characteristics might be made to prove more than the author would be willing to allow. The corner loafer cannot be made to work for wages,' but spends his lazy existence basking in the sun on the warm side of buildings solely in the interest of' his own cheerfulness.' Moreover, the play impulse is seen illustrated in the young of all animals. Dr. Hickok would not call the former and his acts or his inaction highly creditable to humanity or regard them as evidence of a superior nature, though the lounger has a reason; nor would he concede that the young brutes have that faculty, though the play impulse be proof of such a power. It would be well for Dr. Hickok to be more consistent. But even if he could deduce an independent and sufficient argument from a supposed elevation of the active and moral powers in consequence of a reason, he would accomplish nothing by it unless he exhibited some probabilities that in the absence of such a faculty there would be a lower degree of character. Since we have no human beings to look upon in whom the reason is not found, we have no data from which to judge whether this would be the case or not. We do not know but the sense and the understanding, if exercised alone, might produce exactly as high a character; or, on the other hand, we do not know but that whatever superiority of character man has may come as much from the exercise of these two faculties as from the reason, since the three are never in fact found separate. All that Dr. Hickok can do is to appeal to the difference between man and the brutes, and assume that the distinction is in the kind of knowing. Of the flimsy character of this assumption I have already spoken. And even if it were proved, still in order to make Dr. Hickok's argument conclusive, it would be necessary to have some man without the faculty of reason in order to compare him with men who have reason; for we can hardly be called upon to suppose that the sole distinction between man and the brutes is in the kind of cognising powers. Differences of bodily structure and constitution might be found to make up no inconsiderable amount of general difference; and since with Dr. Hickok species are distinct in kind and never can pass into each other, among the lower animals themselves there would seem to be as wide differences as between them and mankind. Are these degrees of differences in kind?

§ 49. Lastly, we come to a position to which intuitionalists of the stamp of Dr. Hickok are very prone to retreat when hard pressed. Sometimes they say (and Dr. Hickok forms no exception)

that the consciousness of the working of such a faculty as Dr. Hickok's reason is sufficient evidence of its existence; in other words, that it is an ultimate fact not susceptible of proof. This stand might be taken with the confidence that it would be a stronghold against attack, if the reason be, as they assert, an ultimate fact. But in order to determine this we must first know what is meant by reason. We cannot make a predication of this subject unless we have the subject distinctly and definitely in mind. Now, as has been seen, when we attempt to examine. this reason, it flies in pieces; the moment we essay to define it, to ascertain what the term means, it loses all distinctive character. Assuredly, when that which is under consideration vanishes from before our eyes or is resolved into something else, it is not an ultimate fact, perhaps not a fact at all. To call reason-knowledge 'perfect, instant, comprehensive, knowing at a glance and also incessant knowing as a constant gaze,' is not descriptive of reasonknowledge more than it is of any clear knowledge which continues before the mind; obviously the description derives all its force from analogies of sense-perception. Dr. Hickok says, 'We may refer to any one instance of clear and quiet conviction and a satisfactory resting in the knowing, and we shall ever find that this satisfied conviction is in the insight of a controlling connection by which the manifold is seized comprehensively in complete individuality.' Whatever this may mean, how it proves a consciousness of a reason or establishes its existence is difficult to understand. Such expressions have very little scientific import; and the import this has is only to the effect that we do have clear convictions with which the mind is satisfied, a fact which nobody ever disputed. The rest of the phrase is hyperbolical and mystical; it may be construed into an averment of the author's reasoncognition, though the word connection is suggestive of Dr. Hickok's understanding-faculty. But whatever may be the meaning of these statements, these are only reiterations of Dr. Hickok's theory, not proofs of it, nor does the context supply any such proofs. How, I should be glad to know, does a clear and quiet conviction' evidence an intuitive reason? Dr. Hickok does not explain, and with my humble abilities and faculties I am unable to discover.

§ 50. If Dr. Hickok and his school hold that the existence of a reason is a fact above proof, and that the faculty itself is beyond Creator and Creation, p. 86.

We

analysis, provided they are consistent in their views and abide by them, it must be confessed that they have at last the advantage of their opponents. They can say to the latter, 'Your arguments are irrelevant, and whatever you prove it is of no consequence; nothing you can say will have the slightest effect upon us. see, we do not need to argue or to prove; you are using the delusive processes of the logical understanding; we discard these and simply look, exercising our divine faculty of reason. If you do not believe us, you are alterum genus, and what you say and believe is a matter of no further concern to us.' "1 This style of thought may be very solacing to Dr. Hickok and those who follow him, but it will not be likely to make many converts to their philosophy. I once heard a great preacher say that if we encounter a man sitting on a dry rock and saying he is in the garden of God, we should give him a hoist.' But it is discouraging to reflect that the more these people are hoisted the more persistent they are in their folly; and we may be forced to the conclusion that about all there is to be done is to pass by on the other side, leaving them to enjoy their inspiring reason-intuitions to the fullest extent possible.

