arrived at, and a new Concordat negotiated, by which the archdioceses of Goa and Cranganor, with the suffragan dioceses of Cochin and Meliapore, remain under the patronage of Portugal, the Goanese churches of Malacca and Singapore being attached to the Portuguese diocese of Macao, while the Holy See regains its freedom of action throughout the greater part of British India.

The conclusion of the Concordat was immediately followed by the publication of the apostolic letters Humana Salutis Auctor, under date of September 1, 1886, constituting the Catholic hierarchy of Hindustan. The archbishopric of Goa is hereby erected into a metropolitan See, and its titular raised to the dignity of Patriarch of the East Indies, with the suffragan sees of Cranganor, Cochin, and Meliapore submitted to his authority. All the other apostolic vicariates of Hindustan, with the island of Ceylon, and the Prefecture of Central Bengal, are erected into dioceses, and seven have the rank of archbishoprics-namely, Agra, Bombay, Verapoly, Calcutta, Madras, Pondicherry, and Colombo. The missions of the Punjab, Agra, Patna, Central Bengal, Vizagapatam, Mysore, Kandy, Sinde, Poona, Mangalore, Verapoly, Colombo, Jaffna, Coimbatore, Pondicherry, Madras, and Hyderabad are freed from the yoke of a double jurisdiction, which still exists only in those of Madura and Bombay. It is furthermore laid down that the archbishops and bishops of India shall communicate with the Propaganda, while the Patriarch of Goa and his suffragans shall address themselves to the Congregation for Extraordinary Ecclesiastical Affairs.*

Thus vanishes the last imperial prerogative of that dazzling conquest by which the little kingdom of the Tagus, the terror of Asia and the envy of Europe, realized the golden dream of ages, and entered into possession of the glowing wonder-world of the elder universe. The prize of that epoch of romance, when nature, not yet ransacked of all her treasures, had still secrets wherewith to reward adventure, and the bold mariner, sailing into unknown seas, might chance upon new heavens and a new earth, it had a glamour which still clings to its faded memory, and invests the deserted streets of the once Golden Goa with such a visionary halo, as must ever cling to the wreck of Empire.

E. M. CLERKE.

* Catholic Missions, November, 1886, p. 106.

ART. VII.-THE INFLUENCE OF FATALISM ON OPINION.*

1. The Signs of the Times. By THOMAS CARLYLE. 1829. 2. On Democracy: an Address read before the Midland Institute, Oct. 6, 1884. By JAMES RUSSELL LOWell.

3. Manifesto to the Electors of Midlothian. By the Right Hon. W. E. GLADSTONE. Oct. 1885.

4. On the Influence of Authority in Matters of Opinion. By Sir GEORGE CORNEWALL LEWIS, Bart.

5. On Compromise. By JOHN MORLEY. London: Macmillan.

1886.

6. History of an Idea. By the Right Hon. W. E. GLADSTONE, M.P. 1886.

MORE

ORE than fifty years ago Carlyle ventured to denounce what he called "The Mechanism of the Age," in an essay† marked with all the picturesque vigour and richness of his style. He bewailed the tendency which substituted or threatened to substitute the press, magazines, cyclopædias and hand-books for permanent literary achievements, subjected the free aspirations of art to Academies and Societies, and made politicians grope for an ideal in constitutions and institutions rather than a statesmanship based on principle. The "mechanism," he declared, which had subdued external nature, was trespassing beyond its proper sphere. It had usurped the domain of life, thought, and morality, and was then sapping the springs of originality and freedom. Hence the endeavour to explain virtue away, reducing it ultimately to fear of pain or hope of pleasure, and to make duty to one's neighbour merely equivalent to a self-regarding benevolence.

The new wonders wrought by physical science had produced a misleading enthusiasm for reducing everything to a system, which, he argued, would not only bar a real material progress, but would finally tend to oust a belief in the invisible. "We are giants," he says, "in physical power, in a deeper than metaphorical sense, we are Titans, that strive by heaping mountain on mountain to conquer Heaven also."

Carlyle was writing here in the familiar role of a prophet, pointing to probable rather than to ascertained results; but with all his prophetic qualities he would hardly have foreseen the

A Paper read at a meeting of the Academia on November 23, 1886. "The Signs of the Times," published in 1829.

immense development in our own day of the tendency to which he points. Mechanism has grown into Fatalism, a Fatalism so universally productive of mental torpor, that when, for instance, the Duke of Argyll denounces the present "Reign of Flabbiness," or Mr. Goschen pleads for the recovery of the almost lost art of original independent thinking, they meet in the main with little encouragement except the pity extended to the misplaced energies of eccentric genius. To find a person, when the question is a political one, with clear personal convictions, based on something more rational than universal hearsay, or "the tide of public opinion," has almost become an event of importance. Some public man, of sufficient standing to secure a column in the daily paper, lights on a plausible phrase or two, scatters them in his next speech like plums in a pudding; the leader next morning pets him with unthinking praise, the local association or league, parrot-like, adopts the cry, and then the thing is done. Those whom Mr.John Morley describes as "the great army of the indolent good, the people who lead excellent lives and never use their reason,"* follow suit, and exert themselves only in denouncing men who hold back and claim a little time to think, as laggards or mutineers or secessionists. If one of the supposed laggards shows a prima facie reasonableness in his demand for breathing space, it is urged that after all it is useless to oppose what in the end is inevitable, as though the very best way to make a thing inevitable were not to join in the chorus of declaration that so it is. Let me not be understood, however, as referring in these remarks to any one political party. This loss of grit and fibre, this tendency to drift, to bend to what is supposed to be irresistible, is, as I hope to show, a common feature in the formation of political opinion of every shade and leaning.

