medium and "demonstrate" only by his achievement. Nor is it any wise different with language, when that is used as an art, as the medium for an art. Words now have other than a purely intellectual value, and there are truths which they express that are not demonstrable truths. There are laws of verse in virtue of which Shakespeare is a greater poet than Longfellow; and if it is a fact that he is so, then all the laws upon which that fact depends must be facts or truths likewise. Ꭺ person who has the critical sense, and who has studied both authors, may be perfectly conscious of and yet unable to demonstrate them.

This I believe to be the real truth of the relation of "positive" knowledge to other knowledge. And against it it is of no effect to argue, that the notion of a human being being responsible to himself alone for his reason opens the door to a new medieval obscurantism. Because, in dealing with truth, you cannot be concerned with the consequences of truth: or rather, if you hold that truth in itself may lead to error, you abolish the function of reason altogether. "O Callicles," Socrates says in the Gorgias, "if there were not some community of feeling among mankind. however varying in different persons-I mean to say if every man's feelings were peculiar to himself and were not shared by the rest of the species-I do not see how we could ever communicate our impressions to each other." But the function of reason requires the same assumption for itself that it makes for the impressions. If our faculty of tracing effects to causes were not really the same faculty in all mankind, no reasoning, no argument, no demonstration would be possible. Obscurantism is an act of will: it is the refusal to use one's reason. And the proverbial person convinced against his will uses this obscurantism just as much as he would

The confusion of ideas which I have tried to expose between demonstration and reason is SO inveterate (almost incidental to the fashion in which we receive all knowledge), and has especially so entered into the very flesh and bones of the Positivist philosophy, that I am quite sure that this paper will seem, to most readers of it, no more than a tissue of paradoxes. You cannot read John Stuart Mill, you cannot read Huxley or Spencer or Auguste Comte himself without seeing that it is impossible for any of these philosophers to carry on a sustained process of thought, but in terms of physical phenomena. Huxley indeed, the most metaphysical of all men of science, drops into the sceptical philosophy of Hume when writing as a metaphysician, But you see that this way of thinking has no real influence on the ordering of his ideas: he emerges immediately whole and unsinged, not even like Dante with the smell of those obscure regions on his clothes. Mill, when he is setting forth the fundamental thesis of Comte's system that "we have no knowledge of anything but phenomena, and our knowledge of phenomena is relative, not absolute. We know not the essence nor the mode of production of any fact, but only its relations to other facts," etc., goes on to say that this fundamental thesis is accepted by all modern philosophy, by Kant not less than by Comte. And verbally this is of course true: but Comte (and Mill with him) is thinking always in terms of physical phenomena. Kant is not: and so the word phenome

non has not the same significance to the German as to the other two. So again in Mill's proposition (in his Logic) that in another sort of world it would be possible for two and two to make five, you see how impossible it is for this thinker to think in terms of metaphysics, and how Kant's demonstration to the contrary has passed over his mind like water over a duck's back. Herbert Spencer's classification of phenomena as "vivid" and "faint" is just another instance in point: the very words "vivid" and "faint" are referred instinctively to physical impressions, never referred to thoughts as such. Herbert Spencer would not see, for instance, that the pleasure a man has in listening to music or contemplating the harmony of a picture is a process of thought in itself, and not a sort of echo or function of the sounds which his ears, the colors which his eyes, receive. at the time. Elsewhere Spencer uses the identical argument whereby Kant demonstrates the non-externality of space to prove the indestructibility of matter. is a still stronger proof of his inability to think otherwise than in terms of physical phenomena.

This

The whole of Comte's system rests upon the same inability to think in what I may call terms of thought. In his system, the positive knowledge at which we have arrived now is exact knowledge of physical phenomena: his famous three stages are reckoned only in terms of that. He imagines mankind always being concerned only to find out the nature of physical phenomena, and that the theological, metaphysical stages which human thought is by Comte supposed to have passed through, were simply imperfect guesses at physical phenomena and nothing else. Plato's doctrine of ideas is (for Comte) an example of the metaphysical stage of thought. Comte is so utterly imbued with the first principles of posi

tivism, that he understands Plato's the. ories as guesses touching the cause of physical phenomena as such, not what they are, viz. guesses on the cause or nature of mental phenomena as such. And of course the average man, who has not so much accepted the positivist philosophy as absorbed it, would find it still more impossible to think as I have expressed it in terms of thought.

