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The Contemporary Review, Volume 36, October 1879

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Title: The Contemporary Review, Volume 36, October 1879

Author: Various


        
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Language: English

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[Transcriber's Notes:

The first part of this volume (September 1879) was produced as Project
Gutenberg Ebook #30048. The relevant part of the table of contents has
been extracted from that document, and a brief title page added.

_Italic words_ have been enclosed in underscores. Greek letters have
been transliterated and enclosed in equals signs, e.g. =psychê=.

As the oe ligature cannot be included in this format, it has been
replaced with the separate letters, e.g. "Phoenician". Also note that on
page 247, the original text shows a breve above the letter "e" in the
Persian word for desert, "meru".

A few minor typographical errors have been silently corrected. Some
inconsistent hyphenation and accents have been retained.]




             THE
         CONTEMPORARY
            REVIEW

  VOLUME XXXVI. OCTOBER, 1879




CONTENTS.


  OCTOBER, 1879.
                                                                    PAGE
  India and Afghanistan. By Lieut.-Colonel R. D. Osborn              193

  Critical Idealism in France. By Paul Janet                         212

  On the Moral Limits of Beneficial Commerce. By Francis W. Newman   232

  The Myths of the Sea and the River of Death. By C. F. Keary        243

  Mr. Macvey Napier and the Edinburgh Reviewers. By Matthew Browne   263

  The Supreme God in the Indo-European Mythology. By James
    Darmesteter                                                      274

  Lazarus Appeals to Dives. By Henry J. Miller                       290

  The Forms and Colours of Living Creatures. By Professor St.
    George Mivart                                                    313

  Contemporary Life and Thought in Turkey. By an Eastern Statesman   334

  Contemporary Books:--

        I. History and Literature of the East, under the Direction
           of Professor E. H. Palmer                                 350

       II. Classical Literature, under the Direction of Rev.
           Prebendary J. Davies                                      359

      III. Essays, Novels, Poetry, &c.under the Direction of
           Matthew Browne                                            366




INDIA AND AFGHANISTAN.


When the news arrived that Major Cavagnari and his companions had fallen
victims to the fury of the Kabul populace, the _Daily Telegraph_ "called
aloud, before Heaven, for a punishment which should ring from end to end
of the Continent of Asia." It is a pity that so much fine and eloquent
indignation should be expended on the Afghans instead of those who are
truly responsible for the catastrophe which has evoked it. If ever there
was a future event which might be predicted with absolute certainty, it
was that Major Cavagnari and his companions would perish precisely as
they have done. Twice, within forty years, have we invaded Afghanistan,
although on both occasions we have frankly avowed that with the
inhabitants of the country we had no cause of quarrel whatever.
Nevertheless, we carried fire and sword wherever we went, cutting down
their fruit trees, burning their villages, and leaving their women and
children shelterless under a winter sky. What could we expect as the
fruit of such acts, except that our victims--knowing, as we did, that
they were revengeful, passionate, and too ignorant to forecast the
consequences of their actions--should retaliate in kind the moment that
they had the opportunity? The first invasion of Afghanistan is now known
by general consent as "the iniquitous war;" but it is open to question
if even that war was so elaborately contrived, or so long laboured for
as this--the first act of which has terminated in the slaughter of Major
Cavagnari and his escort.

The circumstances which preceded it are briefly these. For eighteen
months Lord Lytton had attempted, by alternate threats and cajolery, to
prevail upon the Ameer Shere Ali to make a surrender of his
independence, and become a vassal of the Indian Empire. These attempts
having failed, war was declared against him on the pretence that he had
insulted us before all Asia by declining to receive a "friendly" mission
sent by the Indian Government. This mission was _not_ friendly. It was
notorious throughout India that it would go to Kabul charged with an
_ultimatum_ which offered the Ameer the choice of war, or the sacrifice
of his independence. But even this mission the Ameer never refused to
receive--nay, it is certain that he would have received it if the
opportunity had been given to him, so great was the value he attached to
English friendship. But what the Government of India desired was not the
reception of the mission, but a pretext for making war upon the Ameer.
It knew that the policy which it meditated in Afghanistan would so
completely destroy the sovereignty of the Ameer, that it was impossible
he should agree to it. At the same time, it was impossible to declare
war against an independent prince, simply because he declined to divest
himself of his independence. The war must, somehow or another, be made
to appear as if it were due to some act of the Ameer. Consequently,
almost from the hour in which the announcement was made that the mission
was to start, the Ameer was plied with insults and menaces which, if
they were not intended to drive him to some act of overt hostility, had
no purpose at all. And when these proved unavailing, Lord Lytton
directed Sir Neville Chamberlain to attempt to force his way through the
Khyber Pass, without waiting for the permission of the Ameer. In the
most courteous manner the Afghan officer, in command at the Khyber,
intimated to the mission that, without the sanction of his master, it
was impossible to allow it to proceed; and this refusal was instantly
telegraphed to England as a deliberate insult which must be wiped out in
blood. From first to last, so far as his conduct towards us is
concerned, the Ameer was absolutely blameless. During his entire reign
his consistent endeavour had been to draw closer the ties of amity
between himself and us. The Russian mission had forced its way to Kabul,
despite of all his endeavours to hinder its advance; and there can be no
question that but for the previous action of Lord Lytton that mission
would never have come to Afghanistan. But eighteen months before that
occurrence Lord Lytton had withdrawn our Native Agent from the Court of
the Ameer. This had been done as a mark of displeasure, and a proof that
no alliance of any kind existed between the two States. This proceeding
Lord Lytton followed up by the occupation of Quetta, although he was
well aware that such an occupation would be interpreted--and rightly--by
the Ameer, as a menace to his independence, and the harbinger of war. So
it came about that when the Russian mission knocked for admission at the
doors of his capital, the Ameer found himself on the one side threatened
by Russia, and on the other abandoned and threatened by Lord Lytton.
Lord Lytton, in point of fact, is as directly responsible for the entry
of the Russian mission to Kabul as he is for the dispatch of his own.

But if Lord Lytton's treatment of the Ameer was cruel and ungenerous,
criminal, at least to an equal extent, was his treatment of the people
over whom he ruled. At that time there was an appalling amount of
suffering all over India. The country had been ravaged by a series of
famines. In the Punjab prices were abnormally high. The North-West
Provinces were still unrecovered from a dearth, during which the
Government of India had exhibited a rapacity and indifference to human
suffering which would, with difficulty, be credited in England. Terrible
as is the mortality resulting from a famine in India, the death-roll
represents but a tenth part of the suffering which such visitations
inflict. For every human being that dies, ten are left, without money
and without physical strength, to struggle feebly for existence on the
margin of the grave. They cannot give a fair day's work for a fair day's
wage. They may reckon themselves fortunate if their enfeebled powers can
earn just sufficient to keep body and soul together. For all these
wretched beings--and last year in Upper India they numbered many
millions--the smallest rise of price in the necessities of life means
death from hunger. A war, therefore, with the enormous rise of prices
which it would immediately produce, was nothing less than a sentence of
torture and death passed upon tens of thousands of our own subjects.
Undeterred, however, by the warnings of experience, deaf to
considerations of humanity and justice, the Government of India started
on its wild-goose chase after a "Scientific Frontier." The victims whom
it trampled to death in this mad chase have never been numbered--they
never can be numbered. The Afghans who died in defence of their village
homes form but a hundredth part of them. The residue was composed of our
own mute and uncomplaining subjects.

A war thus wantonly commenced resulted in a failure as ignominious as it
deserved. Long before the Treaty of Gundamuck the ambitious policy of
the Government had become an object of contempt and ridicule all over
India. It was known that Lord Lytton and his advisers were at their
wit's end to discover something which might be made to do duty as a
"Scientific Frontier," and so bring a misjudged enterprise to a
conclusion. But it is the peculiarity of our Ministers to believe that
they can arrest the inexorable sequence of cause and effect by a
dexterous manipulation of the faculty of speech. Lord Beaconsfield
appears to have imparted to his colleagues his own belief in the
omnipotence of phrases to remove mountains, and make rough places
smooth. So the Treaty of Gundamuck was no sooner signed than Ministers
and Ministerial journals raised a great hymn of triumph over the
wondrous things which they had wrought in Afghanistan. The one solid
national advantage to be derived from the sacrifice of Cavagnari and his
comrades, is that this method of treating facts will have to be laid
aside. Lord Lytton is not likely to appeal again to his "carefully
verified facts" as a proof that he is a much wiser man than Lord
Lawrence. Lord Cranbrook will not again express his conviction that the
"objections (to an English Resident) expressed by Shere Ali will be
shown to have been without substantial foundation." Yakoub Khan and his
five attendants are all that remain of that "strong, friendly, and
independent Afghanistan" which Mr. Stanhope informed the House of
Commons had been created by the war. The anguished cry of the _Daily
Telegraph_ "for a punishment which shall ring from end to end of the
Continent of Asia" is the latest expression of the "results incalculably
beneficial to the two countries" which, according to Lord Lytton, were
to flow from the Peace of Gundamuck.

A failure in policy more signal and more complete than this it is
impossible to imagine. But it is to be noted that the Ministerial
journals are doing their utmost to save the "Scientific Frontier" from
the destruction which has overtaken the projects of the Ministry. And so
long as a belief in this Frontier is cherished anywhere, the return to a
safe and rational policy is obstructed. In the following pages,
therefore, I shall, firstly, endeavour to show that the (so-called)
"Scientific Frontier" is as purely fictitious as the "strong, friendly,
and independent Afghanistan" which we were told had been created out of
chaos by means of the war. And, secondly, I shall discuss the various
lines of conduct which lie open to us, when we have occupied Kabul, in
order to determine which is best fitted to ensure the stability of our
Indian Empire and the contentment of its inhabitants.


The Scientific Frontier.

In all the discussions on this Frontier question, a very obvious, but
all-important, fact has been persistently forgotten. It is that British
rule in India is a rule based upon military supremacy; and that,
therefore, our Indian army--English as well as native--is primarily a
garrison, having its duties upon the places where it is quartered. We
could not withdraw our troops from any part of India without incurring
the risk of an outbreak in the districts thus denuded. The "Punjab
Frontier Force" has always been a force distinct from the "Army of
India," and recognized as having special duties of its own. So far as I
know, in the discussions on a "Scientific Frontier" no reference has
been made to the above circumstance. The Indian army has been spoken of
as if it were so much fighting power, which we were free to concentrate
at any point we pleased. And to this oversight is due the hallucination
that an improved frontier would enable us to diminish the strength of
the Indian garrison (properly so called). The fact is, that before this
last war we had almost the very frontier which our situation in India
required. If the authority of the Ameer had extended up to the
boundaries of our Empire, troubles between the two States must have
occurred, resulting inevitably in the extinction of the weaker. The evil
of such an extension of territory no one denies; we should not only have
had to hold Afghanistan with a strong garrison--certainly not less than
twenty thousand men--but we should have been compelled to maintain a
frontier force, to guard against aggression from without, either from
Russia or Persia. Forty thousand men would have been needed for this
double duty, in addition to the pre-existing garrison of India. But by a
piece of supreme good fortune the authority of the Ameer did not begin
where ours left off. Between us and him were interposed the tribes which
dwell in the hills along our North-Western frontier. These tribes
acknowledged allegiance neither to him nor to us. Broken up and divided
amongst themselves, the worst they could inflict upon us was an
occasional raid into our territories; and these we could repress without
having to call the Ameer to an account for the lawlessness of his
subjects. A few regiments of horse and foot were all that we needed for
the defence of our frontier; while as against foreign invasion we
possessed a frontier that needed no defence at all. That frontier
consisted of the foodless deserts and inaccessible hills of Afghanistan.
These were impenetrable to an invader, so long as we retained the
friendship and the confidence of the people who dwell among them.
Consequently, to quote the language of Sir Henry Rawlinson, "our main
object has ever been, since the date of Lord Auckland's famous Simla
Manifesto of 1838, to obtain the establishment of a strong, friendly,
and independent Power on the North-Western frontier of India, without,
however, accepting any crushing liabilities in return." We all know the
manner in which Lord Auckland set about obtaining the "strong, friendly,
and independent Power," and the "crushing liabilities" we had to accept
in consequence. Tutored by experience, we adopted a wiser and more
righteous policy, which was producing admirable results.

