in Comtism; and Mr. Lewes is too able and spirited a man, too cultured, of too frank and quick sympathies in all fine directions, that we should tie him down very stringently to his own enthusiastic expression, that "in the Cours de Philosophie Positive we have the grandest, because on the whole the truest, system which Philosophy has yet produced."* Still, there is a considerable amount of effective British Comtism among us-of that philosophy which abjures and protests against Metaphysics, or the thought of the supernatural in any form whatsoever, as by this time proved rubbish, and would direct the ploughshare of the human mind, in respect of the study of Man, exclusively to Physiology and Sociology.

Into this British Comtism have been absorbed, I think, all the relics, worth reckoning, of what was once native British Secularism. Absorption into Comtism has been an elevation for it.

To be named in close connexion with the British Comtists, though not decisively as one of them, is the late MR. BUCKLE. His great idea, that for which he lived and died, was the possibility of a Science of History. There was a paramount obligation of the human mind in the present age to the study of History in a scientific manner, with all possible aids from Physiology and the other sciences, in order to the discovery and establishment of a new body of truths bearing on the social well-being. In prosecuting this idea Mr. Buckle himself put forth a number of more or less suggestive conjectures and criticisms, and revealed also certain strong idiosyncrasies—in particular, his passion for liberty of thought, and his abomination of the theological * Lewes's Biographical History of Philosophy, Library Edition, p. 662.

There was a breaking

spirit in all times and countries. away in him, too-as is often interestingly the case with enthusiastic Empiricists of his type-into a consolatory private transcendentalism of his own, accessible from his general system by a wicket to which he only had the key. But, on the whole, it must have been chiefly owing to the small amount of public familiarity in this country with exercises of speculation in the same general direction, and particularly with Comte's, that Mr. Buckle's doctrines ran about with such a clamour of rejection and acceptance. As far as I know, all that was essential in them might have been cut out of a corner of Comte, or out of that with a portion of Mill in addition-though I do not mean to say the author acquired them by any such immediate method; and there was a crudity about his statements of them, an incoherence, and an easy contemptuousness towards whole centuries and civilizations of the past, from which the more comprehensive genius of Comte kept him free. It was Mr. Buckle's intellectual courage, his pugnacity for ideas that had roused and invigorated himself, that was his main merit. one.

In our country it is a great merit, because still a rare Thinking, therefore, how largely he possessed it, and how prematurely he was cut off while others who have no such virtue are left, the words may occur to us :

"How well could we have spared for thee, young swain,

Enow of such as for their bellies' sake

Creep, and intrude, and climb into the fold!"

III.

I will now name together two writers, not because they can be constituted into a class, but because each of them is

so important individually that there is a propriety, on that account, in connecting them.

But,

Associated with Mr. Mill by a mutual respect, which has taken opportunities of expressing itself, and also by substantial adhesion in principle, is MR. ALEXANDER BAIN. His contribution to Philosophy is mainly his large system of Psychology in two volumes, entitled The Senses and the Intellect and The Emotions and the Will. It is perhaps the richest Natural History of the Human Mind in the language the most fully mapped out, and the most abundant in happy detail and illustration. The author decidedly belongs to the school of Empiricism, and he roots his Psychology, more strenuously and extensively, I think, than any British psychologist since Hartley, in Physiology. from the fact that his Physiology is that of the present day, he does this with greater intelligibility and effect. He does not indeed reject from Psychology the method of the observation and registration of the phenomena of Mind, as flitting, however generated, in a supposed inner chamber of Consciousness; but he takes care to assert at the outset that this inner chamber is a mere phantasy or trick of the mind. Sweeping away even the imaginary sensorium, or central receptacle for impressions, of the older physiologists, he views Mind as presenting itself in nerve-currents, the recoverability of nerve-currents, and the associability of nerve-currents, on and on, in ever-increasing complexity and in evervarying combinations. Beginning, therefore, with Brain and Nerve as the seats of the nerve-currents, and educing thence those simplest and most rudimentary states of mind which consist of instinctive muscular movements and sensations of the five senses, he proceeds to show how, out of these, by

L

the processes of recoverability and association, all the facts of the mind, all the habits and faculties of men, all their cognitions and beliefs, all the varieties of aptitude, intelli ̄ gence, character, and genius, may be conceivably built up. As he does this in a quiet, gradually synthetic way-leaving the sufficiency of his system to be judged of by his exhibition of its ability to work through, and account for, all the abundance of men's notions as to themselves and each other, rather than debating it formally—it is only incidentally, and here and there, that he touches on the great questions of Metaphysics. And yet his book, I should say, strews excellent new material over these questions, and, if attended to, will not leave their British forms precisely as they were. Thus, with respect to the battle of the two opposed psychological theories-that of Empiricism and that of Transcendentalism-Mr. Bain, I think, introduces a novelty in his Psychology. Rightly or wrongly, he places it to the credit of Empiricism: and, if rightly so placed, it would improve the position of Empiricists, including Mr. Mill, against their opponents. He finds, physiologically, that among the rudimentary facts of the human organism is that of a force of spontaneous movement, as well as an equipment for passive sensibility—a power of generating active nerve-currents from within outwards, as well as a liability to sensitive nervecurrents from without inwards; and through all the complications of his farther expositions he takes care to run this fund of automatic force, intermingled continually with mere sensation, as a something that may prove tantamount, when investigated, to a good deal of that à priori element, apart from sensation, for which Transcendentalists contend. Momentarily, as regards the individual human being, Mr.

Bain, by this provision of a physiological substitute for at least somewhat of the à priori element of the Transcendentalists, does put a different complexion on the question between Empiricism and Transcendentalism, and alters the setting of it. As regards each individual, he provides, on physiological evidence, an ever-flowing fountain of necessary or innate impulse, independent of sensation from without, and intermingling with it. And, as thus, in the very beginning of his Psychology, he offers what may pass provisionally, in respect of the individual mind, as a physiological substitute, as far as it will go, for the important distinction of the Kantians between Form and Matter, so at the end of his work, where he comes round to his last word on the ultimate metaphysical question—the question of the trustworthiness of Consciousness in that conception of a double Universe, of Self and Not-Self, of Subject and Object, which seems to be compelled in every act of external perception— he makes the same notion reappear on an extended scale, so as to take effect upon the state of the controversy between the various systems of Realism on the one side and those of Idealism on the other. Movement and sensation, nerve-currents from within outwards and nerve-currents from without inwards, being rudimentarily and from the first moment the one radical contrast or antithesis in our feelings-this contrast, always accompanying us, and, though strengthened, enlarged, and educated by million-fold repetitions and associations, yet always remaining constant, swells out at last into that contrast between the extended visible immensity of an external world up to the stars, and a felt but invisible and unlike immensity of spirit within, which all men carry with them, and which has been the fascinating