MORALITY WITHOUT METAPHYSIC.

IT is not uncommon for practical men to despise the power of ideas. Novelties of thought are regarded as the imaginations of clever men rather than as new forces launched into the world. Yet nothing is more certain than that it is ideas which govern the world, and that any change in the higher tides of thought soon begins to tell upon the lines of practical life, and to mould them anew into changed forms. The ways of the world, and the old modes of morality and religion, seem fixed from the ordinary point of view-and happily there is a powerful conservatism in all social conventions-yet, in point of fact, the most practical relations of human existence are undergoing sure if fitful modification, as the scope of men's thoughts alter in the higher regions of philosophical inquiry. This is the revenge which philosophy takes for its neglect by the common mind. By-and-by it changes the common mind to its own likeness. Ideas at first received with suspicion or even derision gradually gain ascendancy, and gravitate downwards from the higher to the lower levels of thought, till they begin to direct

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and colour all the currents of life. Opinions which seemed mere speculative abstractions in an abstruse guise are found moving the world in a new pathway, and often changing its most familiar habits. Mere eccentricity of opinion passes away; but the power of thought always tells in the end.

It can hardly be doubted by any that our own time is one in which not merely new fancies, but new thoughts, are very active. The former will vanish and be forgotten, but the latter are evidently graving themselves deeply into the consciousness of the time, and working changes of the utmost consequence to society. Especially are these changes conspicuous in the modern attitude towards religion. The old idea of religion was in the main that of authoritative dogma, elaborately defining the unseen world and its bearings upon the present world. Certain definite notions of God and of the Future, and of the infallible character of certain books, which announced or contained the revelation of these notions, were generally accepted and acted upon. And even those who disputed the validity of such notions, like the Deists of last century, taught or held for the most part certain definite notions of their own, which they were prepared to substitute for the established and commonly accepted religion. They proclaimed a religion so far resting on the same principles as that which they opposed, however abbreviated in its substance. If they denied the especial doctrines of Christianity, such as the Trinity, and the Atonement, and the Divine authority of the Biblical books, they yet believed in God as the Creator and Preserver of the world; and that the Divine will, as discovered in Nature and Providence, was a rule for

His intelligent creatures. In short, the fundamental ideas of a Divine Author of Nature and of a Divine Providence of man still survived; and Butler, as is well known, constructed his famous work, ‘The Analogy of Religion to the Constitution and Course of Nature,' on the recognition of these ideas and the argumentative consequences which he supposed that they involved in favour of Christianity.

But the modern spirit of negation has advanced far beyond the stage of last century. Characteristically it is a different spirit, and the difference perhaps cannot be better expressed than by the use of the word which it has become common to apply to itviz., Agnosticism. Beyond the sphere of the present life and its varied experiences, nothing is recognised as known or surely existing. The cluster of experiences which make up life in its higher as well as its lower moments, is taken as fact, or an accumulation of facts, to be analysed, classified, and co-ordinated; but the old inferences drawn from these facts of a higher sphere of existence, in relation to which the facts are supposed to be alone intelligible, are repudiated as unauthorised. Dogmas transcending experience, and aiming to define for us the unseen world, are represented as mere guesses or conjectures, plausible or otherwise, but wholly incapable of verification, in the well-known phrase of modern scientific nomenclature. This mode of thought is now so common that it is hardly necessary to give examples of it. It is, as it is said, "in the air." All that belongs to the order of experience is fully admitted. All beyond is rejected or ignored. If a religion can be made out of the facts of experience, good and well. Let it be ad

mitted also. But no words of ridicule are too strong for a religion founded upon the old metaphysical ideas of a Personal God, or of soul as distinct from its manifestations in the present world. This is the general and most characteristic idea lying at the root of modern unbelief. But the idea takes many forms; some of them highly dogmatical in their negation. While what is called "experience" is the stand-point of all, some content themselves with simply announcing this and leave religion aside altogether. Others are not satisfied till they have turned their doctrines of experience into a new religion. And here, again, there is a marked distinction betwixt those who set out from a cosmical, and others who set out from a specially human basis of experience-betwixt those, in short, who specially call themselves Positivists, and those who, for want of a better name, may be called Moralists.

The purely scientific position which leaves religion alone seems the most consistent of these modern negations. There is, we are told, an ascertainable cosmical order verifiable by science; and our business is to be satisfied with this order. "Why trouble ourselves about matters of which, however important they may be, we do know nothing, and can know nothing? With a view to our duty in this life, it is necessary to be possessed of only two beliefs: the first, that the order of nature is ascertainable by our faculties to an extent which is practically unlimited; the second, that our volition counts for something as a condition of the course of events. Each of these beliefs can be verified experimentally as often as we like to try." This is the most direct, as it seems the most downright and 1 Professor Huxley's Lay Sermon "On the Physical Basis of Life."

It is our business

honest, attitude of the materialistic school. The laws of nature and of life are verifiable. to know them and to submit to them; and further, to realise that our own volition is one of the collective elements of nature, which it is our duty to make to tell on the right side, in the incessant play of cosmical law of which we are a part. This alone is genuine Positivism, unsatisfactory as it is to the advocates of what is known as the Positive Religion. It is, at the same time, the only genuine Agnosticism. If the Agnostic attitude has any force at all, it has an absolute force. It shuts up the door, if not of religious sentiment, yet of religious worship altogether. It is a mere impertinence of morbid intellectualism to tell man, on the one hand, that there is no Being superior to himself, and, on the other hand, that his highest instinct is that of worship. If we believe that there is no God, the honest thing is to say so, and to be done with the idea of worship altogether. Something bearing the name of religion may survive, but anything of the name of religious worship is a ghastly mockery, where the worshipper not only offers the incense, but is himself the object to whom he offers it.

The position of the ethical school of experience is more interesting, if not more consistent. Equally with the mere physicist and the Comtist, this school ignores and despises all metaphysic; but it is from the study of human life and conduct, rather than from the facts or laws of the cosmos, that it draws its code of experience. It advocates strongly the reality of moral phenomena and the value and beauty of all the higher aspects of life. It would be doing injustice to this school not to recognise how far it rises above mere