The difficulty of establishing a stable friendship with Afghanistan
arises from the character of the people. It is the habitation, not of a
nation, but of a collection of tribes, and the nominal ruler of
Afghanistan is never more than the ruler of a party which, for the time,
chances to be strongest. Consequently there never existed an authority,
recognized as legitimate throughout the country, with which we could
enter into diplomatic relations. At the same time, their divided
condition crippled the Afghans for all offensive purposes. We had,
therefore, nothing to fear in the way of unprovoked aggression, and our
obvious policy was to win the confidence of these wild tribes and their
chiefs, by carefully abstaining from encroachments on their
independence. Such, in fact, has been the policy which every
Governor-General has pursued in the interval which divides the
"plundering and blundering" of Lord Auckland from the like achievements
of Lord Lytton. And it had been attended with the greater success,
because under the firm guidance of two remarkable men, Afghanistan had
progressed considerably towards the status of an organized kingdom.
Shere Ali had diligently trod in the footsteps of his father, the Dost,
and it is in these terms that the Government of India describes the rule
and policy of the Ameer in the year 1876:

    "Those officers of our Government who are best acquainted with the
    affairs of Afghanistan, and the character of the Ameer and his
    people, consider that the hypothesis that the Ameer may be
    intimidated or corrupted by Russia (even supposing there was any
    probability of such an attempt being made) is opposed to his
    personal character and to the feelings and traditions of his race,
    and that any attempt to intrigue with factions in Afghanistan,
    opposed to the Ameer, would defeat itself, and afford the Ameer the
    strongest motive for at once disclosing to us such proceedings.
    Whatever may be the discontent created in Afghanistan by taxation,
    conscription, and other unpopular measures, _there can be no
    question that the power of the Ameer Shere Ali Khan has been
    consolidated throughout Afghanistan in a manner unknown since the
    days of Dost Mahomed, and that the officers entrusted with the
    administration have shown extraordinary loyalty and devotion to the
    Ameer's cause_. It was probably the knowledge of the Ameer's
    strength that kept the people aloof from Yakoub Khan, in spite of
    his popularity. At all events, Herat fell to the Ameer without a
    blow. The rebellion in Salpoora in the extreme West was soon
    extinguished. The disturbances in Budukshan in the North were
    speedily suppressed. _Nowhere has intrigue or rebellion been able to
    make head in the Ameer's dominions._ Even the Char Eimak and the
    Hazara tribes are learning to appreciate the advantages of a firm
    rule.... But what we wish specially to repeat is that, from the date
    of the Umballa Durbar to the present time, _the Ameer has
    unreservedly accepted and acted upon our advice to maintain a
    peaceful attitude towards his neighbours_. We have no reason to
    believe that his views are changed."

This "strong, friendly, and independent Power"--this edifice of order
and increasing stability--the British Government deliberately destroyed
in the insane expectation of finding a "Scientific Frontier" hidden
somewhere in the ruins. It is difficult to conceive of an action more
impolitic or more cruel. In a month the labours of forty years were
obliterated, old hatreds rekindled, and the wounds of 1838, which the
wise and gentle treatment of former Viceroys had almost healed, were
opened afresh.

We come next to the inquiry as to what this "Scientific Frontier" is, in
order to obtain which this act of vandalism was perpetrated. This is a
question involved in some obscurity. The _Times_ is the great champion
of the "Scientific Frontier," but in its columns, as also in Ministerial
speeches, it changes colour like a chameleon. Sometimes it is called the
"possession of the three highways leading to India," thereby rendering
the Empire "invulnerable." At other times it is recommended to us
because it protects the trade through the Bolan Pass, and enables us to
threaten Kabul. The fact is that the (so-called) "Scientific
Frontier"--meaning thereby the frontier we acquired by the Treaty of
Gundamuck--is a make-believe, an imposture. It is not the "Scientific
Frontier" in pursuit of which we "hunted the Ameer to death" and reduced
his territories to a condition of anarchy.

Those who have followed the history of the war with attention will
remember that in September of last year the Calcutta correspondent of
the _Times_ was smitten with a really marvellous admiration for Lord
Lytton. "India," he wrote, "is fortunate in the possession at the
present time of a Viceroy specially gifted with broad statesmanlike
views, the result partly of most vigilant and profound study, partly of
the application of great natural intellectual capacity to the close
cultivation of political science and the highest order of statecraft."
Here we have the portrait of the lion painted by himself; and it is not
surprising that this superb creature should have regarded with
considerable scorn the policy of his predecessors who never claimed to
be "specially gifted" for the exercise of "the highest order of
statecraft." "The present measure," the correspondent went on to say,
"for the despatch of a mission to Kabul forms but a single move in an
extensive concerted scheme for the protection of India, which is the
outcome of a long-devised and elaborately worked-out system of defensive
policy." Here we have a fine example of the "puff preliminary." In the
issue of the _Times_ for the 10th September this "extensive concerted
scheme for the protection of India" is detailed at length, and is there
plainly set forth as intended for a barrier against Russia:--

    "The Indian Government are most anxious to avoid adopting any policy
    which would bear even the semblance of hostility towards Russia, but
    the extreme probability of a collision sooner or later cannot be
    overlooked. It is necessary, therefore, to provide for a strong
    defensive position to guard against eventualities. From this point
    of view it is indispensable that we should possess a commanding
    influence over the triangle of territory formed on the map by Kabul,
    Ghuznee, and Jellalabad, together with power over the Hindoo
    Khosh.... This triangle we may hope to command with Afghan
    concurrence if the Ameer is friendly. The strongest frontier line
    which could be adopted would be along the Hindoo Khosh, from Pamir
    to Bamian, thence to the south by the Helmund, Girishk, and
    Kandahar, to the Arabian Sea. It is possible, therefore, that by
    friendly negotiations some such defensive boundary may be adopted."

Such were the moderate designs entertained by the Indian Government when
they dispatched what they called a "friendly mission" to the Court of
the Ameer. If Lord Lytton imagined that "friendly negotiations" would
obtain these tremendous concessions from the Ameer, it would show that a
training in "the highest order of statecraft" does not preserve even a
"specially gifted" Viceroy from the credulousness of an infant. But his
acts show that he entertained no such belief. He felt, as every one must
feel who reads the extract I have made, that demands such as these must
be preceded by a war. Hence the menacing letters addressed to the Ameer;
hence the rude and insulting manner in which Sir Neville Chamberlain was
ordered to attempt an entrance into Afghanistan without awaiting the
permission of the Ameer; and hence, finally, the monstrous fiction of a
deliberate "insult" inflicted upon us, when, in point of fact, we had
been the "insulters" all along. The obvious intention throughout was to
obtain a pretext for declaring war, because without a war the
"Scientific Frontier" was manifestly unattainable. Lastly, when war had
been determined upon, the same "official" correspondent came forward in
the _Times_ to make known the objects of the impending campaign. "We
have," he wrote, "been driven into what will probably be a costly war
entirely against our will, and all our endeavours to avoid it. The
occasion, therefore, will now be seized to secure for ourselves the
various passes piercing the mountain ranges along the whole frontier
from the Khyber to the Bolan; and further _strategic measures will be
adopted to dominate entirely the Suleiman range and the Hindoo Khosh_."

It is impossible not to admire the hardihood of this remarkable
correspondent when he alleges that the war was "entirely against our
will, and all our endeavours to avoid it." But this is not the matter
with which I am at present concerned. The official character of these
communications will be denied by no one, and they make it clear that the
"Scientific Frontier" was intended as a barrier against Russia, and
would have made the Hindoo Khosh the external boundary of the Indian
Empire. Such a frontier is manifestly the dream of a military
specialist, to whose mental vision the Indian Empire, with all its
diverse interests, has no existence except as a frontier to be defended
against the Russians. And it illustrates the ignorance and precipitate
folly which has plunged us in our present difficulties that a project so
wild should have been seriously entertained. To have carried it out the
subjugation of Afghanistan would have been an indispensable preliminary,
and then the civilizing of it, by means of a system of roads and strong
garrisons throughout the country; the entire cost of these vast
operations being defrayed by a country already taxed to the last point
of endurance, heavily burdened with an increasing debt, and ravaged by
periodical famines. Such, however, was the "Scientific Frontier" for
which a "specially gifted Viceroy," trained in "the highest order of
political statecraft," declared war against the Ameer. But the frontier
which we obtained at the close of the war, and which Ministers and
Ministerial journals would have us believe is the genuine article which
they wanted from the beginning, is not only not this frontier, but it
has not the smallest resemblance to it.

The new frontier does not differ from the old except in three
particulars. We hold the Khyber Pass as far as Lundi Kotal, and we have
acquired the right to quarter troops in the Kurram Valley and the Valley
of Peshin. Of these the Kurram Valley is a mere _cul-de-sac_, leading
nowhere. But I will not ask of my readers to accept of my judgment on
this matter. Among the best known advocates for a forward and aggressive
policy in Afghanistan is Dr. Bellew. An accomplished linguist and an
experienced traveller, he accompanied Colonel Lumsden's mission to
Kandahar in 1857; he was also a member of the mission entrusted with the
settlement of the Seistan boundary question, and no man living is better
acquainted with the geography and people of Afghanistan. I believe it
will not be denied that Lord Lytton, during the recent war, trusted
largely in his knowledge and suggestions. He has thus expressed himself
on the policy of occupying the Kurram Valley:--

    "The Kurram Valley would involve the addition of about one hundred
    and fifty miles of hill frontage to our border, and would bring us
    into contact with the independent Orakzais, Zaimukhts, Toris,
    Cabul-Khel, Waziris, and others, against whose hostility and inroads
    here, as in other parts of the border, we should have to protect our
    territory. By its possession, as we are now situated, we should be
    committed to the defence of a long narrow strip of land, a perfect
    _cul-de-sac_ in the hills, hemmed in by a number of turbulent
    robber-tribes, who are under no control, and acknowledge no
    authority. In ordinary times its acquisition would add to the
    serious difficulties of our position. In times of trouble or
    disturbance on the border, its possession would prove a positive
    source of weakness, a dead weight upon our free action. In it we
    should run the risk of being hemmed in by our foes in the
    overhanging hills around, of being cut off from our communications
    with the garrison of Kohat, by the Orakzais on the one side, by the
    Waziris on the other. These are the disadvantages of the step. In
    return what advantages should we derive? Not one. With Kurram in our
    possession we certainly could not flank either the Khyber or the
    Goleri Pass, because between it and the one, intervenes the
    impassable snowy range of Sufed Koh; and between it and the other,
    intervenes the vast routeless hilly tract of the Waziris. From
    Kurram we could neither command Kabul nor Ghazni, because the route
    to either is by a several days' march, over stupendous hills and
    tortuous defiles, in comparison with which the historical Khyber and
    Bolan Passes, or even the less widely-known Goleri Pass, are as
    king's highways."

This, I think, is sufficient to dispose of the Kurram Valley. If the old
frontier has been rendered "invulnerable," it is not the acquisition of
the Kurram Valley which has made it so. There remains the Peshin Valley.
This valley is an open tract of country lying almost midway on the line
of march between Quetta and Kandahar, but nearer to the former than the
latter. Three easy marches from Quetta suffice to place a traveller in
the centre of it. It cannot accurately be described as an extension of
our frontier, because it is dissevered from it by more than two hundred
miles of difficult country. Between the valley and British territory,
the lands of the Khan of Khelat are interposed in one direction, and
numerous robber-tribes--Kakers, Murrees, Bhoogtees--in another. Until
the valley is securely linked to the Indus by a railway from Sukkur to
the Bolan Pass--a costly work, which could not be executed in less than
seven years--it will be impossible to quarter more than a few thousand
men in it--and these for six months of the year will be as completely
detached from their base of supply and reinforcement in India, as if a
tract of empty space ran between them. So far from ensuring any
increased security to India by our premature occupation of this valley,
we have only enhanced the chances of a hostile collision with the rulers
and people of Afghanistan. We were already in military occupation of
Quetta, and until easy and rapid communication had been established
between Quetta and the Indus, nothing was to be gained by a yet further
advance from our base. As a barrier against Russia this frontier is
without meaning, and no better proof of this fact could be adduced than
Sir Henry Rawlinson's commentary upon its merits in the Article on the
"Results of the Afghan War" which recently appeared in the _Nineteenth
Century_:--

    "The Afghan settlement is a very good settlement as far as it goes,
    but it is not immaculate--_it is not complete_. To yield us its full
    measure of defence, the Treaty must be supplemented by all
    legitimate precautions and supports. _Persia must be detached from
    Russia coûte que coûte._ Russia herself must not be left in any
    uncertainty as to our intentions. She must be made to understand ...
    _that she will not be permitted unopposed to establish herself in
    strength ... even at Abiverd_, nor to commence intrigues against the
    British power in India. She might indeed be warned that, if
    necessary, we were prepared in self-defence to support the
    Turcomans--with whom she has no legitimate quarrel--with arms or
    money, or even to turn the tables on her by encouraging the efforts
    of the Uzbegs to recover their liberty.... _It would be almost
    fatuity at such a moment to withdraw our garrison from Candahar...._
    Yacub Khan must be made to see that it is as much for his interest
    as our own to hold an efficient body of troops in such a position
    that, on the approach of danger ... _they might, with military
    alacrity, occupy Herat as an auxiliary garrison_."

And what is implied in detaching Persia from Russia he explains in
another part of his Essay.

    "If Russia, as there is strong reason to believe, is now pushing on
    to Merv or Sarakhs ... with the ultimate hope of occupying Herat,
    then it might very possibly be a sound policy to extend to Persia
    the provisions of the Asia Minor Protectorate, or even to support
    her actively in vindicating her rights upon the frontier of
    Khorassán."

