oligarchy in disguise. The effective training is training in the discussion, management, and decision of their own civil affairs.

What we need far more than schemes for representing minorities are habits that will stimulate the political education of majorities. And these can only be formed locally and in local centres. Mr. Grant Duff made a suggestive observation at Elgin the other day. "I confess," he said, "I often feel sad to see men drearily circulating through the division lobbies, content to be mere pawns in the game which is played by others, when they could be so infinitely greater as well as more useful, by standing on their own individual importance and administering their wealth for noble ends." (Feb. 5.) This far-seeing remark covers more than the mere administration of wealth, and applies to other people besides capitalists. To be a great citizen may one day seem a higher aim than to be a small member of parliament, and good citizenship is capable of many forms much more important and far-reaching than even the bestowal of munificent endowments. One of these forms is to assist in the task of officering our democracy; of instructing and interesting them first about the affairs that lie at their doors, and then about the greater affairs; of accustoming them to think about good government and good laws. This cannot be done by means of a course of twelve lectures on political economy. Action is the only education: action and responsibility for your opinions being true. And this action must be something very different from the mere giving of a vote once in five years. Political interest needs regular stimulation-not by the continual agitation of 'blazing principles,' but by furnishing many opportunities to members of every class for social action on a scale where they can see and understand what kind of difference their action makes. The wage-receiving classes are for the most part shut out by the unalterable conditions of their life from seats on administrative and deliberative boards. They have not the time, and even if School Boards and Town Councils were foolish enough to hold their sessions in the evening, as the House of Commons does, a workman who was at the mill or the foundry at six in the morning, and has been engaged in exhausting work in a heated atmosphere all day, is hardly in the humour for public accounts, estimates, and balance sheets at night. But the workmen are perfectly capable of being interested in the broad and general aspects of public business. "I have often been impressed at our country town meetings," Mr. Emerson has recently said, "with the accumulated ability in each village of 5 or 6 or 8 or 10 men who speak so well and so easily handle the affairs of the town. I often hear the business of a little town (with which I am most familiar) discussed with a clearness and thoroughness, and with a generosity, too, that would have satisfied me had it been in one of the larger capitals." England will hardly give so good an account as the United States, until our schools have had time to become a more important force, but even now the sound sense and the "generosity" of the people who go to ward-meetings and townmeetings will compare favourably with the same qualities in gatherings of greater pretensions. But the army needs officers, and it depends on the activity, self-denial, and sense of those who have disinterested public

spirit and intelligence, whether the function of officership shall be performed by them, or by a selfish and low-minded class of professional politicians.

So far as legislation goes, there is only one way of attracting the best members of the middle class into some more effective participation in public business than occasional attendance at a caucus for choosing a parliamentary candidate. This way is to make local governing bodies more important. The more interesting and important the functions of an assembly, the better the quality of the intelligence that is likely to come to it. One reason why the House of Representatives at Washington has so small a share of the best men in the country, compared even with our House of Commons, is that its business is so much less important to America than the business of the House of Commons is to England. The State legislatures pre-occupy an immense department of governmental action, and they do their work as a rule intelligently enough. With us, there will be plenty of important work left for the central Parliament, after there has been an increase of the attributions of the local parliaments. At present, there is no unwillingness in the legislature to remit questions to be decided by local authorities. But then parliament seems half afraid of its own policy, and its conception of permissive legislation, wholesome as it is in one respect, is extremely weak and vicious in another. The true principle of all legislation of this kind is to leave to local bodies no alternative in the application of a given measure, but the widest possible discretion in the manner of its administration. Again, one of the most excellent steps for the improvement of local bodies would be to concentrate in one of them the functions that are now dispersed among several. The Town Council performs one set of duties, the Board of Guardians another set, the School Board a third, the Licensing Magistrates a fourth, the Governors of an Endowed School a fifth. There may possibly have been good reasons for this dispersion of offices, when they were first devised. It is hard to see what reasons are now to be urged against their union in a single local parliament, a representative body with powers for all the local purposes of the neighbourhood. At present, though the Council of a great town may in a single year authorise the expenditure of as large a sum as the government of the country has given for half of the Suez Canal, yet the work of the Council of an ordinary corporation hardly exceeds the business of a small contractor. If you added to this the work of the School Board, another set of persons would be interested in watching its proceedings; the administration of the Poor Laws would attract others; the control of the public-houses, and the administration of any local endowments, would do the same. In a body of this kind, among its many other advantages, we could count upon finding feeling enough for good government and the public weal, to counterbalance that penuriousness of the smaller rate-payer which is so natural considering his circumstances, and yet is so threatening an impediment in the way of social improvement.

February 25, 1876.

THE

FORTNIGHTLY REVIEW.

No. CXII. NEW SERIES.-APRIL 1, 1876.

SPIRITUALISM AND MATERIALISM.

PART I.

