argument distinct, although the one is the correlawith just this im- tive of the other. It confounds Susceptistands good for menportant caution derived from the provok- bility to Sensation with Potentiality to ing bird that the non-existence of intui- cause it. When I think of matter as a tive perceptions is a particular and not a Potentiality of Sensation, I mean that I general truth. In Berkeley's argument, think of it as having the power to awake however, as applied to men and not to sensations in me. I do not think of it as chicks, we have an example of accurate having itself the capability of experiencing sensations. Mr. Mill is confounding the and careful reasoning. An example not less remarkable of a false active agent with the passive subject. application of the same process is the fur- There is a well known story of a country ther argument maintained by Mr. Mill that Scotchman, who when he was asked by a the sensations from which we derive our dentist to open his mouth, replied with conceptions of matter do not really indi- characteristic caution, "Naa, maybe ye'll cate anything, or justify us in concluding bite me." This Scotchman, like Mr. Mill, the existence of anything whatever except was thinking of teeth as a Potentiality of "potentialities of other sensations." And Sensation, but he forgot, also like Mr. here we have, as it seems to me, another Mill, that the potentiality to cause that of those self-contradictions in which all sensation lay in the man that had the metaphysical writings abound. After an mouth in a position to bite, and not in the elaborate argument to prove the non-ex-man who had the finger in a position to be istence of abstract ideas, we find Mr. Mill bitten. When will metaphysicians undercontending that an abstract idea― abstract stand that a short phrase does not always up to the double-distilled essence of ab- mean a simple idea? When will they unstraction is the only reality of which derstand that they do not succeed in an"A alyzing thought by simply ignoring some we have any assurance in the world. potentiality of sensation"-what is this essential part of it? idea? It is not a sensation; it is not even merely the recollection of a past sensation. It includes this indeed; but it includes it along with a multitude of other things-along with all the mental conceptions which go to bind together the past with the present and the future, to assure us of the continuity of our own existence, and of the external agencies which act and react upon our organism. I deny, indeed, that our conception of matter can be boiled down into a "potentiality of sensation." Something there is in the body which has escaped in the process of extraction. Some elements there are in the idea which are left out in the pretended abstract. But this is not my point now. My point is that Mr. Mill's account of it is, first, an abstract an abstract of a multitude of things; and secondly that it is a bad abstract an abstract which involves a confusion of ideas, and the admission of one essential element of thought in the very attempt to deny or to expel it. I so far agree with Mr. Mill as to admit that the Potentiality of Sensation is an idea inseparable from our conception of matter. But Potentiality involves in its very root and essence the idea of a dormant power-of something having potency, and this is an idea which attaches primarily to the active cause, not to the passive subject of sensation. This phrase, invented by Mr. Mill,

There are three great subjects on which, as it appears to me, philosophy has been largely vitiated by like confusions. One is the theory of Causation; another is the theory of Morals; and the last is the comthe theory of Life. paratively new one We are told that we know nothing of causation, properly so called, and that what we mistake for it is merely "invariability of sequence." To my mind every form in which this statement can be made - and there are many-involves a bull. That we have some idea of causation which is not mere invariability of sequence is involved in the very argument or asWe sertion which discriminates the two ideas, and then tries to confound them. have the idea of "it must" over and above the idea of "it always does." Nay, we cannot even think of the invariability of In truth, sequence, without seeing in that invariability the working of a cause. there is no such thing as invariability, exParticular sequences cept as applicable to this abstract idea of causal connection.

are not invariable. We do not attach the idea of invariability to any one sequence that we see, or hear, or feel, or touch, however uniform our experience of such sequence may be. Every such sequence we can conceive to be interrupted, broken, stopped. But there is one thing we cannot conceive, and that is, that this break

or cessation should be itself uncaused. I, are drawn between them.
am not speaking of how this idea arises,
nor am I discussing whether it corre-
sponds to an absolute universal truth. I am
only saying that we have this idea, and that
it is an idea different in kind from mere in-
variability of sequence and cannot be re-
solved into it-unless, indeed, the phrase
invariablity of sequence be in itself under-
stood as involving the idea of necessity.