For instance, to the metaphysician the proposition that "Thought is not in Time or Space" expresses a truth which is almost elementary. With the positivist it is a truth which it would be impossible to demonstrate to conviction. Even if you demonstrated it to his reason, his mind would refuse to assimilate it; it would in fact be rejected the next moment.

an

It will be almost as difficult to get any one to accept the theory of undemonstrable reason; and yet I maintain that we have shown infallibly anon that demonstrability can be no portion of a truth in itself. I will now add one more illustration which may serve to make clearer the function of reason even when engaged with nondemonstrable propositions. Imagine the case of a widow, against the advice of her brother-in-law or of her lawyer, paying the debts of extravagant son. Of course to the brother-in-law or the lawyer she is simply acting against reason. But (1) the advice of the brother-in-law or the lawyer is-probably-founded upon general considerations of the character of extravagant young men, whereas (2) the widow may think or she may know that her extravagant son is not an average extravagant young man. The question whether she is acting according to reason or against reason hangs upon the alternative (a) whether she is merely choosing to think her son better than the average, or (b) whether she has a real knowledge of his character

and knows him to be better than the average. But how can she know it? it will be asked. Why, by the same faculty whereby a man may know that Shakespeare is a greater poet than The Albany Review.

Longfellow. She cannot demonstrate her knowledge even to herself. But it may be real knowledge, for all that. C. F. Keary.

The austere housewife who called reading "idle work" may have been unconscious of the oxymoron. But she uttered a profound truth all the same. There are popular authors it would be invidious to name who would apparently rather write than read. Most people would rather talk than do either. Of such was George Henry Lewes, who used, however, to say that when he was too much tired to read German he would read French, and when he was too much tired to read French he would still read English. An academic sciolist proud of his library was once showing off his shelves and bindings to a friend. "I hardly know what to do with all these books," he said. "Read them, my dear fellow," replied the candid visitor. There is a frame of mind, happily rare, in which printed words seem, like the hatter's remarks to Alice, to have no sort of meaning, although they are certainly English. Mere trash, compared by Mr. Goldwin Smith with bad tobacco, kills time and spoils taste. "Idle work" is something more than that. It implies occupation without effort, and what else can be so agreeable? Reading for a purpose absorbs, engrosses, becomes in time an overmastering passion. But reading without a purpose is not altogether purposeless. The search for suggestion is a real pursuit. When Mrs. Glasse said in her cookery book that the first thing was to catch your hare, she had not really got to the beginning. You must start your hare before you can do any

thing else with it, and how many hares are started by idle reading! I don't mean such improving form of sport as looking out the references in Macaulay. Thackeray has an eloquent passage on the infinite possibilities involved in this method. But perhaps it could hardly be called idle, and in some cases it might be almost as difficult as verifying the numerous quotations in Hamlet, or proving that Milton borrowed without acknowledgment from a Dutchman. Dr. Johnson resolutely protested against the popular fallacy that you should begin at the beginning of a book. There was no knowing where that fatal theory might not land you. You might even feel bound to read to the end. Which is absurd.

Only a proposition of Euclid, and perhaps a sonnet, requires to be taken as a whole. A great many people say, "The world is too much with us," without being able to go any further, and without in the least meaning it as far as it goes. But such a use of poetry cannot be seriously defended. Without adopting the standard of Professor Raleigh, which is the true one, and considering Wordsworth as a whole, we may agree that to quote "Milton, thou shouldst be living at this hour" is not really to show a knowledge of him. I saw the other day attributed to Shakespeare the surprising statement that "Orpheus with his lute made trees," which reminded me of the famous text, "Hear the Church," and Archbishop Whately's characteristic comment, "I

should like that gentleman to preach on 'Hang all the law and the prophets.'' One is quite as much in the Bible as the other. Even the idlest reading may serve to show the proper context of a common tag, to prove, for instance, that the author of a great poem never wrote such nonsense as "alone in his glory." Then what did he write? Go and read the Burial of Sir John Moore, if you do not know it by heart, and you will see.

Perhaps essays should be placed in the same category as propositions and sonnets! I mean true essays, not reviews, or long historical discourses. No one would begin one of Bacon's essays, in the middle, though he might be pulled up by a sentence too full of meaning to be appreciated without idle thought. And Hume's essays are so artistically simple that they carry you on like a yacht on a smooth lake. But the normal essay, such as Hazlitt's for example, is open to the objection that it cannot be skipped, being all of a piece, one and indivisible like the French Republic, or a scientific atom. A good novel read for the first time is another instance. Even Johnson sat up through the night to read Evelina, which would send many people to sleep in the daytime now. After the first time skipping is of course easy, unless the book be one of those superlatively excellent performances which should be read once for the plot, a second time for the characters, and a third time for the style. We have heard perhaps too much of the sage who declared with offensive, and obviously mendacious priggishness, that whenever a new book came out he read an old one. "When I want to read a book, I write one," said the more humorous Disraeli, who in his youth had been a great reader of other people's works. Disraeli could certainly make a book out of very unpromising materials. Even a French cook might stand