"Die theoretischen Irrthümer meist mehr darauf beruhen dass man die Erklärungsgründe aus andern Gebiete der Naturwissenschaften übertragend auf den Organismus anwandte."-JOHANNES MULLER, Ueber die phantastischen Gesichtserscheinungen, 1826, p. 3. ALTHOUGH the controversy between the two conceptions of the world, known as Spiritualism and Materialism, still rages, and is likely to rage for many years, the conceptions themselves are incessantly being modified, and approaching nearer and nearer to a common agreement, as each party recognises what is strong in the positions of its adversary. While the spiritualist has been forced by the advances of physiological science to assign a larger and larger place to the operation of material conditions in the production of mental phenomena, the materialist has been forced by the same advance of science to recognise the existence of conditions entirely different from those classed as material. But there is still on the one side the terrified repugnance at whatever bears the name of Matter, and on the other the contemptuous rejection of whatever claims the character of Spirit. There is still the radical separation between the conceptions of Creation and Evolution in the explanation of the Cosmos; and between the conceptions of metaphysiology, and physiology in the explanation of Life and Mind. Standing apart from these contending schools, there is a third school, small indeed, but important, which rejects the theories of both, or rather which disengages what seems valid in each, and by a new interpretation reconciles their differences.

I do not propose here to discuss the Cosmic question, but will merely note in passing that modern philosophy has completely revolutionised it by showing that the broadest of all distinctions-that of Object and Subject, or of Matter and Mind-does not demand a corresponding opposition in their substrata, but simply the logical

VOL. XIX. N.S.

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distinction of aspects: so that one and the same group of phenomena is objectively expressible in terms of Matter and Motion, and subjectively in terms of Feeling. Matter ceases to be an alien, ceases to have the dead unspiritual character, when we learn that everything we can possibly know of it is one of the many modes of Feeling. All our knowledge of it is our knowledge of our own affections. Our inferences respecting it as Notself are but the hypothetical representations of the possible modes of Feeling which the Notself would excite in us under conceivable changes of relation. Having classed experiences and inferences under the general heads of Matter and Motion, and thus formed conceptions of objects and forces, we endeavour to range the unclassed modes under similar rubrics, and thus explain the occurrence of some given change of Feeling by the conjunction of other modes, known and inferred. For example, we say that the change named Colour is the effect of a conjunction of the specific pulsations of an undulating medium on a specific nerve-terminal, followed by a specific excitation in a nerve centre. In one aspect this process is from first to last a material process―i.e. an objective process. But in another aspect it is equally a mental or subjective process. Ideally, and for our convenience, we dissociate the objective from the subjective aspect; but when we suppose that a real separation corresponds with this ideal distinction, we are thrown back upon the mystery of how a material process can become a mental process, how vibrations become sensations. The mystery is an illusion. There is no such transformation. What is called the material process is simply the objective aspect of the subjective mental process. Examine the material terms "vibration," "external medium," 66 impinging," "nerve-terminal," "nervecentre," and "excitation," they are one and all translateable in terms of Feeling; and only thus are they significant: every sensible having its corresponding sensation. Strip the objective terms of all their subjective values, and you leave them as the unknown x. But in saying that Matter cannot be dissociated from Mind, we are not relinquishing our belief in the Reality which is not ourselves; we are only affirming that the perceptions and conceptions which Philosophy employs as its materials in the construction of theories, are under one aspect material-i.e. objective—under another aspect mental-i.e. subjective; and that the business of the philosopher is to systematize the conceptions, and recognise the logical distinction of their aspects.

In systematizing the conceptions respecting the organism and its actions, we must hold fast to the teachings of Experience; and all our inferences which transcend or run before actual sensation, must be modelled on Experience. Now it is a fact of Experience that Feeling and Thought stand in such direct contrast with Matter

and Force-the symbols represent concretes so markedly unlike— that there is the greatest difficulty in recognising identity of existence under such diversity of aspect. Starting from this fact of difference, the spiritualist hypothesis invokes a corresponding diversity in the substrata it postulates the existence of a spiritual entity which is in the material organism but not of it; somewhat as the dwarf was inside Kempelen's automaton chessplayer. The body it regards as a machine which is set going by a machinist who watches and regulates its movements. This machinist has been variously conceived as Vital Principle, or Soul; although directly known through consciousness, it is nevertheless an inscrutable mystery, and its mode of operation in determining organic movements can never be detected. The materialist hypothesis of molecular movements becoming transformed into Feeling is not simply repugnant, it is inconceivable-the gulf between Motion and Feeling being unbridgeable. Nay, does not the materialist himself proclaim the passage to be an insoluble mystery?

So long as the old Dualism of Matter and Mind is not resolved into the dual aspect of objective and subjective, the intellectual difficulty here emphasised will sustain the spiritualist hypothesis. And to this intellectual repugnance there is added a moral repugnance. Many who reject the hypothesis of a Vital Principle as a scientific encumbrance, thwarting instead of aiding research, cling to the equivalent hypothesis of a Psychical Principle, not only as an aid but as a sanction. With an honourable though unwise dread of losing in this hypothesis a great sanction of Morality, they cling to it in the face of evidence, and prefer the ignorance which offers the sanction a basis, to any knowledge which threatens its acceptance. Could they once see that after all Materialism is only an hypothesis, and one which, whether true or false, can in no way alter the facts it is invented to link together, they would admit that while their repugnance may be rational on the intellectual side, it is irrational on the moral side. Our moral life has, happily, no such insecure basis as that of a speculative conception. Nor would the existence of a spiritual Principle, could it be demonstrated, help us to understand, and understanding modify, the facts of moral life. A superficial observation suffices to show how incapable such a Principle must be of generating moral conduct; since so many souls exhibit a deplorable insensibility to moral duties. Every one acquainted with prisons and lunatic asylums knows that there are beings in whom what is called the "moral sense" is irremediably deficient. Nor is this observation impugned by referring to the effect of bad Education; since such an argument implies that Morality depends more on Education than on the Psychical Principle. And if it be said that criminals and cretins are what we see because of their "defec