Torture it as you will, it cannot be made to confess that it has been changed at nurse.

In like manner the attempt in biological or physiological science to get rid of the idea of "life," or to reduce it to simpler terms, breaks down into similar confusions. Professor Huxley, in his ingenious and in many ways instructive essay on the "Physical Basis of Life," has tried to represent It is because Mr. Mill rejects the idea of life as a mere name for the properties of a causation, and avoids the word, that ho is particular kind of matter called protodriven to define our idea of matter as re-plasm, and says it is as absurd to set up solvable into a "potentiality of sensation.' these properties into a separate entity unThis is no necessary part of the philosophy der the name of Life, as it would be to set which traces all our ideas to experience. up the properties of water as a separate Locke, who was the great apostle of that conception under the name of "aquosity." philosophy, describes matter as that which But in the conduct of this argument Pro66 causes or "has power to produce "fessor Huxley is compelled by the necessiour sensations. And so does Mr. Mill ties of thought, reflected in the necessities when he speaks as a Logician✶ and not as of language, to contradict himself. If life a Metaphysician. This, so far as it goes, be the property of protoplasm, and nothis a fair account of at least the skeleton ing else, it must be mere tautology to speak or framework of our conceptions respect- of "living protoplasm," and mere selfing matter, although I am very far from contradiction to speak of "dead protoadmitting that it is a complete account, or plasm." And yet Professor Huxley uses anything like a complete account, of all both expressions over and over againthat enters into those conceptions. Every and must use them, if he wishes to distinanalysis of mind, like every analysis of guish between separate ideas, although it matter, in order to be a true analysis, be in the very endeavour to confound must account for all the elements to be them. found in the subject of examination. I do not think that Locke's analysis fulfils this condition. It appears to me that there are elements in our conception of matter - especially as that conception has been enriched by modern science of which Locke's definition takes no account. But at least it does not commit the blunder of looking at one of these elements, and that one of the most prominent, of defining it, of examining it, and then deliberately rejecting it as non-existent.

The same objections apply, as it seems to me, to all attemps which have been made to reduce the idea of moral obligation to the fear of punishment, to utility, or to any other principle but itself. They all labour under the same insuperable fault of wilfully discarding an element of thought, which is, nevertheless recognized in the very terms of the argument by which it is explained away. How it comes, from what source derived these may be more or less accessible subjects of speculation. But there it is; differing in kind and in quality from all the supposed elements of its composition, and admitted so to differ in the very comparisons which

• Mill's "Logic," Book I., c. ili., §§ 6, 7, 8.

Professor Huxley complains that it is a frivolous objection to urge that "living protoplasm can never be analyzed, because the life of it is expelled in the very process of analysis. The conclusion defended evidently is, that we are safe in assuming the composition of dead and living protoplasm to be the same. Very well, be it so, - then so much the more evident it becomes that the life or the deadness of the protoplasm depends upon something entirely different from that physical composition which is alike in the living and in the dead.

Nor does it mend the matter to ascribe the difference between life and death to some undetectable difference in physical "conditions," as distinguished from physical composition. This is merely to hide our conception of one kind of difference which is clear, definite, and immense, under a word chosen because it suggests another kind of difference which is obscure, indefinite, and minute. We may call life a "condition," and deadness another condition, if we please. But this does not alter the fact that if the difference between life and deadness does depend on any physical difference, it is one undetectable, and belonging therefore, at best, to those "sub

strata of phenomena " which Professor Huxley in the same essay pronounces to be "imaginary."