From all which it would appear that our "Scientific Frontier" is simply
good for nothing until it has been supplemented by an offensive and
defensive alliance with the barbarian enemies of Russia all over the
world. In order to ensure the safety of India, we must protect not only
our own "Scientific Frontier," but we must guarantee the Sultan all his
Asiatic possessions; we must be ready at any moment to fight for the
"integrity and independence" of Persia; we must be prepared to march our
troops to Herat, and to show a front against the Russians on the Oxus;
we must provide the Tekeh-Turcomans with arms and money, and assist the
Uzbegs in their attempts to recover their liberty. Such are the
"legitimate precautions and supports" which are requisite to render the
new frontier immaculate and complete. But if with a "Scientific
Frontier" we remain liable to such tremendous demands as these, it
passes imagination to conjecture in what respect we could have been
worse off when our frontier was "haphazard."


The Circumstances of the Peace.

I shall next endeavour to show the circumstances which compelled the
Indian Government to acquiesce in a peace which thus left the avowed
object of the war unfulfilled. The preparations for the invasion of
Afghanistan were on a scale corresponding to the magnitude of the
enterprise as explained by the "official" correspondent of the _Times_.
Troops were set in motion for the North-West frontier from garrisons in
the extreme south of India. Men were sent from England to man heavy gun
batteries. In addition to the troops under General Roberts, no less than
three columns were formed to invade Afghanistan viâ Sukkur and the
Bolan, and the same number to advance through the Khyber. The force
which marched to Kandahar was supplied with four heavy gun batteries,
and a fifth was sent up subsequently, although, except upon the
supposition that permanent entrenched camps were to be formed in
Afghanistan, these heavy guns were simply an encumbrance and a source of
danger. But the campaign had barely commenced before the Government
became aware that it had utterly miscalculated its cost and difficulty.
It is easy enough for an army to enter Afghanistan; it is next to
impossible for it to subsist when it has got there. It is easy enough to
scatter the Afghans when collected in battle array; it is next to
impossible to subjugate them because they never are _so_ collected. From
these causes our raid into Afghanistan was but little removed from an
ignominious failure. If we had not made peace we should have been
compelled to evacuate the country from the enormous costliness of
retaining troops in it. Under such circumstances, a peace was needed too
urgently to allow the Government to stand out for any extraordinary
concessions. They took what they could get, which proved to be, as we
have seen, the right to place garrisons in the two valleys of Kurram and
Peshin. But having gone to war in search of a "Scientific Frontier," no
alternative was left to them except to frankly confess that they had not
found it; or to affirm that these two valleys constituted it.

We come now to the causes of our failure. These are all-important, and
ought to dissipate for ever the fear of an invasion of India by Russia
or any other Power. The plan of the campaign required that Afghanistan
should be invaded from three points; but the most important operation
was understood to be the advance of General Stewart upon Kandahar. As
soon as hostilities appeared inevitable, a small force under General
Biddulph had been sent forward to secure Quetta against a sudden attack.
General Stewart followed later on, and the two columns numbered upon
paper about 20,000 men, with 60 guns. Meanwhile, a third column was
ordered to assemble at Sukkur in support, and placed under the command
of General Primrose. These extensive preparations were supposed to
indicate the determination of the Indian Government to push on as far as
Herat. The distance which had to be traversed between Sukkur and
Kandahar is, roughly speaking, about four hundred miles, but the country
presents extraordinary difficulties. From Sukkur to Jacobabad extends a
level tract which, during the rains, is flooded to a depth of seven
feet. Between Jacobabad and Dadur--a town situated at the entrance of
the Bolan Pass--extends the Sinde desert. Any large force marching
across this desert would have to take with them, not only food and
forage, but water, for only at intervals of fifteen or twenty miles is
the parched and barren soil pierced by a few brackish springs, which
just suffice for the needs of the hamlets which have sprung up around
them. For six months of the year this desert is literally impassable. A
hot wind sweeps across it, which is fatal to man and beast. Only once
did the Indian Government venture to send troops across it after this
"blast of death" (as the natives call it) had begun to blow. This was in
the last Afghan war. Some hundreds of native troops were sent as an
escort in charge of supplies, and in four days one hundred Sepoys
perished, three hundred camp followers, and (I think) nine officers out
of fourteen. Beyond Dadur is the Bolan Pass. This Pass is about eighty
miles in length; regular road there is none; what purports to be a road
is merely the bed of a stream, which, during the rainy weather, is
filled from bank to bank with a volume of rushing water. Neither food
nor forage is obtainable in the Pass, and even the camels, when starting
from Dadur, had to carry a seven days' supply of food for themselves.
Between Quetta and Kandahar the country is open, but neither is food
procurable for a large force, nor forage for the horses and camels. From
first to last General Stewart's troops were almost wholly fed from
India. The winter, luckily, was one of unprecedented mildness. But for
this, in place of a march upon Kandahar, a terrible catastrophe could
hardly have been averted. In ordinary seasons the snows fall heavily in
and around Quetta early in November, and the cold is intense. The Bolan
Pass is swept from end to end by hurricanes of wind and rain and snow.
At the very time when these storms usually occur we had a dozen
regiments and batteries straggling along the whole length of the Bolan
Pass. Last year, however, there was neither snow nor hurricane, and our
troops got through the Pass in safety. There was no opposition offered
to our advance on Kandahar, but, from the want of food and the hardships
which had to be endured, no less than twenty thousand camels perished
upon the march. This mortality decided the campaign. When General
Stewart reached Kandahar the situation was as follows:--The magazines at
Quetta were nearly empty. Four months' food was collected at Sukkur, but
awaited carriage for its transport to Quetta. The third column under
General Primrose was assembling on the Indus, and needed ten thousand
camels to enable it to advance. To supply all these wants there were at
Sukkur about 1600 camels. In order to lessen the pressure on the
Commissariat, General Stewart divided his forces, despatching one column
to hunt for supplies in the direction of Giriskh, and sending another
with the same object to Khelat-i-Ghilzie. These movements caused the
death from cold and hunger of a large additional number of camels, and
demonstrated that there was not food in that part of Afghanistan
sufficient for a force so large as that collected at Kandahar. Sinde,
meanwhile, had been swept so bare of camels that it was impossible to
collect a sufficient number for the carriage of food to Quetta before
the hot weather had set in, and the march across the desert was barred
by "the blast of death." Immediate action was necessary if General
Stewart's troops were not to starve; and eight thousand men returned to
India, reducing the garrison left at Kandahar to four thousand. This
number, it was trusted, the Commissariat would be able to feed during
the hot weather. But even this small force was so scantily supplied with
carriage that it could not have moved, in a body, for fifty miles in any
direction. It was, so to speak, nailed to the spot on which it was
encamped. This want of food, far more than the physical difficulties of
the country, is and always will be the insuperable obstacle to carrying
on extensive military operations in Afghanistan. The people obtain no
more from the soil than just suffices for their own wants; and for days
together an invading army has to pass over huge wastes with hardly a
trace of human habitation, and consequently destitute of food.

Not a little amusing was the revulsion of feeling caused throughout
India by the lame and impotent conclusion of the advance on Kandahar. It
was a demonstration of the impossibility of an invasion which convinced
those who were most reluctant to be convinced. If when we had all India
from which to draw our supplies, and with no enemy to oppose us, our
utmost efforts had merely sufficed to place four thousand men in
Kandahar, and leave them there, isolated and defenceless, it was
chimerical to suppose that the Russians could march for double that
distance an army capable of attempting the conquest of India.
"Kandahar," writes a military correspondent to the _Pioneer_--the
official journal of India--"is acknowledged to be a mistake, and it is
hoped that a British army will never again be dispatched in that
direction; it is a mere waste of men, money, and means, and an
unsuitable line for either attack or defence."

And the _Pioneer_, the very purpose of whose existence is to preach the
infallibility of the Indian Government, thus endorses the remarks of its
correspondent: "The theories about Kandahar are by this time exploded;
indeed, there are many critics who have refused to adopt them from the
very beginning; believing against General Hamley, that the main road
into Afghanistan, whether we march as defenders of the Kabul Ameer or as
avengers, must lie past Peshawur and Jelalabad."

The failure on the Kandahar side placed the Indian Government in an
extremely difficult position. An advance on Herat was plainly out of the
question; even one on Ghuznee was beyond the power of General Stewart
and his troops. Elsewhere the aspect of affairs was hardly less
cheering. The expedition in the Kurram Valley had resulted in the
somewhat ignominious retreat out of Khost. We had about 15,000 men
holding the line from the Khyber to Jelalabad; but in effecting this,
14,000 camels had perished, and several of the regiments had been more
than decimated from sickness and exposure. We had not subjugated a rood
of territory on which our troops were not actually encamped. The main
strength of the Ameer's army was untouched, while all along our
Trans-Indus frontier the hill tribes were in a state of dangerous
unrest. The hot weather was coming on apace, when cholera and typhoid
fever would be added to the number of our enemies. Thirty thousand
troops had been set in motion, the garrisons in the interior of India
dangerously weakened; three millions of money expended; and this was all
that had been achieved. If now Yakoub Khan refused to come to terms,
what was to be done? General Brown might be ordered to force his way
from Jelalabad to Kabul, but what was he to do when he got there? The
cost in money would be certainly heavy--the cost in men, not improbably,
heavy also. And if, on our arrival at his capital, Yakoub Khan retired
to either Balkh or Herat, we were powerless to follow him. Yakoub Khan,
in fact, had the game in his hands. We had shot our bolt and failed. He
had simply to decline to make peace, and keep out of our reach. We
should then have been compelled either to evacuate the country, or to
occupy it with the certainty that a little later on we should be
compelled to withdraw, when the drain on the finances of India became
too heavy to endure. Sir Henry Rawlinson rightly says, that a very small
force can march from one end of Afghanistan to another; but a very large
force is requisite permanently to hold it. The tribal divisions which
hinder unity of resistance hinder also the achievement of any decisive
victory. Each tribe is an independent centre of life, which requires a
separate operation for its extinction.

Such was the dilemma in which the Government found themselves involved.
It was almost equally disastrous either to withdraw or to advance. If
the troops were withdrawn, they would return burdened with the ignominy
of failure. If they advanced, it would be into a tangle of military and
political embarrassments, the issue of which it was impossible to
foresee. There was only one way of escape possible, and that was to
relinquish the ambitious projects from which the war originated, and
acquiesce in any settlement which the adversary would agree to. The
result was the Treaty with Yakoub Khan--a Treaty which I have no
hesitation in saying has placed in peril the existence of our Indian
Empire.

It is, indeed, impossible to account for the infatuation or the
obstinacy which caused the Indian Government to stipulate for the
reception of an undefended British Envoy at the Court of a prince in the
position of Yakoub Khan. It would have been so easy to have introduced a
clause in the Treaty, to the effect that as soon as Yakoub Khan's
authority was firmly established an English Envoy should be accredited
to Kabul. This would have saved the political consistency of the
Government without exposing the Indian Empire to the tremendous strain
and peril of a second Afghan expedition. There was absolutely nothing to
be gained, either in India or England, by immediately forcing an English
Envoy on the luckless Yakoub; while it enormously enhanced the
difficulties with which he had to cope. Nevertheless, in the face of
historic precedents, in defiance of multiplied warnings, Lord Lytton
deliberately resolved to reproduce, for the edification of Asia, the
tragedy of Shah Soojah and Sir William Nacnaghten, the only difference
being that on this occasion the principal parts were played by Yakoub
Khan and Major Cavagnari. The fact is that from first to last in this
bad business the chief agents were moving in a world of their own
imagining. They appear to have persuaded themselves that they had but to
refuse to _see_ facts, and the facts would vanish. They had but to
publish in the _Times_ that Lord Lytton was a "Viceroy specially
gifted," and forthwith he would become what he was described to be. They
had but to assert that the Afghans had no objection to the presence of a
British Envoy at Kabul, and immediately their objections would
disappear. The mischief is done now past recall. Hardly even in 1857 was
our Indian Empire in a position of greater peril than it is now. The
persistent opposition between official acts and official language which
has been the distinguishing characteristic of Lord Lytton's
administration has created an universal disbelief in the sincerity of
our speech and the equity of our intentions. In the circle which
surrounds the Viceroy, it seems, indeed, to have become an accepted
maxim that it is a matter of indifference whether or not the natives are
heartily loyal to our rule. And Sir Alexander Arbuthnot, in his Minute
on the Repeal of the Cotton Duties, notes the fact as "a grave political
danger." It is a maxim which could not have been formulated except by
the agents of a Government who felt that they had forfeited, past hope
of recovery, the confidence of those they were set to rule over. Of the
alienation itself there can be no question. The loyalty of the native
has, probably, never been at a lower ebb since 1857. And any reverse in
Afghanistan might kindle a flame that would spread from one end of India
to the other.

But there is nothing to be gained by anticipating greater difficulties
than already beset us. I will assume that no additional complications
occur--that General Roberts has succeeded without much difficulty in the
occupation of Kabul--that General Stewart has possession of Kandahar,
and that all we have to determine is what to do with Afghanistan now we
have got it. There are but three courses of conduct possible--withdrawal
from the country altogether, a return to the arrangements formulated in
the Treaty of Gundamuck, or annexation. I will consider the last first.


Annexation.

