anachronism of fastening the new ideal on our favourite figures of antique days, without regard either to obvious historic conditions, or to the plain and unmistakable letter of the antique record. 'One of the hardest burdens,' as Mr. Mill says, laid upon the other good influences of human nature, has been that of improving religion itself' (p. 75). Let us carefully abstain then from falsifying the history of the development of human nature by imputing, either to the religion of the past, or to their founders, perfections of which it is historically impossible that either one or the other should have been possessed. Let us not assume that Christ was so infinitely over the heads of his reporters,' to use Mr. Arnold's phrase, and then proceed to construct an arbitrary anthology of sayings, which we choose to accept as Christ's on the strength of this assumption. It were surely more consonant with intelligence of method to content ourselves with tracing in Christ, as in the two or three other great teachers of the world who are hardly beneath him in psychagogic efficacy, such words and traits as touch our spiritual sense and fit in with the later and more mature perceptions of the modern time. And why should we not do this without fretting against discords in act or speech, that were only to be expected from the conditions; and still more without straining our own intelligence, and coercing the record into yielding us a picture of transcendent and impossible faultlessness?

Let us now proceed to examine the idea of an Intelligent Mind, working under conditions only partially modifiable, and animated by a certain measure of benevolence. Our first remark is upon the arbitrary character of the idea of limiting the Creator's power. It is in this case an interpretation of the facts of the universe invented for the purpose of saving the Creator's moral goodness. Nor, then, can God,' says Plato,

'since he is good, be the author of all things, as people commonly say, but only of a few of the things that occur to men; and for many things he is not responsible; for far fewer are the goods of human life than its evils, and it is the good only that we are to set down to him; for the evil we must seek any cause rather than God.'1 Now if it is indispensable that we should think of the deity as clothed with attributes which are essential elements of human morality, this theory of him as partially responsible would in so far meet the difficulty. And in the next place, if it is indispensable that we should praise and worship the deity, clearly we must impute to him those moral qualities which we praise and admire in the best types of our own species. Mr. Mill has rendered no greater service to morals than by his denunciation, first, in a memorable declamatory passage in the volume on Hamilton, and now in many energetic passages in the volume before us, of the practice of offering homage and flattery to a person whom in the same liturgy we treat as having the most iniquitous of imaginable characters. If the deity is not good in the same sense as men are said to be good, then it is a depraving mockery to make morality consist in doing his will, and to chant litanies expressive of our deep sense how good he is.

But it is conceivable that the world may have been created by a Being who is not good, not pitiful, not benevolent, not just; a Being no more entitled to our homage or worship, than Francesco Cenci was entitled to the filial piety of his unhappy children. Why not? Morality concerns the conduct and relations of human beings, and of them only. We cannot know, nor indeed does it seem easy to believe, that the principles which cover the facts of social relationship, must therefore be adequate to guide or explain the motions of a

1 Republic, bk. ii. p. 379: Ob8' ăpa d Oeós, K. T. X.

Demiurgus, holding the universal ordering in the hollow of his hand. To insist on rejecting any theory of creation which forbids us to predicate anything of the Creator in terms of morality, seems as unphilosophical as to insist on rejecting the evolutional theory of the origin of the human species, on the ground that it robs man of his nobility and dignity. If any one feels bound to praise and worship the Creator, he is bound to invest the object of his worship with praiseworthy attributes. But a philosopher is not bound to do anything except to explain the facts. Our first objection then to Mr. Mill's permissive explanation of the facts by a limitation of creative power, is that it springs from a sentiment which is out of place in an inquiry that claims to be scientific.