I entirely agree with Professor Huxley's assertion that the language both of materialism and of spiritualism has only a relative truth. I believe the idealism which tries to expel our conception of matter to be as false as the materialism which tries to banish our conception of life or spirit. In this respect the language of the vulgar is infinitely more true and more subtle than the language of philosophers. I have spoken elsewhere of "the profound but conscious metaphysics of human speech."* And it has been all the more profound in proportion as it has been unconscious. Language is a self-registering index of the operations of mind. The conceptions of which it is a witness may be defined and traced, but are not to be explained away. All the truth that there is in the phraseology of materialism is reflected accurately in the ordinary use of language. When metaphysicians attempt to get behind that use, they generally do so only to "meddle and muddle." A man may speak of his brains as synonymous with his intellect, and nobody will derive an erroneous impression from language referring to a connection which is the most familiar of all facts, although its nature is incomprehensible. But this is a very different thing from attempting deliberately to confound connection with identity under the cover of some ambiguous word. The half-truth of materialistic phraseology ceases when that phraseology pretends to represent a wholetruth. Moreover, the fallacy which it then becomes is in the nature of nonsense. And this only is my point now. Nor is it surprising that when men try to explain away their own ideas, they should get into the atmosphere of bulls. When we try to get outside ourselves, our attitudes are not likely to be otherwise than ludicrous as may be seen in the case of our canine friends when they take it into their heads to gyrate in energetic pursuit of their own tails.

The metaphysicians and physicists with whom I have been dealing seem to me to be one and all men who walk up to some idea - some old and familiar acquaintance of the mind-recognize it, peer into its face, and then accost it, as the Irishman accosted his acquaintance in Miss Edgeworth's story: "When I first saw you, I thought it was you, but now I see you are another."

Reign of Law," Fifth Ed. p. 308.

From The Cornhill Magazine.
RIQUET A LA HOUPPE.

BY MISS THACKERAY.
CHAPTER I.

Of all the myths of the fairy age, of its many legends and enchantments, true love seems to be the one great charm which has come down to us unchanged by time, untouched by steam-engines, and unexplained by science. Revenge may still exist, with its daggers, and flashes, and melodramatic boots and teeth, but we feel little sympathy for it, and are glad to see it looking more and more clumsy and out of place, except indeed, in a police court, or on the boards of a Surrey theatre. Mystery is also somewhat old-fashioned, and its poor old veils are sadly torn about and darned, and its wonders and terrors exploded. High-flown romance seems out of tune with our modern ideas, and if Lord Hubert went off to his club with Lady Matilda's sleeve fastened to his hat, we should think him a little out of his mind. But true love is true love by whatever signs and language it is spoken,- as long as hearts beat, as long as life exists, in whatever age, iron or golden, we may seek it. Only a month ago, I met stepping across the ruins of a desolated city, a bride in her white robes, and with her white wreath of orange flower; she came smiling hand in hand with the bridegroom, and followed by a train of young men, women and children, in mourning, for the most part, but looking happy because these two were happy. For the last hour we had been driving by charred and fallen palaces, by devastated streets, where the houses were lying in heaps in their own green gardens, crushing the sward and the flower beds. We had come by a great open place, where a storm of death, and fire, and battle, had shattered the houses, furrowed the earth, spread desolation unspeakable, and so passing some battered gates reached a spot where there had once been a pleasant shade, a chirp of birds over-head in the branches, of children beneath the trees; all this was gone! We were crossing a great plain,- a plain covered with brushwood; it reached, swept and desolate, as far as we could see to the west, where Valerian was glooming in the distance. A few black figures were walking along in the sun. It seemed very sad to us, for we had known the place from childhood. We drove on in silence, and so we came at last to a portion of the wood that had been spared. Here the carriage stopped, and the driver asked us to alight and go in

fields reaping their green and saffron crops. There is a chime in the air, torrents foam, birds fly from height to height, the goats tinkle home at night, each cow rings its bell as it browses the turf and wild thyme, and the cow-woman hobbles after in her big straw hat knitting as she goes. My neighbour Sophy King showed me such a nice little sketch she made yesterday from the field at the back of the little inn, of the grey cow we used to see there and its old attendant; of the little gabled village, showing behind its horns. The girl had cleverly laid on her shadows and her blues and greens, and there was the village and the cow and its companion; but then, on the grey paper, she had attempted some white chalk lines. "I spoilt it with those,' she said, pointing ruefully, and then she went out on the gallery and leant over, looking up the valley to where the snow mountains were rearing upon the blue.

