still more; man in civilized communities feels assured that he is not the slave of any fatalistic necessity; that he is less the sport of chance than man in former ages or in ruder nations; that he can not only direct and shape the outward physical facts and forces of Nature in his favour, but that he can even, if he wishes it, to an important extent, reshape his own character, in which is implicitly contained so much, if not as Schopenhauer contends the whole, of his future destiny. The Man has, if his Will has not, a certain directive power. Even the believers in his automatism are obliged to grant so much, however little their principles would explain it. He can to a large extent control his conduct; he has an undoubted and a great capacity of working towards distant aims, which he strongly desires to reach, and of foreseeing and directing the intermediate steps towards these ends. We thus possess a practical freedom, the freedom of working towards a desired end, the only freedom of any value; and we have this freedom the greater in proportion to our native force of character and wisdom. That we have such freedom, the fact of our labouring for distant ends, and of our power of choosing the appropriate means to reach foreseen goals, decisively prove, even though it can be shown that each step of our actions falls under the sway of mechanical necessity, and that each item of our deliberations was controlled by motives. There is now less of chance pressing on us; more of choice allowed us ;-less of the fatalistic necessity where we can only bow our heads, and with Stoic or Islamite resignation passively await the event which neither effort nor thought can prevent. There is more room in our age of Science for our thought and will, for purpose and design, to influence the known course of things in our favour. The mighty machinery of the universe, vast

and complicated as it is, permits man, through the knowledge of it, which Science gives, to turn to profit the very invariability of the working of the machinery, the rigid uniformity of the laws, which at first sight would seem to crush him under the weight of helpless necessity. By his knowledge of the uniform behaviour of Nature, he regains the practical freedom which the universal reign of invariable law seems at first to take away. For by this regularity of natural law, and by his knowledge of it, man is able to press the laws into his service so as to aid in the accomplishment of his designs and desires; and the more completely all Nature, including his own bodily and mental states, passes under the dominion of established scientific laws, the more fully man can avail himself of them, and recover his freedom within their bounds and by their means. The more he knows them and takes account of them, the fuller he secures his own practical freedom. We are free,—and the condition of our freedom is this very rigidity of Nature's laws, joined to our knowledge of the several laws themselves. We are free, and knowledge is the true emancipator. To know the physical law, and to make use of it, to know the physiological, or mental, or economic law, and to take account of it, is to make the law our servant and not our master.

Nature is unchanging; it is for us to know her, and after knowing to obey her, in obeying to obtain the dominion over her. But knowledge is the first condition of empire. Knowledge-which positive science as distinct from hypothesis provides-is thus the true deliverer of man both from the tyranny and seeming caprice of external natural forces, blind and powerful, as well as from the maleficent forces moral, or organic, resident within. Ever it is the

truth which makes man free, so far as freedom can be predicated of a being subject to external and internal conditions, which can be indefinitely modified and made to serve his most intimate desire and purpose, but which in themselves are unalterable.

We are free, in the sense explained; but there is no autonomous will. There is no absolute sovereignty of the will, but only a constitutional rule subject to many checks and conditions. The will is limited by laws and conditions, physical, organic, mental, social, which must be accepted in any case; but which, if accepted and made the best of, man can control his destiny in their despite, and even by their means. We can thus act as if we were free, in spite of the doctrine of speculative necessity, as Butler argues; we are free to pursue our most desired ends-the only freedom that any need care to have; and we shall obtain all the more of this kind of freedom, the more all Nature passes under the yoke of invariable and unchanging laws.

CHAPTER V.

ON IMMORTALITY.

§ 1. AND now, what is the scientific doctrine on the great theme of immortality? Is there any hope for men? In one word, no. For any such hope, if men must continue to indulge in it after hearing the scientific arguments, they must go elsewhere-to the theologian, the metaphysician, the mystic, the poet. These men, habitually dwelling in their several spheres of illusion and unreality, may find suggestions of the phantasy which they persuade themselves are arguments in favour of a future life; the man of science, for his part, and the positive thinker, building on science-who keep within the solid land of inductive truth and positive knowledge, where proof is possible, and where short of absolute proof, analogy should guide the judgment— consider no proposition more certain than that the soul is mortal as well as the body which supported it, and of which it was merely the final flower and product.

Our modern naturalist, following Darwin, has satisfied himself that man is only the superior animal derived from the inferior; why should he not die as the others? Our modern physiologist has ascertained that thought is but a function of the brain and nerves; why should it not perish with these? Our most advanced physicists have discovered that man is a machine first, an animal afterwards, and a

conscious being by an inexplicable accident only in the third instance; a machine in which the various physical agencies are mysteriously transmuted and utilized to repair the parts, and to propel the whole, with consciousness superadded as spectator, but not as director or controller of the machine;-why should it not collapse with the general break-up of the machinery? why should it not cease when no longer supported by the various physical energies whose transformations within the bodily machine alone made its existence possible?

Yes, indeed; our modern savants, and what is of still more consequence, our positive scientific thinkers, reasoning independently from the verified conclusions of science, have, with few exceptions, come to the conclusion that the belief in a future life so long prevalent amongst men must be finally given up. While only partially assenting to Hamlet's great eulogium on man,* with his nobility of reason, his infinity of faculty, his "express and admirable" mechanism, they have, with all but unanimous voice, accepted Hamlet's cynical conclusion in its most strict and literal and serious sense, that all is but the "quintessence of dust." For man, though the acknowledged "beauty of the world and the paragon of animals," is still only an animal, subject to the common doom of the rest. The dust is the end; and this is the conclusion even of those who do not accept the remainder of the materialist's creed,-that the cunning arrangements of the atoms was the beginning, and their mysterious

*The whole wonderful passage is well worth comparing with the Darwinian doctrine of man, standing as it does so much opposed to it at all points save the conclusion :-" What a piece of work is man! how noble in reason! how infinite in faculty! in form and moving, how express and admirable! in action, how like an angel! in apprehension, how like a god! the beauty of the world! the paragon of animals! And yet to me what is this quintessence of dust ?"