Nobody, so far as I know, desires to annex Afghanistan. But there are, I
apprehend, but few who are aware of what is involved in "the annexation
of Afghanistan," and the danger is that we may drift almost unwillingly
into annexation, to discover the full consequences only when too late.
Everybody is agreed that India cannot defray the costs. This is set down
by the supporters of Government at a sum of five millions annually. I
believe it would be much larger; but we will assume that five millions
is a correct estimate. By no possibility could we screw this additional
sum from the people of India. Already the expenses of the administration
increase at a far quicker rate than the revenues which have to meet
them. The costs of governing Afghanistan, therefore, would have to be
defrayed from the English Exchequer. But assuming this to be arranged,
the pecuniary difficulty is the smallest which has to be encountered. To
garrison the interior and frontier of Afghanistan we should require not
less than forty thousand men--one-half of whom would have to be English
soldiers. For, until the interior of Afghanistan is completely opened
out by roads which can be traversed throughout the year, the garrisons
holding the country would have to be sufficiently strong to be
independent of reserves and supports during the winter. And if we
attempted to hold Balkh and Herat, twenty thousand English soldiers
would not suffice. Now where are these English soldiers to come from? An
addition of at least forty thousand men to our regular army would be
required in order to supply them. But the English part of our
Afghanistan garrison does not present so insuperable a difficulty as the
native. It would not be safe, at least for many years, to organize our
native garrison from the Afghans themselves. The regiments would have to
be recruited in India specially for this service--but out of what races?
The natives of the Southern parts of India have not the physique capable
of enduring the severities of an Afghanistan winter. The Sikhs or
Hindoos of Upper India would certainly not enlist in a service which
carried them so far from their homes into the midst of an alien people
and an alien faith. The only recruits we should obtain in large numbers
would be Muhammadans. The danger, then, is obvious. In India the fierce
fanaticism of the Moslem creed is mitigated by its contact with the
milder tenets of Hindooism; but remove an Indian Moslem to Afghanistan,
and he would very soon become inspired by the religious zeal of his
co-religionists around him. We should be exposed to the risk,
perpetually, of our native garrison combining with the people of the
country to expel the infidel intruders from the land, and restore the
supremacy of the Prophet. But even these dangers dwindle into
insignificance when we contemplate the main result of an annexation of
Afghanistan. That result would be that the hills and deserts of
Afghanistan would no longer extend between the Russian Power and our
own. We should have given to Russia the power to interfere directly in
the internal concerns of India.

I have never supposed Russia to have any sinister designs upon India.
After much reading I have failed to discover any proof of such designs.
Those who suspect Russia obtain their evidence by a very simple process.
They reject as incredible the objects assigned by the Russian Government
as guiding its policy, and substitute their own fixed preconception in
place of them. I believe that neither Russia nor any other Power would
accept of India as a free gift. I cannot imagine a rational statesman
coveting for his country so burdensome and unprofitable a
responsibility. But that a Russian Government should ever attempt the
invasion and conquest of India is to me beyond the power of belief. What
Mr. Cobden wrote in 1835 appears to me as convincing at this day as it
was then.

    "China," he wrote, "affords the best answer to those who argue that
    Russia meditates hostile views towards our Indian possessions. China
    is separated from Russia by an imaginary boundary only; and that
    country is universally supposed to contain a vast deposit of riches
    well worthy of the spoiler's notice. Besides, it has not enjoyed the
    '_benefit_' of being civilized by English or other Christian
    conquerors--an additional reason for expecting to find a wealthy
    Pagan community, waiting, like unwrought mines, the labours of some
    Russian Warren Hastings. Why, then, does not the Czar invade the
    Chinese Empire, which is his next neighbour, and contains an
    unravaged soil, rather than contemplate, as the alarmist writers and
    speakers predict he does, marching three thousand miles over regions
    of burning deserts and ranges of snowy mountains to Hindostan, where
    he would find that Clive and Wellesley had preceded him?"

Apart, however, from the question of motives, it is not possible to
march an army from Herat to the Indus. And we must always bear in mind
that even if the Russian army reached the Indus, their real work,
instead of being over, would only then commence. With that vast extent
of hill and desert behind them they would have before them some sixty
thousand British troops in an entrenched position. Even a victory would
leave the invader begirt about with dangers and difficulty; a defeat
would be his utter annihilation. Not a soldier of the army of invasion
would return to tell the tale. It is impossible to divine where or how
Russia could raise the money for so gigantic an enterprise; and if the
money was forthcoming it is not credible that any Government should
fling it away on such a hopeless undertaking. In assuming that Russia
will refrain from an attack upon India, there is no need to credit
either the Government or the people with more than that ordinary common
sense which hinders men and nations from attempting to achieve the
impossible.

The danger to India arises not from the existence of any Russian designs
against our Empire, but from the belief that such exist. This belief
will, so to speak, hybernate for a season; then all at once we find it
in full activity, and creating a panic in every heart of which it takes
possession. These are the critical moments for the well-being and
security of our Indian Empire. In such a period of panic we rushed into
the disastrous war in Afghanistan in 1838. Under the influence of like
feelings we involved ourselves in the inglorious raid the first act of
which has just terminated. On both occasions we have been guilty of
assailing a Prince whose only desire was to form an intimate alliance
with us. On both occasions we have carried fire and sword among a people
with whom we frankly avowed that we had no assignable cause of quarrel.
But so long as Afghanistan extended between us and the Russian dominions
in Asia it was physically impossible to declare war against Russia. In
our unreasoning panic we fell upon the Ameer and his people, because
there was no one else to attack. But if we make the Hindoo Khosh our
military frontier, then Russia, by assembling a few thousand men upon
the Oxus, can, whenever she pleases, agitate India from one end to the
other. She will not need to attack. The menace will be sufficient. For
we must remember that the undisputed supremacy of British rule in India
depends, in the main, upon two conditions, both of which are destroyed
if we annex Afghanistan. The one is, that no heavier burden be laid upon
the people than they are willing to bear; and the other, the absence of
any hope of deliverance. The cost of maintaining our supremacy in
Afghanistan _will_ make the burden of our rule utterly intolerable alike
to our native soldiers and our civil population; the assembling of a
Russian army on the frontiers of Afghanistan will provide the hope of
deliverance. The hazards and uncertainties of the situation would keep
the natives in a state of perpetual unrest. The ambitious and the
disaffected would engage in intrigue and conspiracy; trade would
languish; the internal development of the country be abruptly arrested;
and the Empire would assuredly be wrested from our hands on the occasion
of the first European war in which we became involved.


The Treaty of Gundamuck.

Annexation being impossible, is it wise, or is it practicable, to return
to the provisions of the Treaty of Gundamuck? It is neither wise nor
possible, for the simple reason that this Treaty was based upon a
fiction. It was grounded upon the utterly false assumption that there
existed in Afghanistan a central authority, acknowledged as legitimate
by all the people of Afghanistan, with whom we could establish permanent
diplomatic relations. There is no such authority. Instances have been
adduced of attacks made upon European Embassies in other Oriental
countries, and the argument has been put forward, that as,
notwithstanding such outbreaks, diplomatic relations have been
maintained with Turkey and Persia, there is no reason to conclude from
the fate of Major Cavagnari that they are impossible in Afghanistan. The
cases are not parallel. The Ameer of Kabul has no such authority in his
capital or throughout his dominions as the Sultan or the Shah. It is
possible, though not very probable, that a British Envoy might reside in
Kabul without being murdered, but the measure of his utility would
depend upon the fluctuating fortunes of the Ameer to whom he was
accredited. The only way to obviate this would be to place a force at
the disposal of the Envoy, sufficient to put down all insurrectionary
movements against the Ameer. But if we undertook this duty, we should
become responsible for the character of the civil administration. We
could not punish the victims of a cruel or rapacious Ameer, without at
the same time cutting off at their source the cruelty and rapacity, by
the deposition of an unworthy ruler. And thus, in a very brief time, we
should find that virtually we had annexed the country. Facts are
stubborn things, and it is worse than useless to fight against them.
Those who contend that the murder of Major Cavagnari ought not to be
allowed to overturn what they term the "settled policy" of the Ministry,
are bound to show in what way this "settled policy" can be carried out.
How do they propose to obtain an Ameer towards whom all the sections of
the Afghans shall practise a loyal obedience? And if no such Ameer can
be obtained, with whom or with what are we to establish diplomatic
relations?


The Policy of Withdrawal.

There remains the policy of withdrawal. The surest barrier against
foreign aggression in India is to be obtained in the contentment and
prosperity of the people. A people thus situated are prompt to repel
invasion, and secret intrigue is deprived of the conditions essential to
its success. But in order that the people of India should be prosperous
and contented, it is absolutely necessary that the financial burdens
they have to carry--and especially the military charges--should not be
enhanced. It is not possible to advance our military frontier--even to
the extent of the (so-called) "Scientific Frontier"--without an enormous
enhancement of our military expenditure. And all military expenditure is
unprofitable, in the sense that it takes so much from the tax-payer and
brings him no material equivalent. Consequently, whatever else this
forward policy accomplishes, it cannot fail to impoverish the people and
stimulate their discontent. Moreover, the incidents of the war have
demonstrated that an invasion of India from Central Asia is physically
impossible. We started from the Indus, firmly resolved to march to
Herat, if necessary; but when we had reached Kandahar, we found it
impossible to advance further. It would be equally impossible for a
Russian army to march from Herat to the Indus. There is, therefore, no
such reason for a change of frontier as was alleged in justification of
the war.

In all probability there is not even a Tory in England who does not in
his heart approve of a policy of withdrawal; but there are, he would
say, difficulties in the way. There are. After all the glowing eulogies
they have pronounced upon themselves, it will not be pleasant or easy
for Ministers to transfer these eulogies to their opponents. It will be
extremely disagreeable for a "specially gifted Viceroy" to have to
confess that his chiefest gift was a gigantic capacity for blundering.
But if India is to be preserved to the nation, there is no escape from
this unpleasant alternative. Either Ministers must acknowledge an error
that is now patent to all the world, or India must be saddled with the
heavy costs and the incalculable risks of an annexation of Afghanistan.
These risks, it must be remembered, are not transitory, but enduring;
and if we accept them, we must be prepared for a doom of absolute
effacement in the politics of Europe. The argument which will be urged
against withdrawing from Afghanistan is, of course, the old familiar
one--the loss of prestige. This is an argument impossible to refute
because the exact worth of prestige is an unknown quantity, as to which
no two people are agreed. But whatever be its value, to rush upon ruin
and destruction in order to preserve our prestige is an act of insanity.
It is as if a man should commit suicide in order to preserve his
reputation for courage. When we retired from Afghanistan in 1842, we
frankly confessed the mistake we had committed, and I am not aware that
any evil resulted from the confession. The wrongs that we had done left
behind them a legacy of evil, but not the confession of those wrongs.
And so it is now. The frontier policy of Lord Lytton has ruined our
reputation for justice, truthfulness, and generosity, and the stain of
that policy must cling to us for ever. We shall not conceal or efface it
by laying a crushing burden upon our native subjects and upon future
generations of Englishmen, in order to evade the humiliation of a
confession. On the contrary, we make what reparation is still in our
power when, in the interests of both, we refuse to annex Afghanistan.

    ROBERT D. OSBORN,
    _Lieutenant-Colonel_.




CRITICAL IDEALISM IN FRANCE.

    _La Science positive et la Métaphysique._ Par LOUIS LIARD,
    Professeur à la Faculté des Lettres de Bordeaux. (Ouvrage couronné
    par l'Institut de France.) Paris, 1879.


For some years past there has been observable in France, outside of and
in opposition to Positivism, a growing movement in favour of idealism in
general, and of the critical idealism of Kant in particular. This
philosophy, which had previously found very few adherents in our
country, has now begun to make its way into our teaching and our
Universities. Berkeley and Kant have been the subjects of special works,
and an attempt has been made to translate and reproduce their ideas by
harmonizing them with the principal doctrines of spiritualism. We have
here a movement full of promise and well deserving of attention.[1]
Among the different productions affording some notion of this
philosophical tendency, we make choice--as being both the most recent
and the most complete--of a remarkable work, distinguished and crowned
by the French Institute, _Positive Science and Metaphysic_, by a young
and learned professor of Bordeaux, M. Louis Liard.

To begin with, M. Liard's work is well composed, its plan being simple,
severe, and lucid. It divides itself into three parts. The first is
devoted to determining the nature and limits of positive sciences--that
is, of the sciences properly so called--and to showing that they cannot
pretend to abolish or replace metaphysics. In this portion of his book
the author discusses the three forms of the experimental philosophy of
our day, namely--Positivism, the philosophy of association, and that of
evolution.

In the second part, the author examines what he calls Criticism--that is
to say, the philosophy of Kant. The preceding discussion having
demonstrated that the human mind is incapable of departing from certain
forms, certain laws, without which experience itself would be
impossible,--the author now resolves these into five fundamentals:
space, time, substance, cause, the Absolute. But are these forms or laws
of the mind the laws of things as well? Have they an objective
authority? We know that metaphysics hang upon the solution of this
question. We know, too, what is the solution given by Kant to this great
problem. In recognizing the necessary existence of these forms as laws
of the mind he disputes their external reality; hence he only admits
critical, not real and dogmatic metaphysic. Now, as regards this point
the author of the book under our notice, instead of dissenting from
Criticism as he had done from Positivism, appears on the contrary to
accept it by its own name, and to admire and endorse its conclusions. He
seems to grant or even to affirm that if Positivism is wrong, Criticism
is right, and that, strictly speaking, metaphysic is not a science.

