species and mysteriously buried in individuals, as secret latencies and potencies, ready at any unexpected moment to burst forth and surprise us; or, instead of propagating itself in this way, the higher knowledge may, by some occult influence, leap from the person endowed with it, light with muffled foot in another mind, and there proclaim itself. But this last theory in both its forms goes a great way to find an explanation of the facts. In reference to the first, the secret endowment of individuals by heredity, there is no evidence that there is any such umbilical cord between the individual and the race, or, if there were such a cord, that it is a medium for the secret transmission of intelligence; and, in reference to the latter, the mind-reading supposition,-it is admitted by its advocates that it is no part of the normal experience of mankind, is an irregular and unnatural function, and does not explain the origin of any of the grand, healthy, transcendent acts we are considering.

There remains, in addition to our own, the theory of inspiration. I do not deny that there may be divine inspiration in our day; that men are often directly helped up to great thoughts, discoveries, works, by the warm girdings and inspirations of God. In this way, there may be gleams of knowledge, flashes of insight, breaking in on human vision directly from him "in whom we live, and move, and have our being." But we are investigating a class of facts most of which more or less characterize all men, or have their roots in all men; facts which belong to the orderly, regular development of mankind, though on a unique and extraordinary side of that development; facts which seem to come under a law of that development,—a higher law of its own,-and do not need the supposition of immediate inspiration, as they can be rationally explained otherwise. And it is alike unscientific, unphilosophical, and unchristian, to infer direct divine action when other explanations are adequate.

We therefore fall back on our own hypothesis as a con

venient string on which to hang the facts, the mind is only in part in conscious possession of the body. It has reserves and reaches of power which only under favorable conditions it can find the means, in its clumsy physical environment and organs, of hinting to us or others. At such times, the mind above the mind acts, and flashes its higher and surprising light, out of our own hidden personality, within the reach of consciousness. Lotze's words are significant. "The finite being always works with powers with which it did not endow itself, and according to laws it did not establish; i. e. it works by means of a mental organization which is realized not only in it, but also in innumerable other similar beings." This excludes the theory of inspiration for the explanation of our phenomena. "Hence in reflecting on self, it may easily seem to it as though there were in it some obscure and unknown substance, something which is in the Ego though it is not the Ego itself, and to which, as to its subject, the whole personal development is attached. And hence there arise the questions, never to be quite silenced, What are we ourselves? What is our soul? What is ourself— that obscure being, incomprehensible to ourselves, that stirs in our feelings and our passions and never rises into complete self-consciousness? The fact that these questions can arise shows how far personality is from being developed in us to the extent which its notion admits and requires."1

It may be interesting to note that our hypothesis is quite in the line of the scriptural doctrine, that man was made in the image of God. The greatness and the royalty of this image may well be supposed to be unable to express itself fully in its corporeal investment and organs. Ovid, in his "Metamorphoses," represents certain persons as turned into trees, and only with difficulty and at intervals able to make their presence known by sighings. In all souls may there not be a hidden spirit, the better part of ourselves, sighing again 1 Microcosmos, Vol. ii. p. 686.

and again, waiting for opportunities to attract attention, and now and then uttering a tone of touching divineness? This hypothesis, also, agrees with the intimations of immortality which we find in our nature. The sighings and voices in that part of our pent-up personality which we are considering are, so to speak, the reverberations and echoes of immortality on the earthly side,-or rather, the advance-couriers, come to sound in our dull ears, as they can, the waiting fact of immortality. The outlying soul, the undeveloped soul, the imprisoned soul, knocking at the earthly gates, and now and then finding an opportunity to drop a ringing message down into the earthly courts where it is found, shows that there is something in us worthy of immortality.

Further, this hypothesis justifies our feelings of the greatness of human nature. This feeling is generally rather an unintelligent one. It rests on piling up earthly qualities and achievements, rather than on discovering in us grand spiritual insights and powers. Our man is great because he is cyclopean, encyclopedic, pyrotechnic, volcanic. But when we see that there are grand reserves of soul-powers, higher, more imperial, more divine, in us,-and that it is the unconscious. play and sheen of these, around and in our conscious thoughtworld, that stirs this feeling and gives it its finest quality, we perceive that the estimate of the greatness of man is justified, and he rises, rationally, to colossal grandeur. And when he shall have come out of his prison, and spread his folded wings, and taken an investment and organs suited to his disenthralled power, he may really be great next to God, as it is said of him: "Thou hast made him a little lower than God."1

But we must give up the pursuit of this mysterious activity of mind. We have seen it does more than come out from behind the screens and cut capers, to amuse and astonish. It is the master actor. It dwells in the holy of holies of our being. It handles first, and then hands over to us, the reali

1 Ps. viii. 5 (Heb. and Revision).

ties of supreme interest. It is this that looks out into the eternities, and thrusts its head into the other world, and talks with God, and then comes down to us, as it is able, and gives us the echoes. It is this that, rapt and seraphic with such communings, gives us insight and impulse in the direction of things supremely pure and beautiful, ideal and divine. And it is this that, ever sitting at its enduring loom, weaves for us the web of conscious unchanging personality and conscious unchanging identity, not out of the floating disconnected gossamer flecks of our swift vanishing states of consciousness, but, using these as woof and the objects of his own eagle-eyed changeless insight as warp, it weaves the web, and hangs it where we can see it or feel it. This is the centre and head of the regnant personality, the support and bond of the transient experiences and untrustworthy powers: surviving all catastrophes, continuing through all changes, seeing the corporeal, intellectual, moral stages come and go, but itself always the imperturbable, regal, inscrutable, immortal, rational Ego.

ARTICLE II.

EGYPTIAN ETHICS.1

EACH of the great nations of antiquity had, so to speak, its mission in the world; the special mission of the Egyptians appears to us not the least noble in the development of the civilization which is the pride of modern times.

This history presents itself to us in three divisions.

To the Babylonians is due incontestably the merit of having created commercial law, with a marvellous knowledge of the questions of interests, of business, of the transformation and the utilization of different values; with a surprising intuition of the fundamental principles of political economy. Among the Greeks human thought expanded to wondrous amplitude. Poetry spreads its wings, and charms by its divine songs. Eloquence is no longer the spontaneous accent of a heart that is moved: it becomes an art that is cultivated, I had almost said, a science. Philosophy giving body to abstractions, proclaims the reign of the idea, the worship of the beautiful.

But law, taking this word in its highest meaning; morality, its application to the relations of men to each other; the equitable organization of the condition of persons and its consequences; the science of the human soul and its destinies,—this was, pre-eminently, in the education of humanity, the share of this Egyptian people, who were far more ancient than the Greeks.

In the Orient as in the Occident, among the Jewish

1 [A lecture delivered in the School of the Louvre by Professor Eugene Revillout. Translated from the Revue Internationale de l' Enseignement, Paris, May 15, 1889, by Florence Osgood.]