§ 51. In concluding these remarks upon the views of philosophers of the school of Jacobi (for so it is on the whole proper to denominate them, though Jacobi developed no system, and is not usually cited as the progenitor of a line of thinkers), I am happy to quote with my most cordial approbation and endorsement the following words of Dr. McCosh:-

It is of all things the most preposterous in certain speculators to set out with the idea of the infinite without a previous induction of its nature, and thence proceed consecutively or deductively to draw out a body of philosophy or theology. Such men have lost themselves in attempting to voyage an "unreal, vast, unbounded deep of horrible confusion"; and yet they would seek to pilot others, only to conduct them into darker gloom and more inextricable straits, and in the end bottomless abysses. . . . He who passes these bounds is talking without a meaning; he who would start with the notion of the absolute, and thence construct a system embracing God, the world, and man, will without fail land himself in helpless and hopeless contradictions-the necessary consequent and the appropriate punishment of his folly and presumption.'"

1 Empirical Psychology, p. 68

Intuitions, p. 229.

§ 52. If any one, by the exigencies of a school or college curriculum or by other interest, is constrained to spend time over Dr. Hickok's works, there is no better method of clearing and purifying his mind than to read or re-peruse Locke's Essay. It is ever true, in the words of William Molyneux, that Locke is incomparable, in that he hath rectified more received mistakes and delivered more profound truths . . . for the direction of man's mind in the prosecution of knowledge . . . than are to be met with in all the volumes of the ancients. He has clearly overthrown all those metaphysical whimsies which infected men's brains with a spice of madness, whereby they feigned a knowledge where they had none, by making a noise with sounds without clear and distinct significations.'1

CHAPTER LVIII.

NECESSARY TRUTH.

§ 1. I SUPPOSE I owe the reader an apology for attempting an extended discussion of necessary truths. Abler pens than mine have treated the subject fully, and in what has preceded in this work all has been said that is needed in the way of exposition. Nevertheless, I am unwilling to close our examination of cognitive integrations without a somewhat extended review of the chief questions that have been raised respecting universal and necessary ideas, both as regards their nature and their origin. So obstinate has been the error, and so widespread the misunderstanding attached to these portions of knowledge, that labour is still needed to expose new disguises of the fallacies in connection therewith which are all the time appearing, and to beat back the constantly recurring (though greatly weakened) attacks of the old forms of a false philosophy. It may well seem strange, when by far the greatest portion of our knowledge is and always has been conceded to come from experience, and when all the attempts that have been made from the time of Thales to the present have failed to satisfy the world of any other basis, that men should still be seeking to find such a foundation for science, and that

English Men of Letters Series: Locke, by Leslie Stephen.

there should be need of correcting their mistake; but since even some of the learned are persisting in such a search, and it is necessary to refute their arguments and to show again and again. the futility of their endeavours, contributions to the polemics of this topic may not be amiss at the present time.

§ 2. It will not be deemed supererogatory to ascertain in the beginning of the discussion what have been the characteristics of the class of truths now under review, as entertained by the à priori philosophers. I presume no one will object to the statements of Dr. William Whewell, who is probably the most eminent of the modern defenders of the so-called intuitional theory, as furnishing a fair statement of the position of those maintaining the existence of knowledge independent of experience. Let us then see what Dr. Whewell says as to the nature of these postulates:

'Most persons are familiar with the distinction of necessary and contingent truths. The former kind are truths which cannot but be true; as that 19 and 11 make 30; that parallelograms upon the same base and between the same parallels are equal; that all the angles in the same segment of a circle are equal. The latter are truths which it happens (contingit) are true; but which for anything which we can see might have been otherwise; as that a lunar month contains thirty days, or that the stars revolve in circles round the pole. The latter kind of truths are learnt by experience, and hence we may call them Truths of Experience, or, for the sake of convenience, Experiential Truths, in contrast with necessary Truths.

"Geometrical propositions are the most manifest examples of Necessary Truths. All persons who have read and understood the elements of geometry know that the propositions above stated ... are necessarily true; not only that they are true, but they must be true. The meaning of the terms being understood and the proof being gone through, the truth of the propositions must be assented to. We learn these propositions to be true by demonstrations deduced from definitions and axioms; and when we have thus learnt them we see that they could not be otherwise. The latter kind men could never have discovered to be true without looking at them; and having so discovered them, still no one will pretend to say that they might not have been otherwise. For aught we can see, the astronomical truths which express the motions and periods of the sun, moon, and stars might