And yet if metaphysic were not a science in the strict sense of the
word--that is to say, in the sense of objective sciences--would it
follow that it was nothing, or nothing more than criticism itself? By no
means: our author does not stop at that apparent solution; metaphysic
according to him has an object that criticism has not reached, has not
shaken; metaphysic has its own proper function, in which criticism can
never take its place. Only instead of founding it on the object, we must
found it on the subject. The mind must turn away from the external world
and re-enter itself. It is there that, without need of forms or
categories of which criticism has demonstrated the fallacy, the subject
grasps itself not only in its phenomena but in its being, and determines
itself in conformity to an end. This end is goodness: and this is the
only notion we can form to ourselves of the Absolute. Thus, metaphysic
is not the science of the object, but that of the subject; or if the
name of science be still withheld, it is at least the study of the
subject, and it is founded on and completed by morality. Thus, the
author ends by an evolution very similar to that of Kant, but with
certain differences which it will be our part to point out.

These constitute the three parts of the work. We will now take them up
in succession.


I.

Let us first of all consider the characteristics of positive science. It
has for its object the conversion of facts into laws, or in other words
the resolving the composite into the simple, the particular into the
universal, the contingent into the necessary. But let us observe with
our author that we are only dealing here with a relative simplicity, a
partial universality, a conditional necessity. None of these characters
present themselves in a really absolute manner. The simple is invariably
composed of several terms; the universal only applies itself to a
certain class of phenomena; the necessary is so only with relation to
the consequences of a law, but the law itself always remains contingent.
Thus, no positive science can ever attain to the absolute. It is the
same with methods. These methods are induction and deduction. Now,
however precise these processes be, however marvellous the sequence and
interdependence of the propositions they discover and demonstrate, their
data are never more than particular and contingent facts; consequences,
then, can only be proportioned to those data. Hence it is certain that
the positive sciences cannot go beyond a relative universality or
necessity. It may seem as though we ought to make an exception in favour
of mathematics. But by a subtle discussion which it would be difficult
to give summarily, the author shows that they too come under the same
law, whence it follows that the domain of positive science properly
so-called is contained within the relative.

From this consideration there has sprung up in our day a philosophy that
reduces all sciences without exception to the knowledge of relation, and
by so doing has declared all metaphysics impossible: and this philosophy
is called Positivism. "Any proposition," says Auguste Comte, "which is
not finally reducible to the simple enunciation of a particular or
general fact, is incapable of holding a real or intelligible meaning."
"There is nothing absolute," says the same philosopher, "if it be not
this very proposition that there is nothing absolute." As to the proof
of this proposition, it lies, according to the school in question, in
the celebrated law which reduces all progress of the human mind in all
orders of research to three phases: the theological phase, in which
facts are explained by causes and supernatural agents; the metaphysical,
in which they are explained by abstract and ontological entities; and,
finally, the positive, in which phenomena are verified by experience and
referred to their laws--that is to say, to constant and always
verifiable relations of coincidence and succession.

Our author, having expounded this doctrine with much precision, proceeds
to criticize it with equal sagacity. He points out what is illusory in
this law of the three states; shows that it confuses metaphysic with
scholasticism; and proves, finally, that, in aiming at merging mind in
knowledge, and subordinating, as he says, the subjective to the
objective, Positivism does not understand what it is speaking of, since
all knowledge is ultimately referable to facts of consciousness--that is
to say, to something subjective, which is in effect, as Descartes has
pointed out, the only order of absolutely certain truths. Besides which,
let positive science, or rather the positive philosophy, in the name of
positive facts, proscribe metaphysic as it will, is it not evident that
the fundamental conceptions of all science--number, atom, force, matter,
cause, law--are metaphysical conceptions? Is it not evident that all
science whatever is impossible without a certain number of principles or
notions,--in a word, of intellectual laws, which even govern experience
itself? As yet the positive school has not answered the learned
demonstration of Kant on the necessity of the _à priori_ principle, or
rather it has ignored it. It has made no addition to that old
empiricism which the school of Leibnitz and of Kant had refuted.

But since the Positivism of Auguste Comte, too little versed in
metaphysical knowledge to discuss it authoritatively, there have arisen
two important schools, the one of association, the other of evolution.
The former has endeavoured to base experience on an experimental and
positive law; the latter has generalized this law, and made of it a
particular case of a more general law embracing the whole of
Nature--namely, the law of evolution.

The doctrine of association may be referred to the fundamental law that
all ideas rising simultaneously or successively in the human mind, tend
invariably to recall each other in the same order; this is what is
called association of ideas. When any two ideas have thus been
constantly associated without ever being separated (as, for instance,
form and colour), they unite indissolubly and thus become necessary
laws. Now, of all these necessary connections, the most universal is
this: no phenomenon ever appears without having been preceded by some
other phenomenon, which is always the same under the same circumstances.
This law is that of causality, which is both the supreme principle and,
at the same time, the result of all experience. To this doctrine of J.
S. Mill and Alexander Bain our author opposes the two following
objections:--1st, How does it explain the generalization? 2nd, How does
it explain the necessity of the laws of the understanding? On the first
point the English School appeals to a law that it calls the law of
_similarity_ or faculty of identifying the like in the different. But
this is indeed, strictly speaking, a fact of association? Should not
association, properly understood, be reduced to the law of
contiguity--that is to say, to the fact of our ideas only becoming
associated through relations of time? To admit the faculty of
recognizing similarity in diversity, what is this but to admit mind,
intelligence--something, in short, which is other than a simple external
association? As to the second point, can we reduce the rational
necessity that Kant and Leibnitz have laid down as the criterion of _à
priori_ principles to a pure necessity of habit--that is to say, to the
automatic expectation of the future inscribed on the past? Where is the
scientific guarantee in this hypothesis? Why should Nature bend to our
habits? "Who can assure us that we do not dream in thinking of the
future, and that the next sensation may not interrupt our dream by an
unforeseen shock?" We see how far-reaching this doubt is; it affects not
only metaphysic but science as well.

As to the philosophy of evolution, we know that, with regard to the
origin of the principles of thought, it consists in linking the
experience of present generations to that of generations past; in
substituting secular for individual experience--in a word, in filling up
by the accumulation of ages on ages the interval existing between
particular and contingent facts and the universality of principles. This
hypothesis is always at bottom no other than that of the _tabula rasa_,
only it is no longer the individual who is this _tabula rasa_, since
each one has, by heredity, received a pre-formed intelligence.
Nevertheless, under pain of contradicting the hypothesis, we are forced
to admit that there was a first subject who, prior to the action of the
object, must have been this _tabula rasa_. But here the objections of
Leibnitz reappear. What can a pure, abstract, and unmodified subject be?
And again, before any meeting of subject with object, we have to admit a
pure object having nothing subjective, just as the subject had nothing
objective. What shall we affirm of this pure object? Let us divest it if
you will of colour, heat, sound; must we not at least conceive it as
extended, as existing in time, conceive it, that is, according to the
necessary forms that are supposed to be suppressed? For to say that it
has been capable of existing without having anything in common with
these forms, and that out of this unknown and nameless condition have
arisen, by way of transformation, the notions of which we treat, were to
admit that something _can_ come out of nothing. We must therefore
acknowledge that universal notions do at least exist as germs at the
origin of evolution. It is not evolution that has created them,
evolution has only developed them, and be they ever so attenuated, they
still remain conditions without which nothing can be thought.

Such is the gist of the first part of M. Liard's book, and we have
nothing to add to it but our approbation. We can but admire the skilful
analysis with which it begins, and the vigorous discussion accompanying
that analysis. The three stages traversed by the experimental philosophy
of our days--namely, Positivism, the Associative Philosophy, and that of
Evolution--are competently and precisely summed up. The discussion is
cogent, solid, and could not be further developed without injury to the
unity of the work. No doubt it requires close attention to follow it;
but it is lucid and well sustained. Whatever the difficulty metaphysic
may encounter in constituting itself a science, and getting recognized
as such, it has been established that empiricism is not a tenable
position, since it has been found necessary to pass from positivism to
association, from association to evolution; while evolution itself still
supposed some pre-formation. One thing is certain, intelligence
invariably contains a something that does not come from without--namely,
intelligence itself.


II.

The criticism of Positivism has taught us that there is no knowledge
possible without _à priori_ elements--that is to say, without laws
inherent in thought, which impose themselves upon phenomena, so as to
constitute veritable knowledge. This is the system of Kant, and thus
that system avoids not only empiricism, but scepticism as well, though
commonly confounded with it. For without necessary laws phenomena only
form an arbitrary succession, entirely dependent upon the organization
of the individual; we have no longer anything but individual
sensations. In the Kantian philosophy, however, the individual is
subjected to laws that are superior to himself; these are the laws of
human thought, and even, perhaps, of all thought whatever. These laws
impose themselves on each one of us in a necessary and universal manner,
and by so doing communicate to phenomena an objective reality in this
sense at least, that they are for individuals veritable objects; and
thus it is that mathematical truths are objects to the intellect, even
supposing they should be nowhere realized in any existence independent
of thought.

But are these laws of thought anything else than laws of thought? Do
they really attain to objective reality--to _things in themselves_. Kant
has denied that they do, and our author, in following in his steps,
agrees, or seems to agree, with the "Kritik" of Kant.

Let us then resolve the fundamental laws of the human intellect into
five principal concepts: these are, space and time, forms of
sensibility, substance and cause, laws of external experience, and,
lastly, the Absolute, the final and supreme condition of all knowledge.
Now, according to Kant and our author, these notions, at least the four
first, are at the same time necessary as subjective conditions of
thought, and contradictory so soon as we seek to realize them outside of
thought.

For example, that space and time are found by implication in every
internal or external representation, that they are not the result of
abstraction and generalization, this has been firmly established by
Kant; for the elements from which some have sought to derive them
already imply them. But, at the same time, they are only internal
conditions, of which the objects are unrealizable outside of ourselves,
and the reason of this is given by M. Liard, as follows:--Space and time
have three essential characteristics, they are homogeneous, continuous,
and unlimited. Now, if we seek to make of space and time _things in
themselves_ we may doubtless conceive them as homogeneous and
continuous, but not as unlimited, for no actual magnitude is unlimited;
all magnitude is expressed in numbers, and numbers are necessarily
finite, an infinite number involving a contradiction.

We will not enter into a question here mooted by the author, leading to
what Leibnitz calls the labyrinth of the continued (_Labyrinthus
continui_), or of invisibles; we will content ourselves with pointing
out that the reason here given is not by any means in conformity with
the ideas of Kant--indeed, that it contradicts them. In fact, our author
here applies to the two forms of sensibility the objection that Kant
raised only about real things and the sensible world. The world, indeed,
being composed of parts, can only be conceived as infinite by adding
these parts to each other, and by thus supposing the actual reality of
an infinite number. But it is not so with space, which, not being
composed of parts, is consequently not representable by numbers. "There
is only one single space, there is only one single time," says Kant. The
notion of space is therefore not formed by the infinite addition of
small portions of space and time. These are unities, not numbers. Hence
illimitableness is given with the very intuition. "Space," says Kant,
"is represented as a given infinite magnitude," _als eine gegebene
unendliche Quantität_. Now, so soon as the infinite is _given_, instead
of _being made_ by a mental addition, it seems to us that the above
difficulty vanishes.

Let us pass to the notion of substance and to that of cause. These two
notions are necessary to render possible the connection of phenomena in
the human mind. Our perceptions are, in fact, diverse; if they were only
diverse, and had no unity, there would be no passage from one phenomenon
to another; consciousness would arise and disappear with each
phenomenon, to arise and die anew with the next, and so on. But then
there would be no thought, for in order that thought should exist there
must be at least two different things presented to the unity of
consciousness. In other terms, we should be incapable of perceiving a
changing thing without something that was changeless. Hence this is a
necessary condition of knowledge. Now, let us see whether this condition
can be rendered objective. According to our author it cannot, for if we
subtract from surrounding things all the phenomena that fall under the
domain of the senses, what remains? Nothing. Common-sense, indeed,
believes in substance, but does not mean thereby an abstract and
metaphysical entity, it means the whole of what strikes the senses; when
the phenomenon is opposed to substance nothing is meant but that a new
phenomenon has just added itself to preceding ones. Wood burns; here
wood is the substance, combustion the phenomenon. This is how
common-sense understands the matter; but if we separate from the idea of
wood all that characterizes it as wood, nothing remains but a pure
abstraction, of which common-sense takes no account, and has never so
much as thought. Our author further combats the idea of substance by
appealing to the metaphysical difficulties that it suggests. Is there
only one substance, or are there several? Either hypothesis is equally
difficult to sustain. In other words, substance is nothing more than
that law in virtue of which the mind connects phenomena in one and the
same act of thought.