Sophy is an ugly little woman with red hair and a thick complexion and two little green twinkling eyes. She is bright and clever and companionable, a little abrupt, as clever and ugly people are apt to be. There she stood, in her short woollen petticoat, with two little hobnailed boots upon which she is used to scramble about the mountains.

H. and I looked at each other. Had it all been a dream? Were battle, and murder, and mourning, but horrible nightmares? We found ourselves in a green shady dell from which many an avenue ran into glimmering depths of woodland; the birds, we remember, were singing their old songs over-head; the trees were tranquilly shedding their autumn leaves, that had turned golden on the branches: they lay on the turf in a placid sunshine that brightened, but no longer burnt: the very stems of the trees were illuminated by it. A soft shady dazzle, blue and pearly mist, of green and shadow, shimmered round about us; there was a sound of water plashing, an echoing of cheerful voices of people laughing and, looking up, we saw the wedding party advancing towards us. Hand in hand came the bride and the bridegroom by a steep bank of rock, leading from the waterfall among the trees. She clung to him as she picked her way with white shining shoes among the stones; her arm floated, and sometimes her long gauzy veil caught in the branches. Some children ran up with flowers, and the bride smiled as she stooped to take them. I saw H. watching them all with kind eyes as the little procession went on towards a rustic hut among the trees where some sort of wedding feast seemed to be spread. I know not what scenes these people had lived through what privations, what losses and peril of life, We had not seen them since our last and wreck of hope. Here they were re-triennial visit to our old friend Mrs. Dorjoicing at peace among the very ruins mer at Lulworth. They were staying of warcheered by the kindly charm that there at the time, and Sophy had taken a comes home even to the saddest hearts. girlish fancy to me. I confess I was glad The wedding guests were in black, as I of her company. The house was deadly have said, but the bride was dressed like dull. Mrs. Lulworth still reigned for her any bride in any peaceful land, where the aunt, and did her best to pull down the harvests ripen and the country people blinds, muffle up the furniture, and drive store their grain at their leisure, where the away all guests, conversation, and ease of only roll is that of the heavy-laden carts, mind or of body; but old Mrs. Dormer, or the farm engine, in its shed; where the the real lady of the manor, seemed to arms are peaceful scythes, and spades have taken a new lease of energy, and overturning the soil, and the wasps are suddenly at ninety to reassert her rights. the enemies the housewives dread, while Since Cecilia (whom some called the sleeptheir plums hang ripe beside the cottage ing beauty) had married her cousin Frank door. Lulworth, Mrs. Dormer had seen more of his family, and was for ever inviting them, to Mrs. Lulworth's unfeigned jealousy. She had always hated Frank's father. She liked her son-in-law individually, but she detested him collectively. There was no end to his family - it was always turning up. Frank had several sisters older than

Even in poor war-driven France there are places as still and peaceful as the parish of Dorlicote-cum-Rockington, of which place I, by a certain association of ideas, was thinking when I wrote these last lines. In these little mountain villages of Savoy the people are at work upon their sloping

This was their second visit to the little bathing-place. Mrs. King had been so decidedly the better for her mud-baths and her tumblers of nasty water, that they had come back this second year, and proposed that we should join them.

