aside religion, but believes in an "eternal religion." In short, the great men who have risen like mountains in our world have all been profoundly religious; thus, to name some of them in their historical order: Socrates, Plato, Jesus of Nazareth, Bacon, Descartes, Newton, Spinoza, Leibnitz; and, in this last age, Herschel, Faraday, Mayer, and Henry. Both these truths have been established by a large induction, going as far back as history and archæology can carry us. In reaching them there have, in the struggles for existence, been fearful conflicts between Science and Religion, of which Dr. Draper and President White have been the historians, altogether on our side. There have even been internal feuds in each of the hostile camps, both on the religious and the irreligious (so charged) sides. This we might expect, for the whole of cosmical action is carried on by the repulsions as well as attractions of molecules, and human history has to speak as much of war as of peace. Religions have had their dissensions, and so have positivists. Prof. Huxley has once and again used very irreverent language in speaking of our great system-builder, M. Comte. Replying to the Archbishop of York, he says: "So far as I am concerned, the most reverend prelate might dialectically hew M. Comte in pieces, as a modern Agag, and I should not attempt to stay his hand. In so far as my study of what specially characterizes the Positive Philosophy has led me, I find therein little or nothing of any scientific value, and a great deal which is as thoroughly antogonistic to the very essence of science as anything in ultramontane Catholicism. In fact, M. Comte's philosophy in practice might be compendiously described as Catholicism minus Christianity." But a far more painful attack has been made within the last few months on one of our very greatest men, who has for years past been acknowledged to be the greatest of our logicians-in fact, the special philosopher of his age. Prof. Jevons is so presumptuous as to speak thus of Mr. J. S. Mill: "For about twenty years past I have been a more or less constant student of his books; during the last fourteen years I have been compelled, by the traditional requirements of the University of London, to make these works at least partially my text-books in ... lecturing. Some ten years of study passed before I began to detect their fundamental unsoundness. I will no longer consent to live silently under the incubus of bad logic and bad philosophy which Mill's works have laid upon us. . . . If to all his other qualities had been happily added logical accurateness, his writings would indeed have been a source of light for generations to come. But in one way or other Mill's intellect was wrecked. The cause of injury may have been the ruthless training which his father imposed upon him in tender years; it may have been Mill's own life-long attempt to reconcile a false empirical philosophy with conflicting truth. But, however it arose, Mill's mind was essentially illogical. . . . I undertake to show that there is hardly one of his more important and peculiar doctrines which he has not himself amply refuted." I might quote pages of similar opprobrious language. There may be some truth in it as applied to Mill's formal logic, in which he has never been regarded as an adept. But he makes an equally strong attack on his inductive logic, which has commonly been regarded as perfect. He describes "Mill's mind as essentially illogical;" he speaks of "the perversity of his intellect;" declares that "the philosophy of the Mills, both father and son, is a false one;" and says of a certain paragraph that "it is likely to produce intellectual vertigo in the steadiest thinker." He disparages Mill's famous canons of induction, and affirms that he confounds both causation and induction. But all this dogmatism will not prevent Mr. Mill from surviving. Men will soon discover that Jevons's attempt to make logic mathematical is an entire failure. It is not a proper interpretation of the judgment "man dies," to put it in the form "man = some dying creatures." It is clear to me that, in the struggle for existence, Mills will long outlive Jevons. As man must have a religion, and the old religions are sick, dying, or dead, so we must have a new-born religion. We cannot hasten the orderly but slow processes of Nature. A premature birth must produce a weakly child. Emerson says truly, in the last number of this REVIEW, "It does not yet appear what forms the religious feeling will take." So we are not able to describe fully what the new religion already in the womb is to be. But we can confidently affirm that it must obey certain conditions, and can specify some of the negative ones. 1. It cannot have a God living and personal. This would be pure, or rather very impure, anthropomorphism. In the philosophy of Plato, and in the Old and New Testaments, and the popular apprehension, man is supposed to be formed after the image of God; but the truth is, man has formed his god after his own image, quite as much so as when the old idolaters cut down a tree and made a man-god figure out of it. The old Greek philosopher Xenophanes satirically remarked that the Thracians gave blue eyes and the Ethiopians snub noses to their gods; so the Christians make their god hate what they hate, and denounce as sin and send all to hell who do not believe as they do. There can be no objections with Spencer to call the Unknown by the name of God, but then he must not be regarded as having properties that can be named, or even thought of,-the lofty Neoplatonists of Alexandria were right in making their god so high and pure that no predication could be made regarding him. 2. It cannot insist on a personal immortality to the soul. This would be bringing an Egyptian mummy of the days of the Pharaohs into a modern drawing-room. True, every object known is not only immortal, but eternal, as the doctrine of the conservation of force shows; and has existed in all past time, and shall exist forever-if there be a forever. But the individual soul is the product of the brain, and, when the brain is decomposed, the soul must dissolve with it into its material elements; and is really so insignificant that it is not transmuted into any other force. I am not aware that the soul of Shakespeare, or of Newton, when they died, added any weighable powers to the dust to which they returned. 