Here, again, we are obliged to say that the preceding arguments against
the objectivity of the notion of substance are, in our opinion, far from
conclusive. In the first place, it seems to us a false philosophical
method to exclude an object from the human mind because it suggests
difficulties that we are incapable of solving. Every object must be
presented to us as existing before we can judge of the possibility of
that object. Perhaps we do not possess the means of solving all the
questions which the existence of an object may suggest, but this is no
reason why it should not exist. The existence of things cannot be
subordinated to the limits of our understanding; it is this very
principle which seems to us soundest of all in the "Kritik" of Kant.
Even should we be for ever incapable of knowing whether there is one
substance or whether there are many, even should we be for ever doomed
to doubt as to this point, it would not follow that the existence of one
or of many substances were thereby done away with. Moreover, the
criticism of our author goes much further than the imperilling the
objectivity of substance; it really bears against the very notion
itself. If, in fact, every phenomenon being withdrawn, nothing remains
any longer in my mind, it is not merely objective substance that
vanishes, it is the notion itself. What, indeed, is a notion which,
analyzed, comes to naught? And what is this necessary law which is a
nonentity? Our author tells us that if we remove all the accidents there
remains "nothing perceptible to the senses." This is mere tautology, for
it is too evident that nothing sensible ought to remain in the notion,
all sensible accidents having been withdrawn; but what does remain is
that without which phenomena could not be connected. And this is no
empty concept, for how should an empty concept have any uniting power?
And, lastly, when the author, correcting himself, as we think, says that
the notion of substance reduces itself to what he calls a "fundamental
phenomenon," he does nothing but change the word, and in reality reverts
to what we call substance. For in what sense does anything
fundamental--that is to say, that to which other phenomena ultimately
reduce themselves, and which cannot be reduced to any other--still
preserve the name of phenomenon? All this, therefore, is but admitting
under one name what has been denied under another.

The criticism of the notion of cause is quite similar to that of the
notion of substance. It is a notion necessary to the mind, for just as
without substance there can be no mental connection between simultaneous
phenomena, in the same way without cause there can be no connection
between successive phenomena. Causality is the necessary law that
connects each phenomenon with its anterior conditions. Without this law
there could be no science, no induction, no experience. It cannot,
consequently, be derived from experience, since it is the very condition
of it. But do we seek to render cause objective as well as substance? If
so, we must understand it in a different sense. Cause is no longer
merely a phenomenon anterior to another, the antecedent of a consequent.
It is something quite different, it is force, the active power, that
initiates the movement, and of which we find the type in our own
consciousness. Hence, to render cause objective is nothing less than to
spiritualize the universe, to suppose everywhere causes similar to
ours--it is a kind of universal Fetichism. And, further, we fall into
the same difficulties as we did with regard to substance. Is there only
one cause or many causes? Lastly, causation thus understood is of no use
whatever to science, for science has no need at all of metaphysical
forces, that which is necessary to science, and employed by it under the
name of force, being a measurable quantity which it disengages from
phenomena and from experience.

On this new ground the difficulty that confronts critical idealism is
the same as that affecting the notion of substance. It lies in
defending the position against empiricism, from which are borrowed all
the arguments against the reality of the cause, while attempting,
nevertheless, to preserve the notion of it. How succeed in retaining as
an _à priori_ law what empiricism declares to be only an acquired habit?
How explain a law of mind imposing a determined order on external
phenomena? How can the entirely subjective need of relation determine
phenomena to produce themselves in the order desired by our
intelligence? The thunder rolls: my mind, in virtue of an innate law,
insists on this phenomenon being connected with a certain totality of
antecedent phenomena--namely, heat, the formation of clouds charged with
electricity of different kinds, the meeting of these clouds, and the
combination of the two electricities, &c. How and why have these
phenomena produced themselves in order to satisfy my mind? Our author
somewhere reproaches the partisans of innate ideas with supposing ideas
on one side and phenomena on the other. How can he exonerate Kant's
system from this objection? No philosopher ever insisted more than he on
the opposition between matter and form, the former being, as he says,
"given _à posteriori_," the latter ready prepared _à priori_ in the
mind. No philosopher, not even Leibnitz, has more radically separated
sensibility which is passive from the understanding whose principle is
spontaneity. How do these two opposite principles happen to agree? Even
were it pointed out that our senses themselves are innate, since our
sensations are but the manifestation of the specific activity of each
one of them--light, of the optic nerve, sound, of the acoustic--it still
remains certain that our sensations are only subjective as regards their
content and not as regards their origin; they arise in virtue of causes
to us unknown. How should understanding, by aid of a purely mental law,
and in order to its own satisfaction, evoke sensible phenomena from
nothingness, and if it had such a power, it could only be in virtue of
an active force, that is, of a veritable causality? You say that you
require relation, without which there could be no knowledge. And why
must there be knowledge because you feel the need of it? And why should
there not be in the understanding a need of unity and relation that
sensibility does not satisfy? To say that the mind at the same time that
it thinks the law produces phenomena conformable to that law, is to make
the mind itself the cause in the objective and metaphysical sense of the
word--is no other than that universal spiritualism that the author began
by refuting. We are therefore very far from admitting his criticism of
the principles of causality. Let us go on to the notion of the absolute.

M. Liard begins very properly by pointing out the confusion too often
made between the notion of the infinite and that of the absolute. He
says that the infinite can only be strictly understood in the
mathematical sense, but that hence, as Leibnitz has said, the true
infinite is the absolute. He admits the existence in the mind of the
notion of the absolute in so far as it is inseparable from that of the
relative. The Scotch philosopher, Hamilton, had endeavoured to suppress
this notion, and had reproached Kant for not having completely exorcised
the phantom of the absolute,[2] and for having retained it in the
character of _idea_ while contesting its objective existence. It is
remarkable that on this point, so decisive for metaphysics, Hamilton
should have been opposed and refuted by the more modern English
philosophers, who often pass for having pushed the critical and negative
spirit further than he, when, indeed, on this point it is just the
contrary. Herbert Spencer especially is one whom it is interesting to
consult here. He maintains against Hamilton the notion of the absolute
as positive, not negative, "as the correlative notion of the relative,
as the substratum of all thoughts"--I quote verbally--"as the most
important element of our knowledge."[3] He also maintains in opposition
to Hamilton that the affirmation of the absolute is "a knowledge and not
a belief." Only according to him this object that underlies all our
thoughts is absolutely indeterminable by us. We know that it _is_, not
_what_ it is. It is the incomprehensible, the unknowable.

M. Liard seems to us substantially to admit all these conclusions.
"Existence by others," he says, "is not to be understood without
self-existence." "Without the spur of the notion of the absolute, how
comprehend the obstinate persistence of the human mind in transcending
the limits of the relative? Is not this a proof that the relative is not
sufficient to itself?" It is one thing to affirm the absolute, another
to determine its nature. Even granting that we be powerless to speak as
to the essence of the absolute, and that it can never be for us other
than the indeterminable and unknowable, "is it nothing to be assured of
the existence of an unknowable? At all events religious beliefs might in
default of scientific certainty find in an irremovable basis this
conviction."

We see therefore that our author agrees with Mr. Herbert Spencer in
granting the existence of the absolute; he does not seem to reduce it,
as Kant does, to a mere idea. He confines himself to saying that it
cannot be determined. He shows that none of the notions that have been
previously examined can fill up the concept of the absolute. Neither
space, nor time, nor substance, nor cause, nor the totality of
phenomena, can be raised to the notion of absolute. It is therefore
indeterminable. Now, as the absolute is the proper object of
metaphysics, it follows that metaphysics lack an object, having nothing
to say thereon. Hence it is self-condemned, and consequently metaphysics
is not a science.

Such is the conclusion of the second part. The first appeared to raise
us above phenomena by establishing the necessity of thought and of its
fundamental law. But the second confines us within the domains of
thought, and forbids us to go beyond. There is, indeed, a science of
thought, but this science is criticism, not metaphysics. Have we, then,
only escaped from positivism to fall into the abyss of scepticism?

Before explaining in what manner the author has endeavoured to escape
from this abyss, there is room for an important remark on the previous
discussion as to the notion of the absolute. Scepticism on this point
may assume three forms. Either, first, we do not even possess the notion
of it, our notion is entirely negative,--the absolute is the
non-relative, is indeed the relative with a negation: such is the view
of Sir W. Hamilton. Or else, secondly, we have the notion of the
absolute, of being in itself and by itself, of the superlatively real
being, _ens realissimum_, as Kant expresses it, but it is only a notion,
we cannot affirm the existence: this is Kant's doctrine. Or, thirdly, we
have indeed a positive notion of the absolute, and we necessarily affirm
its existence, only we are unable to determine its nature: this is the
conclusion arrived at by Herbert Spencer. Now, of these three doctrines
the two first alone, in our opinion, belong to what may be called
criticism. The third is manifestly a return to dogmatism. The more or
less of determination in the notion of the absolute is only the second
problem of metaphysic; the first is the existence of that absolute. And,
moreover, the doctrine of the divine incomprehensibility has always been
maintained by the greatest metaphysicians as well as the greatest
theologians. All mystics incline to it. There may therefore be room for
debate as to the more or less approximative character of our concepts of
the absolute. That any of these are adequate, or absolutely adequate, is
what no philosopher has ever thought himself obliged to maintain. No
doubt, to define the absolute as the unknowable, is to express the
doctrine under a very rigorous form, but one could hardly refuse to
allow the absolute to be the incomprehensible.

Consequently, then, if the author, as appears to be the case from the
passages we have quoted, thinks with Mr. Herbert Spencer that the notion
of the absolute corresponds to an existence, and if he contents himself
with maintaining its indeterminability, we may, if we like, consider
this to be a singularly attenuated metaphysic, but we are not entitled
to deny that it amounts to a departure from criticism and a return to
metaphysic. If, on the other hand, criticism does at least suppose one
fundamental datum,--thought, namely, and with the thought the
thinking,--we are still forced to grant to Descartes, and consequently
to metaphysic, the existence of the thinking subject; and hence that
science which our author declares not to be one would be found already
in possession of the claim by the single fact of what he has called the
criticism of two fundamental postulates: I think, I am--I think the
absolute, the absolute is. And is this then nothing?

We are therefore of opinion that M. Liard ought to have concluded the
second part of his work as he did the first--that is to say, that he
ought to have shown the insufficiency of criticism as he did that of
positivism. To our mind, criticism supposes metaphysic, as positivism
supposes criticism. Metaphysic contains the reason of criticism, as
criticism does that of positivism. Instead, then, of saying that
metaphysic is not a science, we should rather call it the culminating
point of science. But in place of following this natural order, which
is, indeed, only his own method, our author has preferred to prove
criticism right in the second part of his book, and metaphysic right in
the third, by a sort of _saltus_, not contained in what goes before. He
has chosen to appear nearer to Kant than he really is; has chosen to
carry on his own evolution in Kant's manner, and to rebuild on different
bases what he had demolished; but we shall see that this evolution is in
reality quite different from that of Kant, and that his justification of
criticism is only apparent, or at least if he defends it, this is really
only in order subsequently to undermine it.


III.

Kant's evolution, which makes dogmatism to result from scepticism, was
an entirely moral evolution, substituting for speculative the authority
of practical reason. The evolution we have now to deal with is of a
quite different character; it consists in passing from objective to
subjective knowledge, from the object to the subject. Even if all that
has been just said on the side of criticism were true, there is at least
invariably one existence that remains untouched by it: this existence is
that of the thinking subject, and this existence is incontestable. What
appears to us as a circle to the circumference are objects, in the
centre is the subject. We do not confound ourselves with our sensations,
we distinguish between them and ourselves. Can, then, this consciousness
of the thinking subject be no more than the transformation of external
events? No; for all exterior events reduce themselves to one--_i.e._,
motion; and all interior events to one--_i.e._, thought. There is no
transition or transformation possible between one of these phenomena and
the other. "We acknowledge," says a distinguished savant, Professor
Tyndall, "that a definite thought and a molecular action of the brain
occur simultaneously, but we do not possess the essential organ, nor
even a rudiment of the organ we should require in order to pass by
reasoning from the one to the other." Thus, then, the subject exists and
is not reducible to the object. Shall we say that this subject is
nothing more than a sum of phenomena? But what adds up these phenomena?
A common bond is needed. Have we any consciousness of such a bond?
"Yes," replies our author, "we call internal states of consciousness,
past, present, or possible; we attribute them to ourselves, we say that
they take place within us. What does this mean if the _ego_ to which we
refer them is only their succession? How comprehend the continuity of
consciousness?" In a word, our author admits absolutely that the _ego_
has a consciousness of its own being, as distinct from its sensations
and from external objects. "It is," he says, "an activity constantly
modified, but yet always one, which dominating its states refers them
to the unity of one same consciousness."

