fact for Metaphysics. The notion of Not-Self or Object is a generalization of the feelings of Active Movement; the notion of Self or Subject is a generalization of the feelings of Passive Sensation. What, then, must be the answer of a philosopher to that question, as to the last certainty accruing from the total evidence of Consciousness, to which philosophers may be expected to possess an answer, although common men, nor for that matter philosophers themselves, except when they philosophize, need not entertain it? Where shall one rank oneself? Among Nihilists, among Materialists, among Natural Realists, among Constructive Idealists, among Pure Idealists, or among those who hold the doctrine of Absolute Identity? Curiously enough, Mr. Bain's premiss leads, on the one hand, out of any form of Idealism, towards a peculiar, and what may be called physiological, form of the doctrine of radical Identity. Though the two generalizations of Self and Not-Self, of the perceiving mind and of the world external to it, are carried apart practically by all men, and life consists in a perpetual hypothesis of their opposition, yet the psychologist, knowing that they have their roots inextricably united in the same organism, and knowing no more than this, is bound to proclaim, as the deepest fact of the phænomenal universe arrived at by his science, the identity, the inseparability, of Subject and Object. Of course, as it is within the bounds of his psychological theory of Empiricism that Mr. Bain takes up this position, his Identity-system is a very different thing, in its metaphysical bearings, from the Identity-system of some of the Transcendentalists. They, or any of their brother-Transcendentalists, would be entitled to run Mr. Bain back, with this physiological form of the Identity

system in his hands, along that eternal track which the controversy between Empiricism and Transcendentalism must pursue in the quest of the real beginning. Such farther interrogation, however, Mr. Bain implicitly declines. Except through Psychology, and consequently except through Physiology, he refuses Metaphysics. He does so, I believe, on definite principle. And, considering the great services he has done to Psychology by persevering adherence to his own method-the important novelties, I think I may say, which he has introduced into British Psychology in particular-we ought, most certainly, not to object to his system that it does not give us what it never undertook to give. Still, as Philosophy in its widest sense asks, and always has asked, for instruction as to the best mode of thought on those metaphysical questions, at their highest and most extreme range, which Mr. Bain declines to entertain, and as, at the present moment in particular, it is obvious to all that it is with these questions, as reset for it by an all-comprehensive and soul-exciting Cosmology, that British Philosophy is passionately grappling, Mr. Bain's treatise does not encircle all the requirements.

No such defect can be charged against the other writer whom I am now to name-MR. HERBERT SPENCER. Of all our thinkers he is the one who, as it appears to me, has formed to himself the largest new scheme of a systematic philosophy, and, in relation to some of the greatest questions of philosophy in their most recent forms, as set or reset by the last speculations and revelations of science, has already shot his thoughts the farthest. He both works out his Philosophy physiologically and psychologically from the

centre, and-what seems to me an eminent merit in relation to the intellectual needs of the time-surveys it and contemplates it from the circumference cosmologically. Indeed, I should say that he is the British thinker who has most distinctly seen the necessity that Philosophy should deal with the total cosmological conception as well as with the mere psychical or physiological organism (and this from the demonstrable inter-relatedness of the two), if it would grasp all the present throbbings of the speculative intellect. His writings take for granted this necessity, and make it plainer than it would otherwise be. Nowhere else are the various sciences so fished for generalizations that may come together as a whole to help in forming a Philosophy. Nowhere else, at all events, is there a more beautiful and fearless exposition of some of those recent scientific notions which I spoke of in the last chapter as affecting our views of metaphysical problems. There are parts of Mr. Spencer's writings, occupied with such expositions, which, from sheer scientific clearness, and adequacy of language to the matter, have all the effect of a poem. If even only for such renderings of high scientific conceptions, on the chance of their somehow taking possession of the popular soul, and uniting there to rectify previous forms of thought, he would deserve honourable recognition. But Mr. Spencer does not stop short in the character of an interpreter between Science and Philosophy, handing on the conceptions of Science to that congress of all the Powers where they are to be adjusted and take effect. He assumes the work of the philosopher proper. He seeks to enmesh the physical round of things, as Science now orbs it to the instructed imagination, within a competent Metaphysic; he desires to fix in the centre a com

petent Psychology, consistent with this Metaphysic, and yet empirically and physiologically educed; and he would fill up the interior, or what of it the physical sciences leave void, with a competent Ethics, a competent Jurisprudence, a competent Esthetics, a competent Science of Education, and a competent Science of Government and Politics. In this great work he is still engaged; and it will not perhaps be till the whole is accomplished that there will be the means of determining either the sufficiency of Mr. Spencer's philosophy for the higher practical purposes of philosophy, or its exact intellectual relations to previous systems. Already, in consequence both of the decisiveness of his views and the variety of interesting subjects over which they extend, Mr. Spencer, more than any other systematic British thinker save Mill, has an avowed following both here and in America; and, if any individual influence is visibly encroaching on Mill's in this country, it is his. For my own part, believing that no type of man ought to be more precious to a nation than a resolute systematic thinker, and believing Mr. Spencer to be a very high specimen of this type, I anticipate nothing but good, nothing at least but a clearing away of the bad, from what he has already done or may yet do. And this I say, though differing as deeply and at as many points from Mr. Spencer as from any man whom I respect. His Metaphysic seems to me too merely negative; and this negativeness of character I trace through his views, so far as I know them, in Politics, in Esthetics, and in all matters whatsoever. Also I think-or it may be the same thing in a particular form-he undervalues history, erudition, and the power of the historical element.

IV.

Although Hamilton is no more in the midst of us, Hamiltonianism is not defunct. But why should I say Hamiltonianism? All our British speculative thought, in every corner where intellect is still receptive and fresh, has been affected, at least posthumously, by the influence of that massive man, of the bold look and the clear hazel eyes, whose library-lamp might have been seen nightly, a few years ago, by late stragglers in one of the streets of Edinburgh, burning far into the night when the rest of the city was asleep. Oh! our miserable judgments! Here was a man probably unique in Britain; but Britain was not running after him, nor thinking of him, but was occupied, as she always is and always will be, with her temporary concerns and her riff-raff of temporary notabilities. And now one has to dig one's way to the best of him through the small-type columns of perhaps the most amorphous book ever issued from the British press. But some have done this, who had no inducement to do so except their love of ideas wherever they were to be found. Mill and Bain, who are fundamentally opposed to Hamilton's Transcendentalism, and Spencer, who is certainly not a Hamiltonian, all acknowledge their respect for Hamilton, and the obligations of British thought to his labour. And it was the gymnastic of Philosophy, its power to energize and elevate the mind in the pursuit of truth, more than agreement with any one supposed system of truth, whether his own or another, that he himself cared for. Hence, if I say that there are still Hamiltonians among us, I do not mean that even those whom I call such adhere to Hamilton's doctrines, but only that to