Paley admitted the possibility of the same kind of explanation on a different ground. Contrivance,' he said, 'by its very definition and nature, is the refuge of imperfection. Why resort to contrivance where power is omnipotent?' He answered this by saying that it is only by the display of contrivance that the existence, the agency, the wisdom of the Deity could be testified to his rational creatures. So 'God has been pleased to prescribe limits to his own power, and to work his ends within those limits.'1 The difference between

1 Paley's Natural Theology, ch. iii. The passage concludes thus:-'As we have said, therefore, God prescribes limits to his power, that he may let in the exercise, and thereby exhibit demonstrations, of his wisdom. For then, i.e. such laws and limitations being laid down, it is as though one Being should have fixed certain rules; and, if we may so speak, provided certain materials; and, afterwards, have committed to another Being, out of these materials, and in subordination to these rules, the task of drawing forth a creation; a supposition which evidently leaves room, and induces indeed a necessity, for contrivance. Nay, there may be many such agents, and many ranks of these. We do not advance this as a doctrine either of philosophy or of religion; but we say that the subject may safely be represented under this view; because the Deity, acting himself by general laws, will have the same consequences

Mr. Mill's idea and Paley's (both Paley and Mr. Mill are content to rank it as a more or less plausible hypothesis) is that the latter hypothetically conceives God as voluntarily fixing bounds to his own power, for the sake of proving his own existence to men, while the former hypothetically conceives him as struggling with intractable matter and its stubborn conditions. Mr. Mill's idea is simply that of the Timæus, of which Mr. Grote's account will suffice. The Demiurgus of Plato is not conceived as a Creator, but as a Constructor or Artist. . . . He represents provident intelligence or art, and beneficent purpose, contending with a force superior and irresistible, so as to improve it so far as it will allow itself to be improved. . . . . . The genesis of the Kosmos thus results from a combination of intelligent force with the original primordial Necessity, which was persuaded, and consented to have its irregular agency regularised up to a certain point, but no further. Beyond this limit the systematizing arrangements of the Demiurgus could not be carried; but all that is good or beautiful in the Kosmos was owing to them.' 1

In short, each of these hypotheses is as arbitrary as the rest, and we are hardly to be blamed for having expected that the last word of the great positive thinker of our day would have been a warning to people to remember how arbitrary all such hypotheses must be, and a clear-voiced counsel to abandon them. And the surprise with which Mr. Mill's countenance to such a hypothesis affects us, is all the greater because in an earlier passage he speaks of the evidence for it as 'shadowy

upon our reasoning, as if he had prescribed these laws to another. It has been said that the problem of creation was, "attraction and matter being given, to make a world out of them;" and, as above explained, this statement perhaps does not convey a false idea.'

1 Grote's Plato, iii. pp. 248-9.

and unsubstantial.'

He is doubtful even whether it can be

called evidence at all (p. 117).

Next, when we are told that such evidence as there is points to the arrangement of the present order of the universe by an Intelligent Mind, what are we to understand by an Intelligent Mind? Surely this is to define the supernatural in terms of the natural, the Unknowable in terms of the Known. It is a sublimation of anthropomorphism, but it is essentially anthropomorphic. Mind is no individual and integral entity. It is an abstract term, conveniently invented to describe a set of complex psychological energies. It comprehends reason, volition, appetite, affection, and as many subdivisions as the ingenuity of psychologists may form. They do not call them material phenomena, but they are phenomena which we only find objectively united in a material synthesis. No scientific psychologist can realise the occurrence of a mental operation without a corresponding change in structure. In the case of the individual man, what scientific person seriously thinks that his mind (ie. a set of complex energies) is something with an independent objective existence, external to his body? Mind is a general conception, an abstract idea, like motion or heat, and any one who ascribes to it the position of an independent entity, existing apart from the phenomenal conditions in which only we know it, has no right to laugh at Plato's doctrine of archetypal Ideas. To talk of a Mind without a personality attached to it, as the framer of the Kosmos, is every bit as unmeaning as it was in Pythagoras to fix on Number for the ruling power of the universe. And the moment you attempt to attach elements of personality to this mere name and empty. abstraction, there is no reason why man should not forthwith proceed to make God after his own image. If you attach personality to this Intelligent Mind, it can only be a finer