aghast at the Life of Lord George Bentinck. That singular volume, without a parallel in our literature, lends itself to idle reading, though it was by no means idly written. It is hard reading that the easy writing makes. The best of idle reading is that you cannot tell beforehand what will come of it. The course of the hare is beyond human prediction. There is no argument, there is not even pure Latinity, in the words of St. Augustine which converted Newman to Roman Catholicism. The result was not less surprising than the consequence of Saul's quest for his father's asses, which profited, if they cared for desolate freedom, by the sudden preference of the Israelites for monarchical institutions. A tomb at Lucca, I think, altered the whole tenor of Ruskin's life, and he read tombs as idly as other people read books. Ruskin did not altogether like the effect of his lucubrations upon the idle reader. He confessed with sorrow that he had caused a large number of entirely worthless individuals to take an interest in art. What he wanted, good man, was to teach political economy. But idle people will not learn political economy, and the others would not learn it from Ruskin.

The idle reader does not by the hypothesis want to learn. It by no means follows that he always escapes that mental process. Is there a book better suited to the idle reader than Tristram Shandy? Is there any place where the law of association must be so inevitably, and man be so idly learnt? Just think of Mrs. Shandy's many-colored wardrobe passing in procession through the mind of Susanna when she hears of Bobby's death. Why should the idle reader trouble himself with Locke? He does not read, bless him, to think, but to be saved the trouble of thinking. How grateful we are, consciously or otherwise, to the authors who do us this service. We cannot be always

leading the strenuous life. The mind must sometimes lie fallow, and then one turns with relief to a new friend from the circulating library, vivid and not exacting, like Mr. Wells, or an old friend, whose pet phrases are household words, like Matthew Arnold. Take down Essays in Criticism, the worn brown volume that we handled so reverently when we were young. Never mind the obvious faults, the tricks, the repetitions, the affected turns of phrase. Soak your mind in the noble enthusiasm for literature, the scholar's instinct for what is best, the happy quotations, the happier humor, the clearness and preciseness of thought. Can there be an idler, or a pleasanter task than to read in that limpid English why we are not a critical nation, why we seem unintelligent to the French, what a set of Philistines we are, or were, how much we want an Academy, or at least how many errors we should be spared if we had one. Whether Matthew Arnold was right or wrong, is not the question. The point is that he saves his readers all trouble, talks to them, entertains them, thinks for them, sends them on their way rejoicing. He was an inspector of schools, and had learnt so well how to be understood by children that he was never obscure to grown-up people. There ought surely to be books for tired minds, and Essays in Criticism is one of them, not because there is no thought in it, but because the author thinks for the reader. He may have been dogmatic, but for idle reading give me a dogmatist. I do not in such moods like to be argued with, 1 like to be told. Even if one does not exactly know what "prose of the centre" is, nor how Matthew Arnold came to be an infallible judge of it, one can put up with the authoritative pronouncement that Bossuet could write it, if one is given a sample of his wares. How did Bossuet come by such a style?

Why could he not come by larger ideas? What is style? Did Pascal make the French language out of Montaigne, or out of nothing, or at all? These are the sort of vague surmises on which idle reading floats one. Like index learning, they turn no student pale. They do not make the weakest head ache. They do not excite, but in the good old sense of the word they amuse. If you are seriously and soberly earnest, you should compare like with like, not the best passages of Bossuet with the worst passages of Burke, or the best of Clarendon with the worst of Macaulay. But the idle reader does not want you to be soberly and seriously earnest. Very likely an English Academy would have excluded Burke on account of his occasional grossness. Would they have been right? It is easy to say "No." Much fun, some of it very good fun, has been made of the French Academy. How delicious is

C'y gît Piron, qui ne fut rien,
Pas même Académicien.

Yet the French Academy has lost none of its reputation since Cardinal Richelieu founded it in 1635. It has imposed upon Frenchmen a respect for their own language which we have not for ours, free and independent Britons that we are. Even the idle reader, or perhaps I should say especially the idle reader, is affected by style. He may even ask himself whether Matthew Arnold always wrote "prose of the centre," and whether the "note of provinciality" is not to be found even in him.

I am told that very few people nowadays read Sir Arthur Helps. That profound thinkers, always on the mental stretch, should avoid him I can understand. He did not invent platitudes, and call them paradoxes, as seems to be rather the fashion at the present time. But if Friends in Council are idle, they are very easy reading. They