electricity is a mode of motion, the organ for direct perception of it is lacking in us. It is possible to make complaint of the fewness of our senses. The relativitymen have done this in every age, and Mr. Balfour now takes up the tale. What would satisfy such critics? If they had fifty senses in lieu of five, they might complain that they had not five hundred; if they had five hundred, they might clamour for five thousand or for fifty thousand. Our senses can enable us to perceive the orderliness of nature and control its uses and thrill to its beauty; they put us in touch with our fellow-men and suggest to us the great unseen Friend. And thus they do their work. Perhaps it is in the region of the Beautiful that the change is most noticeable which a wise acceptance of evolution involves. Nature is not objectively a quivering jelly, and only subjectively "for us" a thing of life and beauty. The lower view is put with great force by a mind who saw well past it, R. L. Stevenson in Pulvis et Umbra.1 "Matter," he says, " when not purified by the lustration of fire, rots uncleanly into something we call life; seized through all its atoms with a pediculous malady; swelling in tumours that become independent, sometimes even (by an abominable prodigy) locomotory; one splitting into millions, millions cohering into one, as the malady proceeds through varying stages. . . . In two main shapes this eruption covers the face of the earth, the animal and the vegetable. . . . What a monstrous spectre is... man, the disease of the agglutinated dust."

This we say is the lower view of nature. According to the higher view, life is not a strange something inserted 1 In his volume, Across the Plains.

into nature from without (and here is the advantage of belief in natural evolution). Life is only the fulfilment of matter's own "promise and potency." The undulations were incompletely real until they were seen and heard. If all nature is not demonstrably alive, at least all is framed for life and craves life. Not what is first but what is last in evolution is most characteristic and most important; not the blind, deaf world of the primeval nebula, but that world of poised forces, that world of glory and beauty, in which man and humanity live; that world which has evolved into colour and music, into life and thought and love.

The environment in man's case is a wide one. Across the almost measureless yet measured abyss of space, stars and nebulæ send their beams to this earth; and some rays touch the optic nerves of men, giving a new vision of the "starry heavens above." The furthest "parcels of matter" as well as the nearest have significance for us. We find all nature correspondent in some sense to man's life and man's thought.

And we trust-though we do not prove-that the life and thought, which have emerged here for a little season, do not pass away into the darkness again, but pass into the light.1

1 We must confess to having abandoned Hegel's guidance. The highest stage in Hegel's Philosophy of Nature is the healing art; and its highest attainment is-death. This is neither a jest nor a Platonic parable, but a piece of sentimental unbelief.

The contents of the Philosophy of Nature-in its advance from space to man-may be given in the briefest outline:

CHAPTER X

TRANSITION TO THE PHILOSOPHY OF SPIRIT

HITHERTO We have mainly considered Hegel's philosophy of the Absolute or his doctrine of reality; in other words-in Hegel's own words-we have dealt with his Logic. We have inclined to accept Hegel's idea of an absolute system as in some sense true, while we have seen reason to distrust that dialectic method upon which Hegel relies for the confirmation and the elaboration of his doctrine. Now we have to proceed

to applications of the Logic. In the light of a triumphantly established doctrine of reality as such, we are next invited to take account of various realities. One such has already been before us in the Philosophy of Nature; but Hegel's ill success there is pretty widely admitted by his friends, and the realities with which the Philosophy of Spirit deals are of such importance as to give an entirely new interest to the development of Hegel's thought. Even the abstract doctrine of reality as Hegel teaches it has strange difficulties. What is the full account of the relation of reality to thought? We have not yet ventured on an answer; but in some sense Hegel holds that thought does not simply explain reality, but implies reality, is coextensive with reality, is reality. And henceforth, not in Nature

merely but in Spirit, Hegel undertakes to show by deduction from his Logic the necessity and the real but limited worth of every phase of existence. The potentialities of the Logic require or imply the highest experiences of the human soul. Of course the dialectic method of development goes with us still, and we have cause again to dread its limiting influences. Hegel will aspire to show us how within ethics, æsthetics, religion, the various phases of ethical, æsthetic, religious thought and life may be expected to emerge. Each mode of the spirit must come to light, and each must reveal its weaknesses. But nothing will be done to show us how the various elements of spirit supplement each other, either inside an area, or upon an encyclopædic view of the complementary areas of the world of mind. Reality is still to be serial or successive. Nothing in any region of study is to be more than a phase.

Has the conception of absolute system any real contribution to offer in the fields of study that now lie before us? Can inquiry into the nature of the True shed light upon the nature of the Beautiful and the Good? Surely it must do so. There are not two regions of reality,-one, where truth reigns; another, where distinct ideals that know nothing about truth set up their thrones. Beauty and goodness, we may trust, are part of the truth of things. One kind of knowledge—if we are to carry analysis and distinction even as far as this-deals with beauty; another kind-if we are to call it so-deals with goodness. But all are akin in this, that they give us knowledge. All deal with reality. There cannot be two realities-if there are, why do we call them by the same name? From the Divine point of view, accessible to us or inaccessible,

the two will necessarily reveal themselves as phases of one reality.

Perhaps a different question arises when we ask whether we learn anything further in the study of Beauty and Goodness. As usual, there are plausible grounds for reckoning Hegel a supporter of each alternative. He adds to his Logic a Philosophy of Spirit would he have done that if he had had no fresh material to submit? He regards everything as settled in principle by the Logic ;-does such a position do justice to the human heart and conscience?

The question is largely discussed upon psychological grounds, or at least in psychological language. The trichotomy of intellect, feeling, will, is in high favour at present. Even so strong an admirer of Hegel as Mr. M'Taggart makes use of it, telling us that "while Hegel was justified in identifying all Being with Spirit,' he was not justified in taking the further step of identifying the true nature of Spirit exclusively with pure thought,"-exclusively, i.e. in contrast with Spirit's "two other aspects besides thought, namely, volition and feeling."2 The Philosophy of Spirit, in Hegel's hands, undertakes to show how will-Objective Spirit in Hegel; Practical Reason in Kant-necessarily emerges from a study of thought and its object. (Feeling is rapidly dismissed; Hegel despises it too much to do more than note it as a link with the brutes.) Ultimately, like all opposites, it coheres with its opposite (with thought) in the Absolute Mind.-Must we not say here what we have said before? Is it not

1 Compare closing chapter.

2 Studies in Hegelian Dialectic, p. 119.