me necessarily to my own estate, my own family, within the narrow enclosure of my own country. "Family, country, property, must be harmonized with man's right to free communion with all men and with all nature, without, however, on that account ceasing to be family, country, property."

This brings us to what Mr. Leroux contends is the fundamental principle of all genuine, ethical, and political science. The ancients founded ethics and politics. on the maxim, "Thou shalt love thy neighbor," a profound maxim, which has not yet been comprehended in all its depth. Philosophy now for the first time demonstrates its wisdom and truth, and does so by showing that THY NEIGHBOR IS THYSELF, BECAUSE HE IS THY OBJECT. In other terms, thy life being indissolubly objective and subjective, and the objective part, residing in thy neighbor, being as much thine as the subjective part residing in thyself, there is a oneness, a true solidarity between him and thee, which makes it necessary for thee to love him as the indispensable condition of loving thyself, impossible for thee to love thyself without loving him. To love is to manifest thyself, whether thou lovest thyself or another. But thou canst not manifest thyself without an object, and this object must be other than thyself. Thou canst not love even thyself, then, save in loving an object which is not thyself. Here is the law of thy life. Withdraw thyself from it thou canst not, violate it thou mayst, but never with impunity. Here, then, is self-love itself leading to Charity, or love of neighbor.

"What are all the sophisms of selfishness before this law of life! Since our life is bound up with that of other men, since we are inseparably united to humanity, and our fellow beings are at bottom in some sort ourselves, as we have seen, what now become all the false doctrines, founded on the selfish and individual interest of each one taken separately? Evidently selfishness turns to its own defeat, is destroyed by itself. Thou wouldst love thyself; love thyself in others, for thy life is in others, and without others thy life is nothing. Love thyself in others, for if thou lovest not thyself thus, thou canst not love thyself at all.”—pp. 193, 194.

Mr. Leroux reproduces here the doctrine of Pope,

who declares self-love and social the same, and virtually the doctrine of "Interest well understood," or enlightened self-interest, in which, under one of its principal aspects, resulted the philosophy of the last century; but under other conditions, with stronger and nobler sanctions. He unites, to speak truly, "in a pure and fundamental synthesis, both the teachings of Jesus and the conclusions of the philosophers."

"Jesus and all great religious legislators have enjoined charity, but have supported it by no other reasons than the authority of God's will. Philosophers the most irreligious have also boasted charity, but have boasted it as our interest. We have demonstrated by the very principle of life itself, that charity is both our law and our interest."- p. 195.

IV.

We come now to the fourth book, on the "mutual solidarity of men." The preceding book has prepared the way for the leading doctrine of this; but we approach now more closely the author's peculiarities, and therefore must be even more than ever on our guard.

The mutual solidarity of men, or unity of all men in the one life of humanity, is explained by the law of life already stated; namely, that life resides jointly and inseparably in the subject and the object, and therefore that in life the subject and object are not only placed in juxtaposition, mutually acting and reacting one upon the other, but are in fact unified, if we may so speak, soldered together; or amalgamated, as the acid and alkali in the formation of the neutral salt, so that a separation in time or space is impossible, without destroying life itself. The actual object of each man is his family and his country, his virtual or possible object towards which he aspires, and should be free to aspire, is all men. Then the life of each individual man resides, so to speak, jointly and indissolubly in himself and in all other men. Each man is an undivided and an indivisible part of the life of all men, and the life of all men and of each man is

an undivided and an indivisible part of the life of each man. Thus is each in life soldered to the whole, and the whole to each. This, as clearly and as precisely as we can state it, is what Mr. Leroux and the Saint-Simonians mean by the solidarity* of the race.

The doctrine may be easily seized by recalling the old theological doctrine of the Federation of mankind. in Adam and Christ. According to this old theological doctrine, God made a covenant with Adam, whereby Adam became the Federal Head of his race, so that in his fall all his posterity were to be implicated; God also made a covenant with Christ, the second Adam, whereby he became another Federal Head of the human race, so that through his righteousness the elect should be redeemed, and adjudged to be righteous. Understand now by Adam, the father of humanity in its anormal condition; by Christ, the father of humanity in its normal condition; and what theology has heretofore declared to exist virtually, by way of covenant and imputation, but not actually, understand to exist actually and really, as the very principle and law of human life itself, and you have the doctrine in question. It is a great doctrine, and follows necessarily from the position assumed, that to live is to manifest oneself; that man in no sense whatever can manifest himself without an object; and that his object is mankind. It is the clear, distinct, and philosophical statement of the doctrine, which lies at the foundation of what we all