Sylvia! What a name," said Mrs. Lulworth. "We shall have to send to meet them, I suppose, and the carriage has already been She stopped short, seeing me there, for H. and I had arrived only an hour before.

himself, some married, some unmarried. "No, mamma," said Cecilia, flushing up. The eldest of all was our friend Mrs." They are quite well, and though Sophy King, lately returned from India with her does not look it, she is even stronger than husband, and settled at Brighton. She Sylvia." had married very young, and her two twin daughters were grown up young ladies. "Odious girls!" thought Mrs. Charles. What possessed Mrs. Dormer to invite all these people to Lulworth? She had met them at Cecilia's house in London. They were safely disposed of on their way abroad, and now, most unnecessarily, they were to come to Dorlicote, and spend a couple of days at the hall before they started.

"I wonder if you will think Sylvia like me?" interrupted Cecilia, hastily; "everybody says so, only she is prettier than I ever was. Uncle John says she is like my grandmother Lulworth, mamma."

This was an unfortunate speech of Cecilia's. Mrs. Lulworth's expression became more and more fixed and upleasant.

"That will be a reason for the whole family's remaining another fortnight," said the ungracious woman.

"And pray why should my niece and her children not remain a fortnight," said the old fairy, suddenly appearing in the midst of us on her rolling chariot.

Mrs. Dormer at ninety years of age seemed younger, brighter, more interested in her surroundings than she had ever been. She was a little deaf, but she had a wonderful trumpet, and her eyes sparkled brighter and brighter; she wrote the same delicate, though trembling hand; she was lame, but, if she chose, she could fly across the room in one instant with the help of her tortoise-shell cane, and her wheel chair, upon which she would come rolling into Cecilia gave a great stare; she had not the room like any old fairy in her chariot, heard her aunt coming. Frank Lulworth only the dragons who pulled it along were had rolled the old lady in from the adjoinhuman dragons, Miss Bowley, her compan- ing room: the children followed scamperion, or Mrs. Lulworth. Sometimes, in-ing; Mrs. Charles rose to her full length stead of dragons, Cecilia's little children of claret-coloured merino, and then sat would come and try to push, frolicking all down again. round about it, and cooing and chattering in their little white pinafores.

If her advice had been taken, these children would have been brought up very differently, Mrs. Lulworth used to say, gloomily. They might run about, shout, scramble, they used to jump upon Miss Bowley's back; the amiable woman was sometimes discovered on all fours, being led round the room with Cecy's sash tied to her capstrings. One day they dived into a certain mahogany desk which their grandmother had neglected to lock. Their horror-stricken mother only rescued it in time, for Cecy had got the lid open, and Charlie was very busy under the table with something that Cecy had given him to play with. Mrs. Lulworth was heard coming, and Cecilia hurried the children away.

It was that afternoon that I heard Cecilia trying to reconcile her mother to the Kings' arrival.

"It is only for a Sunday, mamma. I think you will like Emily; she is a quiet woman, in very delicate health."

"Delicate health!" said Mrs. Lulworth. "Cecilia, do you think I do not know that people make delicate health an excuse for every idle and luxurious habit? Are the girls also in delicate health, Cecil ? " VOL. XXIV, 1017

LIVING AGE.

"Emily King is as much my niece as Cecil," the old lady went on, "and her girls are my goddaughters; one of them is a beauty; I can't say much for the other. I have some very ugly god-children; I'm always told they are clever. There is poor Tom Rickets - have you ever seen him, Frank? He called one day and nearly frightened Maria Bowley out of her wits." "Tom Rickets?" said Frank; "do you mean Tufto Rickets? We used to call him Tufto at Cambridge. He is a very good fellow, and has been very ill-used. He had some money left him and came home from India. He don't seem to know what to do with himself here."

"He is coming to dinner to-night,” said Mrs. Dormer, shaking defiantly. Yes, I asked him. He can take in Sophy King, and they can be put behind a dish-cover and talk as cleverly as they like."

"Will Mr. Tufto also require a carriage to be sent to meet him?" asked Mrs. Lilworth sarcastically.

The Kings arrived soon after luncheon in a fly, by an unexpected train. Almost everybody was out. I happened to come back early to write some letters, and I heard of their arrival. The Colonel had