As one of the symptoms of the disease to which I wish to direct attention, let me dwell on the fact, perhaps sufficiently obvious, that Parliament has largely ceased to be a deliberative body. Not that there is any lack of oratory, not that speeches are shorter, or members more content than of yore to give a silent vote; the new process of winnowing measures through Grand Committees, the threatened proposals as to clôture by hare majority, tell quite another tale. What I mean is the admitted dislike in the House to appeals to principle or anything savouring of what is unhappily called dry reasoning. Were Burke living now, it is probable that even for enlightened legislators in a Reformed Parliament his rising would be as sure a signal for dispersion as in the days when the Speech on Conciliation with the Colonies failed to prevent even a Sheridan from slinking out of the House behind the back benches. And

*"Burke " ("English Men of Letters"), p. 153.

so, if Mr. Leonard Courtney wishes to unburden his soul he flies to the remote parts of Cornwall; and, sad to say, his high - speculations only make him appear in the eyes of many an abnormal specimen of the legislator. Not long ago Mr. Goschen, in an address at the Eighty Club, endeavoured to probe out and formulate the principles of the legislation of the last decade, whereupon critics in the press said Mr. Goschen was a theorist, a term, strange to say, meant to imply condemnation and importing unfitness for the task of government. There are, it is true, congresses and conferences without number on the many heterogeneous subjects that come under what is called "Social Science;" but confining our view to political questions, there is little doubt that public meetings of the usual kind are to a very slight degree deliberative; they are in the main not gatherings of persons desirous of hearing the pros and cons., and of inquiring what is right and just, but are composed of individuals whose minds are made up on the subject at issue, and who are merely anxious to swell the chorus of approval or disapproval. The primary object of assemblages of this character is not to create or test opinions, but to ratify and publish them with some parade and solemnity. In Parliament, as out of it, it has almost become a maxim that speeches do not gain votes, or alter judgments; and it is no paradox to say that the success of an orator is measured rather by the power of flattering the prepossessions of his friends than by his success in shaking the convictions of his opponents.

The new doctrine of Fatalism, let me say at once, does not at all imply that men think and act without motives of any kind. Beliefs that are arrived at under the new canon have their own sanction, but that sanction is no longer the internal sense of reasonableness or justice, but the pressure of a tendency which is given a name, and then somehow invested with an external existence. Individual judgment is surrendered to what is styled the course of "Public Opinion," not because it is considered that error is more likely to be winnowed out and the truth to come to light when the majority agree (which would be quite reasonable); but because "the force of circumstances," or "the spirit of the age," or as learned persons say the "Zeitgeist," is conceived as a force with life and momentum, carrying the helpless age onwards in its steady, irresistible march. To attempt to stop its course by audaciously asserting what right reason commends, would be as useless (if we are interpreting a common fallacy rightly) as to endeavour to stop a steam engine in motion by patting it on the boiler. The common sense of most does indeed keep a fretful realm in awe in a manner the poet perhaps never conceived. As Carlyle says in the essay already referred to, "By arguing on the

force of circumstances we have argued away all force from ourselves, and stand leashed together, uniform in dress and movement, like the slaves of some boundless galley. . . . . Practically considered our creed is fatalism, and, free in hand and foot, we are shackled in heart and soul in far worse than Feudal chains."

Nor is it merely that this Necessitarian mood corrupts the every-day judgment of ordinary folk who claim no intellectual supereminence; the poison has spread much further, and stains the deliberate pronouncements of men who rank, and justly rank, amongst our teachers and leaders. Mr. Russell Lowell, for instance, has the name of being an independent thinker, if ever there was one, yet he too has not escaped infection, but has deliberately adopted what I may call the inclined-plane theory. For instance in his address (otherwise admirably conceived in aim and tone) to the Midland Institute * on the extension of the political power of the masses, these are his words:

66

"What we used to call the tendency or drift, what we are being taught more wisely to call the evolution of things, has for some time being setting in this direction. . . . . There is no use arguing with the inevitable. The only argument available with an east wind is to put on your overcoat. And in this case, also, the prudent will prepare themselves to encounter what they cannot prevent. Some people advise us to put on the brakes, as if the movement of which we are conscious were that of a railway train running down an incline. But a metaphor is no argument, though it be sometimes the gunpowder to drive it home and imbed it in the memory."

And again :

“The question for us, as it has been for all before us, is to make the transition gradual and easy; to see that our points are right, so that the train may not come to grief."+

A metaphor is indeed no argument, to requote Mr. Lowell's own words, but unhappily it is often an intellectual ignis fatuus for the most wary. Mr Lowell himself, usually the most lucid of thinkers, has in his own neatly chiselled phrases given us an example of the fallacy against which he would warn us. Why speak as he does of "evolution," "setting in this direction," of the "inevitable," and of looking to our "points." Fatalism is fatalism, though it is rechristened with the scientific name of "evolution."+

* On "Democracy: "see Times, Oct. 7, 1884.

+ Mr. Lowell has recently spoken in a vein more worthy of himself at the tercentenary of Harvard College. "Democracy," he says, "must show its capacity for producing, not a higher average man, but the highest possible type of manhood in all its manifold. varieties, or it is a failure."

Dr. Whewell makes some pertinent observations on the danger of loosely applying scientific terms when their strict meaning is forgotten :The language of science, when thus resembling common language, is liable to be employed with an absence of scientific precision, which alone