Here, then, we have, without possibility of mistake, the fundamental
doctrine of the spiritualistic philosophy of Descartes, Leibnitz, Maine
de Biran, and Jouffroy. By laying down this principle the author
believes himself enabled to reinstate that metaphysic which criticism
had condemned. We, for our part, have no doubt of this; but we fail to
see how the author can at the same time hold this principle and the
Kantian principle of idealism. The "Kritik" of Kant bears upon the
subject as well as the object; according to it both the one and the
other are unknowable and incomprehensible noumena. The human mind is but
a complex compound of sensations and categories, the unity of which is
reached by the same process as the unity of external objects. No doubt
Kant is, indeed, obliged to concede something to the _ego_, the _cogito_
as he calls it; but he does not very clearly say what it is; it is not a
substance, not a category, not a result. "It is," says he, "the vehicle
of all categories." What can be more vague? The metaphor shows both how
little disposed Kant was to assign its due part to the _ego_--how vague
and uncertain he left it, and at the same time how he was forced to take
it into account. The _ego_, the active, continuous, self-conscious
_ego_, is the rock ahead to Kant's philosophy. For how dispute the
consciousness of substance and of cause, when one admits "a continuous
activity dominating all states of consciousness and reducing them to
unity?"

What, then, is substance, according to our author? It is, he says,
something that does not change considered as the necessary condition of
that which changes. What is cause? Is it not the power of initiating any
given movement? Now, this same consciousness which gives us the _ego_ as
a continuous activity, does it not in so doing give it us as the
condition of phenomena and as the productive cause of movement in
voluntary efforts? Consequently, to grant that the _ego_ knows itself as
_ego_, and as activity, is in point of fact to restore the notions of
cause and substance which had been done away with. At most all that has
been gained from criticism is the difficulty of comprehending substance
and cause without objective, that is, material form. Its results, then,
amount only to the incomprehensibility of matter. But the cause of
metaphysic is not to be confounded with that of matter; metaphysic is
not tied to the existence of materialism; and were it even led in
self-defence to deny the very existence of matter altogether, one does
not see that such a negation need cost it much. Descartes did not
hesitate to place the existence of bodies in doubt, in order to save the
existence of spirit. Malebranche did not believe that the existence of
bodies could be proved except by revelation. Leibnitz did not think that
bodies were more than phenomena, the reality of which was spiritual.
There is, then, no common cause between the interests of metaphysic, or
of what Kant calls _dogmatism_, and the question of material
objectivity, which may be left open without compromising the
fundamental basis of things. How, then, can our author appear to assign
the victory to criticism while in reality depriving it of its chief
support by restoring to the _ego_ the immediate consciousness of itself
as a being, one, active, permanent, and continuous? Kant may have played
this game, because, in effect, outside of criticism, he only admits
moral reasons for reinstating dogmatism. But although our author follows
him too on that ground, he nevertheless enters in point of fact upon an
entirely different path when he invokes immediate consciousness as a
guarantee of the existence and activity of the mind. These are not moral
and practical, but metaphysical reasons. Metaphysic, then, independently
of morality, has its own proper foundation, which, far from being
affected by criticism, is the very foundation of criticism itself. This
foundation once admitted, are we entitled to declare metaphysic no
science? We hold that we are not. Doubtless, if by science be meant an
absolutely adequate knowledge of the object, such as mathematics
affords, metaphysic cannot pretend to such knowledge; but we have here
only a question of degree. The perfection of a science is not the same
thing as its existence. A science is what it is by reason of the
difficulties its objects present, and the imperfections of its method;
but it is science none the less if it possesses a given object and a
solid foundation. Now, such a foundation is admitted by our author when
he admits the intuition of the _ego_ by itself; and hence it is no
longer a mere question of words to refuse the name of science to the
series of deductions that may be drawn from a principle which has been
admitted valid.

If our author grants the foundation of metaphysics by adhering to the
Cartesian principle of the immediate knowledge of the mind by itself, he
at the same time acknowledges its most elevated term by defending the
existence of an absolute perfection, a supreme type of spirituality. "If
in ourselves," he says, "relatively perfect ideas realize themselves in
virtue of their relative perfection, why should not the total perfection
from whence they are derived exist? There is nothing contradictory in
such an absolute." Is not this to admit the doctrine of the perfect
being as the Cartesian School has constantly expressed it? but is it
enough _to_ say that the total perfection _may_ exist, enough to inquire
why it should not exist? Should we not go further, and say with Bossuet,
"On the contrary, perfection is the reason of being." Here we are forced
to allow, in the views, or at all events in the expressions of our
author, a fluctuation and uncertainty which now impel him towards the
critical, and now towards the metaphysical position, without his
arriving at a sufficiently decided conclusion. "The absolute," he says,
"would then be the ideal of moral perfection. But by such a definition
do we not compromise its reality?" To which doubt he replies that the
"true reality is precisely the ideal." Now, this is an equivocal and
obscure reply, demanding explanation. No doubt the reality claimed for
the perfect being is not a sensible and material reality. But there is
another than material reality--there is a spiritual, such as is
manifested to us in the reality of consciousness, in the immediate
activity and intuition of our being. We may, indeed, style this sort of
existence _ideal_, in opposition to material existence; but the
expression is incorrect, for that which, properly speaking, is an ideal
existence is one merely represented to the mind when thinking of
something that no longer exists, does not yet exist, nor ever will
exist. Now, the question is, whether the moral absolute, of which we
have just had the definition given, belongs to the first or to the
second of these ideals; whether it exists for itself, or only for us, in
so far as we think it, and while we think it. For a mode of existence
like this, dependent on our own thought, is very far from being the
supreme reality; it is only a modal and subjective reality. Thus our
author, we see, expresses himself too uncertainly. Nevertheless, his own
principles sufficiently authorized him to declare himself with more
precision. Indeed, we have seen, on the one hand, that he, with Mr.
Herbert Spencer, affirms the existence of the absolute; and, on the
other hand, that he acknowledges the concept of total perfection to be
in nowise contradictory. Granting so much, must not absolute perfection
be the reason of the existence of the absolute, as relative perfection
is the reason of the existence of the relative? If, however, any choose
to call that supreme perfection the _Idea_, with Hegel--as Plato calls
it the _Good_, Aristotle the pure _Act_, Descartes the _Infinitely
Perfect Being_--we have nothing to object, so long as it be clearly
understood that the _idea_ shall signify the identity of the thought and
the being, and not merely a subjective conception of the human mind.

To sum up: it results from what has been already said, that spite of his
powers of thought, the author has not been able to escape a certain
fluctuation between criticism and spiritualism, and has only arrived at
a contradictory compromise between the two conceptions. From criticism
he borrows the ideality of the notions of space, time, substance, cause,
and the idea of a moral absolute founded on purely moral motives. From
spiritualism he borrows the existence of the absolute as the necessary
correlative of the relative, and the consciousness of the subject which
perceives itself in its continuity as the cause of its phenomena; and,
finally, the idea of a total perfection, which may, without involving
any contradiction, have the reason of its existence in itself. These two
orders of conception are not so closely connected as they should be; too
much is conceded to criticism, too little to metaphysic; and M. Liard
inclines overmuch to give to morality the exorbitant privilege of
deciding between the two.


IV.

But is this equivalent to saying that we blame our author for his
enterprise, and for the attempt he has made to reconcile criticism with
dogmatism? By no means; for we are inclined to believe that this is the
very aim that all metaphysic should set before itself at the present
day. How, indeed, could we possibly admit that so powerful, so lofty an
intellectual effort as that initiated by Kant, which under the name of
criticism, of subjective or objective idealism, or even of positivism,
has but been the development of his primary thought; that so prodigious
a mental movement as this should be absolutely void of meaning, and
destined to leave no trace in science? How believe that since the days
of Descartes the human intellect has gone mad? Would not this be to
express ourselves in the same way as those who, including Descartes
himself in this condemnation, have maintained that since St. Thomas the
whole course of human thought has been only one long error? Can there be
anything more contrary to the laws of the human mind than this
hypothesis of absolute truth discovered once for all, leaving no room
beside it for anything but error? And besides, what more did Kant do
than, under the form of a system (a defective form, no doubt, but
hitherto the only one known to philosophy)--what more, we ask, did he
than develop and render prominent what had been implicitly contained in
the teaching of all preceding metaphysicians? Had not they all assigned
a share in human consciousness to the subjective and relative, and very
often a larger share than we are led to think, if we only regard their
conclusions? Has there, for example, been since the days of Plato a
single metaphysician who has denied the knowledge of the senses to be
relative, and has the full scope and bearing of this principle been
accurately measured? Can that be denied which has been scientifically
demonstrated, which Descartes already affirmed, _i.e._, that light and
sound--Nature's two great languages--are only the products of our
physical organization, and that outside of the eye that sees, and the
ear that hears, there is nothing external to us but a series of
vibrations and undulations, which are neither luminous nor sonorous?
Reduced to itself, without the presence of men or animals, matter is
merely darkness and silence! What sort of matter may this be, and how
little resembling the one we know? But is not, it may be said, the
reality of that matter attested at least by resistance, by impact? The
reality--yes; but is the very nature of the external thing, as it is in
itself, manifested thereby? What is impact, what is resistance, if not a
mode of our sensations? To be assured of this, we have but to turn to
all that metaphysicians teach us as to the nature of God. All agree in
saying that God has no sensations. If God be cognizant of matter, as is
indubitable, it follows that He does not know it through sensations
similar to ours. The _argumentum baculinum_ which appears so convincing
to Sganarelle, would be powerless with regard to a pure spirit, still
more an infinite spirit. Now is not this as much as to say that impact
is the mode of action bodies exercise on each other, and by which
sentient beings are made aware of their existence, but that it is a mode
purely relative to the sensibility of finite beings? Say that, we at
least admit with Descartes the reality of extension. But what is the
real size of the extended things by which we are surrounded, and which
according to the shape of our lenses we see enlarged, diminished, or
even distorted in a thousand ways? Were it to please God, as Leibnitz
has said, to collect the immensity of worlds into a walnut-shell, while
preserving the proportion of objects, we should never find it out; and
such diminution might be carried on infinitely, without ever reaching
any term of smallness. 'We grant it,' will be the reply--'all sensible
knowledge is relative; Plato, Malebranche, Leibnitz, have sufficiently
told us this; but above the senses there is the understanding, which
alone is made for truth. Our senses give us the appearance of things,
our understanding makes us see them as they are in themselves.' Nothing
more true, and this is the basis of metaphysics. But the question is, to
what point the understanding is separated and separable from
sensibility, and reciprocally, to what point sensibility enters into the
understanding. Is there anything in us which can really be called
understanding pure? Understanding--yes; but pure--no! Man cannot think
without images, says Aristotle; this alone demonstrates that our
understanding is always obliged to sensibilize its most abstract
concepts. Moreover, between pure concepts and the data of sensibility
there is still a debatable and obscure region--that, namely, of space
and time. And here it is that Kant has made his mark ineffaceably. It is
by so doing that he renovated metaphysics. He believed, thought, that
both these domains belonged to sensibility and not to intelligence, that
they too were only modes of representation--that is to say, modes purely
relative to the nature of our mind. On this point also traditional
metaphysics came to his support, at least as regards time. For is it not
said by all schools whatever that God is not in time, that He is an
eternal _Now_, that past and future are nothing to Him? Is it not this
conception which is constantly appealed to as affording the solution of
the conflict between divine prescience and human liberty? Now to affirm
that God is not in time, and that He sees all portions of time in one
sole and eternal present, is not this as much as to say that time is
only the mode of representation of finite beings with regard to
themselves; that, consequently, it is an image belonging to their
finitude, but not to what they are in themselves, since God, who must
see them as they are, sees them in an absolutely and radically different
manner? Let us add another difference between the human and divine
intelligence, pointed out by Bossuet, when he said, "We see things
because they are, but they are because God sees them." Therefore in God
intelligence is anterior to things, in us posterior. Now, though we can,
through artistic creation, form some idea of an intelligence anterior to
things, the analogy is, after all, a coarse one, since in us creative
imagination only deals with materials borrowed from without. Hence it
follows that our intelligence is but a very imperfect image of the
divine. Now, as the latter alone can be the type of veritable
intelligence, we can only attribute to ourselves a relative
intelligence, subordinated to the conditions of the creature. But does
not this amount precisely to saying that we only see things in a
subjective and human manner, and that, consequently, we do not know them
as they are in themselves? Let us go further still; let us raise
ourselves to conceptions of the perfect being, the divine being. Here,
too, all metaphysicians agree in acknowledging that we have only an
entirely relative view of the Divinity. Is there one who admits that we
can, without anthropomorphism, understand literally all the attributes
that we impute to the Deity? Has not God Himself defined Himself in
Scripture as _Deus absconditus_, and does not the doctrine of mysteries
in every great religion imply that the true essence of the Deity is
unknown to us, and that, consequently, the philosophic doctrine of the
attributes of God is a purely human conception, by which we strive to
represent to ourselves the unrepresentable, and to bring within the
grasp of our sensibility and our imagination the august and sublime
notion that confounds all created substance?