3. There must be no terrors drawn from a day of judgment. These may frighten children, and men and women weak as children, but highly-developed men are beyond them, and look down with pity, not unmixed with contempt, on those who are swayed by them. True, there is a judgment set up in our world -one which pronounces terrible sentences that cannot be reversed. It is the struggle for existence, in which those not suited to the environment-the weak, the deaf, the blind, the decrepit, the negroes, the Indians-as being useless, must perish; and the strong, the healthy, the bold, especially evolutionists, will survive and advance the civilization of the world. 4. There can be no ghostly sanctions or motives derived from a supernatural power, or a world to come. The thinking portion of mankind have never been much swayed by considerations drawn from these regions above or below our ken. Any attempt to enforce them in this advanced age will be resisted by every man of independence. 5. Everything beyond what can be seen must be represented as unknown and unknowable. The Hebrews were right in saying that clouds and darkness cover the face of God's throne, and furnish a mystery fitted to awe us; and in that region, as in the heathen groves, religion may be allowed to dwell. It is vastly more difficult, beforehand, to tell positively what the new religion is to be. Still the prophets of our own, and the priests who have charge of it, have given us certain characteristics. Mr. Mill has given us a description of the worship set up by Comte, though he is not prepared to adopt it: "Private adoration is to be addressed to collective Humanity in the persons of worthy individual representatives, who may be either living or dead, but must in all cases be women; for women, being the sexe aimant, represent the best attribute of humanity that ought to regulate all human life, nor can humanity possibly be represented in any form but of a woman. The objects of private adoration are the mother, the life, the daughter, representing severally the past, the present, and the future, and calling into active exercise the three social sentiments-veneration, attachment, and kindWe are to regard them, whether dead or alive, as our guardian angels, les vraies anges gardiens. If the last have never existed, or if in the particular case any of the three types is too faulty for the office assigned it, their place may be supplied by some other type of womanly excellence, even by one merely historical." All who have benefited the race are to be the Dii Minores of this theology: and days might be set apart to Democritus and his atoms which made the world; and to Lucretius who expelled all superstitious fears; and Hobbes who derived all our ideas from sensation; not omitting Comte himself, who rid us of first and final cause. I do fear, however, ness. that this religion will not survive in the struggle for existence. Some of Comte's followers speak of it as an evidence of his lunacy. But there must, I suppose, be a worship of some kind, were it only to accommodate the religion to human nature, which wishes to have an outlet to, and expression of, its feelings. But this worship, as Huxley has profoundly remarked, must be chiefly of the silent sort." Worship has, in fact, never had much influence on the life of the worshiper. Borrow tells of the gypsy mother who said to her child, "You may go and steal, now that you have said your prayers." Religious emotion is an ebullition which wastes the energy without doing much good. But this worship of the "silent sort" may have a quiet influence without anybody seeing it. With Humanity as its god, the religion must have an immortality, after which all are striving. Mr. Harrison, the most spiritstirring of our later prophets, has been lately developed to tell us what it is to be. It is not to be a personal immortality, but it is to be a continued life in a man's works. Thus Homer lives in the "Iliad." In like manner the orator lives in the words he has uttered; and the actor in the parts he has played; and the singer in the tunes he has sung; and the trumpeter in the vibrations he has started; and the ploughman in the earth he has turned up; and the fisherman in the fish he has caught; and the butcher in the cattle he has killed: and Mr. Harrison in the posthumous influence-theory in the "Symposium" of the Nineteenth Century. This leads me to remark how happy a thing it is that we have two such organs as the Contemporary Review and the Nineteenth Century to give the prophets of the new religion an opportunity of being heard by respectable people. I find that the old lady, the Quarterly, always "so dastardly," complains of this. We are the more dependent on these two young organs since the old fires of the Westminster Review have burned themselves out, and left, like the volcanoes in the moon, only extinct craters. Along with this belief there might be fêtes and festivals to rival the grand Catholic ceremonies. There would be some kind of Sabbath, but removed as far as possible from the Jewish and the Puritan; and to distinguish it it might be called Sunday, that is the sun's day, and we might have it like the French Revolutionists, once in ten days, instead of seven. On these occasions there would be lectures of the true American type, developing the theory |