* Solidarité. I have anglicised and transferred this term, because I have been unable to find any single term in our language by which to translate it. It is a legal term for an obligation in solido, an obligation in which several individuals are bound each for the whole demand. The doctrine Mr. Leroux wishes to express by the term is not that all men are merely bound in solido, but that, touching the life, all men live IN SOLIDO; that there is a solidity of life, a one life in them all; each individual life being an indissoluble portion of the life of the whole; or rather the life of each being, in itself, in some sort, the life of the whole. The doctrine is well explained by Paul. "For as we have many members in one body, so we being many are one body in Christ, and every one members one of another."—Rom. xii. 4, 5. See also 1 Cor. xii. 12, and Eph. iv. 25.

say, when we say "man is a social animal; he was fitted to live in society; he withers and dies in solitude." We confess, important and far-reaching as the doctrine is, we are forced to accept it, not only by Mr. Leroux's reasonings, but by certain considerations which had brought us independently of him to accept, as the foundation of all sound philosophy, the fact on which it all rests; namely, the absolute impossibility in which the human ME is placed of manifesting itself, that is, of living, without an uninterrupted communion with the NOT-ME.

We have seen that this doctrine of the mutual solidarity of men lays the foundation of a genuine charity, universal as well as special, without for that destroying the enlightened self-interest of the philosophers. It effects the atonement, or rather a perfect synthesis of the love of self and the love of neighbor, of the love of ME and of NOT-ME, by showing that one is never without the other, and can never be but by and with the other.

Mr. Leroux, while acknowledging the superiority of Christianity over all other religions of the past, still thinks that it has failed to show this synthesis, and reconcile the love of self with the love of neighbor.

"You bid me," he says, "love my neighbor; you command me in the name of God. Be it so. I obey. But tell me, I pray you, what shall I do with this love of myself, which nature has evidently placed in me, and which God by the voice of nature commands me to follow, whilst you, in the name of God himself, command me to love my neighbor?

"See me then with two loves, and two tendencies, between which you demonstrate no possible harmony. And these two loves are alike holy. For if you tell me that the love of neighbor is holy in the eyes of God, then the love of self is legitimate, holy before the Creator of all things, because it is the necessary condition of the existence of the love of neighbor.

"It is certain that Christianity has left humanity unsettled and in darkness, relatively to the antinomy of necessary and holy self-love, and equally necessary and holy charity, or love of others. All the precepts of the most excellent doctors of Christianity have always remained vague and undefined. Charity, as they have conceived and taught it, has never been able to be the foundation of a real science of life, because it has never been able to bind up together in one life the ME

and the NOT-ME; and because it has made the necessary and holy love of self subordinate to the love of others, or rather, as I shall soon proceed to show, to the love of God.”—pp. 198, 199.

If Mr. Leroux will substitute Church for Christianity, and if instead of saying that Christianity falls into the error here pointed out, he will say that some Christians in their interpretations of the precepts of Christianity have fallen into it, we shall have no objection to offer. And it is proper here to observe, that Mr. Leroux and others, who for the most part agree with him in his general doctrines, mean by Christianity, Christianity as it has been defined, interpreted, and authoritatively enjoined by the Church; in other words, Christianity, if we may so speak, according to Saint Augustine, and not according to Jesus, the Son of Mary. Mr. Leroux himself, notwithstanding what he says, exonerates Christianity from the charge he brings; and while claiming his doctrine as a modern discovery, seems to convey the notion, that Jesus borrowed it of the Essenians, a Jewish sect, which had no doubt anticipated many of the elements of Christian Theology and Christian Ethics.

"Certainly," he says, "I will not say that Jesus and the other founders of Christianity had no knowledge of the metaphysical principle, which is the true foundation of charity. I have shown, on the contrary, in my Essay on Equality, that a long time even before Jesus, the Essenians, his predecessors, had had a profound conviction of this truth. Besides, it is certain that Christianity, the principal symbol of which is the Communion, or Eucharist, has known and taught, up to a certain point, and under a veil, the law of life, by virtue of which man lives not by himself alone, but by communion with other men and with nature. Nevertheless, we may say, without fear of being deceived, that Christianity has not demonstrated its precept of charity, and has not distinctly referred it to the metaphysical principle in which it originates."— p. 201.

That Christianity has not metaphysically demonstrated its doctrine of charity is no doubt true, for it demonstrates no doctrine; it teaches, it does not demonstrate; but that it teaches the true doctrine of charity is here admitted; and we have ourselves proved it in our "New Views;" in the Essays on the Originality of Jesus and the Christian Movement, published in this