This is what we are taught by all metaphysic doctrine whatever, and not
only by that of Kant, Plato, St. Augustine, St. Thomas, Descartes,
Malebranche, Leibnitz, Fénelon: all alike teach us that the senses are
but a confused and relative knowledge, that space and time are modes of
finite existence, that God can only be conceived of by analogy, and not
in His essence. Are such conceptions as these very different from those
of Kant? And if he has taken them up again under another form, if by
isolating he has exaggerated them, his is the merit of having brought
them into prominence, of reminding us of them, and forcing us to assign
them a more important place in our doctrines. Despite the warnings of
the greatest minds, and of all great minds, are we not ceaselessly
tempted to yield to the automatic instinct which makes us believe things
to be as we see them, makes us suppose the existence of a matter, solid,
coloured, sonorous, cold, or hot, such as the senses acquaint us with;
makes us believe in an absolute space and time, with which we no longer
know how to deal when we think of the true Absolute; makes us conceive
of this true Absolute or Goodness as of a species of great man, that we
strip of a body, without even reflecting whether we have really the
power of representing to ourselves anything absolutely incorporeal? It
is against this vulgar current dogmatism, which philosophy has so much
trouble in getting rid of, that not only Kant, but every metaphysician,
protests. Kant only expounded, under a rigorous and systematic form, all
the critical portion of previous metaphysics. To us it seems
impossible--with more or less reservation, and without insisting at
present too rigidly on the share of the relative and subjective in human
knowledge--impossible, we say, not to allow this share, and
consequently, in a certain measure, not to give in our adherence to
transcendental criticism and idealism. There is, however, as we have
seen above, something which escapes from this relativity of all human
knowledge: it is the very fact of knowing. This fact has in itself
something absolute. I know not whence it comes, I cannot explain it; I
marvel that a being should be met with in whom at one time or other what
we call knowledge has appeared; but this fact cannot exist without being
known by the knower. All knowledge supposes, then, a subject that knows
itself--that is to say, who is internally present to himself. Here
knowledge comes from within, not from without. Whatever is objective can
only _appear_ to me, and is consequently a _phenomenon_. I only see its
outside, and it is only in relation to myself that I can grasp even that
outside. But the conscious _ego_ sees itself from within. Shall we say
that it appears to itself? I am willing to say so, but as it appears to
itself that appearance is a reality, for the form that I give it is my
own form. In order that it should become _me_, _I_ must be _me_. Every
other object has to be given in the first instance before it is
perceived; in order that I should see a house, a house must be there. It
is not so with the _ego_. For if at the moment it is given me it is not
already me, how is it to become so? How shall I know it as such? And if
it be already me, it is already perceived as such. Hence it follows that
the external thing may be represented without being, as happens in
sleep, while I cannot think without thinking myself, or think myself
without existing. All subjectivism, all relativism, all criticism,
therefore, are baffled in presence of the _ego_.

It is from this solid and immovable foundation laid by Descartes at the
entrance of science that we may set out to extend the sphere of our
knowledge. Everything, it is said, is relative. What matter if that
relative be connected by precise and fixed relations with the unknown,
if that which is given be a strictly faithful projection of that which
is thought? For instance, we do not know the souls of other men in
themselves, we have never seen a soul such as it is in itself; those
even which are dearest to us are unknown like the rest. But if we
suppose all the signs by which they manifest themselves to be sincere,
is it not to know them truly and in the only way intelligible to us, to
hear their voices, and understand their words, and interpret their
actions? No doubt nothing external to ourselves can be known internally
by us; but if the exterior be the expression of the interior, is not the
one the equivalent of the other? And to ask more would amount to asking
to be more than man. Science teaches us that all appearances have a
fixed and precise relation to reality. The visible apparent sky is
strictly what it ought to be to express the real sky. The deeper our
knowledge of things goes, the more we see the perfect conformity of the
apparent to the real, the more faithfully do phenomena translate
noumena. Are we not, therefore, justified in supposing that these
relative noumena, which are still no more than appearances, could be
translated in their turn, if only we had the key to them, into other
noumena of which they are the form and image? I may say the same about
the anthropomorphic representations of Deity. I admit that the Absolute
is in its essence above all human representations. But these
representations, when we disengage them as much as possible from all
sensible elements, are none the less the true expression of that
incomprehensible essence in so far as it appears to a human
consciousness. If not God in Himself, it is God in relation to me; and
it is with only this last that we have to do so long as we are but men.

We do not, therefore, consider it impossible to assign to the critical
element its part in metaphysic without denying the objective reality of
knowledge. We think that the famous old distinction between being and
phenomena, the intelligible and the sensible, still endures, despite the
"Kritik" of Kant; or rather, this very "Kritik" itself is, in our eyes,
only a hyperbolical but striking manner of expressing this great truth.

    PAUL JANET.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] We already endeavoured to make this philosophy known at its earliest
appearance, by an article that appeared in the _Revue des Deux Mondes_
of the 19th October, 1873, under the title, "A New Phase of
Spiritualism." We are now dealing with the most recent form of this new
school.

[2] Hamilton's "Discussions: Cousin, Schelling."

[3] Herbert Spencer's "First Principles," First Part p. 18.




ON THE MORAL LIMITS OF BENEFICIAL COMMERCE.


When a Professor of _Political Economy_ was first established in the
University of Oxford, a controversy presently arose in the academical
common rooms concerning the just meaning of the phrase. Among elder and
conservative men, the most active-minded insisted that it ought to
receive the full width of meaning attached to it by Aristotle in his
Treatise on Economy, which, with him, was essentially the economy of the
State--that is, in pure Greek, _political_ economy, although this
epithet is not annexed to his title. By this interpretation, the science
naturally and necessarily became implicated with moral considerations,
which never can be excluded from the statesman's view. But the actual
students and professors of the new science--eminently Mr. Nassau Senior
and Dr. Whately, shortly afterwards Archbishop of Dublin--naturally
feared that by such an interpretation political economy would become
confounded with politics; would, indeed, cease to be a science; and by
so great an enlargement of its area, would fail to receive that special
and definite cultivation which Adam Smith had bestowed on it, as the
theory of national wealth. Whately indeed, to avoid this inconvenient
extension of the sense, proposed to call the topic, not political
economy, but _Catallactics_--that is, the science of exchanges.
Excellent in many respects as the last title was, it might have seemed
to exclude the whole doctrine of taxation, and still more decisively all
discussion of Malthus's theory of population, which belongs to politics
or to morals, not at all to the doctrine of exchange. In the end, the
economists ruled that their science does not at all teach what _ought_
to be, but simply what _is_, what _goes on_, and _will go on_, as an
inevitable result of individuals holding exchangeable right in definite
articles. Thus they seemed to have driven moral considerations out of
their science, as much as out of gardening or medicine. To call their
political economy, on that account, _heartless_ (as so many have done)
may seem ridiculous; but this form of attack on it arose from a
perception or belief that its professors were claiming for it an
_imperative_ force, while disclaiming morality, and were assuming that
it was a sufficient and supreme rule for political action.

Of late it has been maintained on a special ground that moral
considerations cannot wholly be excluded from political economy. Dr. W.
B. Hodgson, first holder of a new chair in Edinburgh as Professor of
_Mercantile_ Economy, has urged that, in so far as morality or
immorality in individuals affects wealth and the markets, we do not
exhaust the discussion on exchanges while we neglect this consideration.
Perhaps indeed no one, in discussing taxation, has omitted to consider
what taxes lead to fraudulent evasion or to smuggling; but economists
hitherto, with great unanimity, have resolved that, in their character
of economists, they will not notice moral evils from an opium trade, or
from sale of deadly weapons and ammunition, or from traffic in
intoxicants; nor can one in general discover from their writings that
they know vice to be wasteful, or national expenditure on needless and
foolish objects undesirable. They have a right to select what topics
they will treat, and what they will not treat. They have a right to say:
"Such and such considerations belong to morals, not to _our_ political
economy." But, on the one hand, if they are resolved that their science
shall be as unmoral as engineering or navigation, they must not claim
for it any decisive weight in State-politics; on the other hand, the
topics which they neglect need, so much the more urgently, to be treated
by others, especially since we have no professors of practical morals,
and (for more reasons than one) questions of the market are not thought
suitable to the pulpit.

That an exchange of one thing for another does, on the whole, _please_
both parties to the exchange, is evidently testified by the fact that
each acts voluntarily; hence, the inference is too lightly made that
each is _benefited_ by the transaction. Not only so, but from an
increasing magnitude of exchanges increase of wealth is inferred,
without any reference to the nature of the things exchanged. In a rough
estimate, this reasoning has, no doubt, a _primâ facie_ weight, for we
may not dictate to the tastes of others, nor assume that tastes which
are not ours are therefore silly. Yet, evidently things which perish in
the using quickly cease to be wealth, and things which are not likely to
be approved continuously cannot long command the same high price. No
article could fetch a price at all if it were not intended to be
enjoyed, used, or consumed; the final purchase is called expenditure,
and all expenditure is liable to moral judgment, approving or censuring.
When we censure expenditure, not merely because it is excessive, but
because it is essentially foolish or evil, we necessarily deplore and
deprecate the traffic which feeds it--the traffic which it encourages;
hence, some vicious trades are even forbidden by law. Short of this,
there is necessarily a large margin of trades which law does not, and
perhaps cannot successfully, forbid, which nevertheless may be justly
regretted, censured, and, as far as may be, discountenanced. Economists
are not here blamed if they (disowning moral considerations) do nothing
of the kind; but they must not be allowed to blind us to the fact that
some trades, not forbidden by law, are so far from promoting wealth and
weal as to be gravely pernicious. To rejoice in their magnitude, to
announce it triumphantly as a proof of national prosperity, is something
worse than a mistake.

No reader, it is believed, will complain that the last sentence is
mysterious or obscure. Our manufacturers of cotton and woollen have of
late loudly deplored the falling off of their home trade, while the
consumption of intoxicating drink continues to increase. They believe
that if the labouring classes spent less on the brewer and distiller,
they would spend more on the clothier. The most fanatical devotee of
alcohol cannot deny that too much of it is drunk, in face of the
long-continued avowal of the judges that drink is by far the greatest
cause of crime--drink, short of evident and provable drunkenness.
Indeed, it is not from those who are outright drunk, but from those who
have been drinking, that the worst and most numerous outrages come,
while the foot and the eye are steady, though the brain and the passions
are perverted. To boast and rejoice in the magnitude of the drink
traffic, legal as it undoubtedly is, has no moral defence. The topic is
here adduced, not in order to push that argument further, but in order
to insist that the mere increase of a trade does not _in itself_ denote
an increase of wealth; is not _in itself_ necessarily a thing to be
applauded either by the economist or by the moralist. In each case we
must look into detail, and consider whether this or that prosperous
trade, like a huge weed in a garden, dwarfs or kills other growths,
which, but for it, might thrive.

An avowed ardent disciple of Mr. Cobden--a gentleman in some eminence of
place and rank--has recently dissuaded taxes on wine and tobacco for the
sake of revenue, _not_ on the ground which one might expect--viz., that
a Government ought not to base a revenue on what may chance to be public
vice, _but_ on the ground that "the grower of wine in France and of
tobacco in America" can reasonably refuse to trade with us, if "we will
not accept payment in _the only coin_ which he has to offer--namely, in
his wine or his tobacco."[4] As if we were not competent to reply: "Of
wine and tobacco we quickly get more than enough. Preserve your grapes
in sawdust, or make them into raisins, and you will not find our people
averse to enjoy them, nor will you encounter any unreasonable duty from
our Custom-houses. As to tobacco, surely the rich land which alone can
raise it, can raise no end of other products which we are certain to
value." This well-informed writer, in his whole argument, seems to
account wine the only food-product which we receive from France (to
silks and elegant articles he once slightly alludes); but he cannot be
ignorant that the solid food which France sends us in eggs, cheese,
butter, vegetables, chickens, and dry fruit is enormous; she would in
ordinary years send us wheat, did not America, Russia, and Australia
make it needless. To speak of wine as _the only coin_ of France is a
wonderful straining of argument. But the reason for quoting it here is
to illustrate how completely the School of Cobden wishes the State to
ignore moral considerations in trade. Yet the State deserves no
reverence, if it be not moral. Laws and enactments, framed by minds
reckless of morality, are apt to be, on the one side unjust and
oppressive, on the other eminently corrupting. A State which gains
revenue from a vicious trade, such as gambling and debauchery,
demoralizes its people so effectually as to deserve reprobation rather
than reverence. According to the ancients, the lawgiver begins to
civilize society and to earn veneration by establishing marriage and
sanctifying the family. Are we to say, "We have changed all that now;
let the Church care for morality: it is no concern of the State?" Who
first taught such sentiment as wise policy, it is not easy to say; but
it certainly has, in practice, if not in theory, attained a deadly
currency. It never was the doctrine of Adam Smith. It is obviously a
sure road to ruin, if its development be unopposed.

A legislator, of course, ought not to guide his enactments by the
morality of any one school. If, in Greek fashion, we were to set up an
Epimenides, a Solon, a Lycurgus, as plenipotentiary to start us in a new
course, there might be some little danger of one-sided and conceited
morals; yet not much, even so; for a very one-sided or very stupid man
would hardly be elected: every lawgiver wishes his new institutions to
be permanent, and is sure to have some regard to the friction which they
would encounter in working. But where the legislation must have
sanction, not from one man, but from a thousand men, of whom six hundred
are elected from different circles of mixed ranks, from diverse
localities, where forms and schools of religion, based on variety of
thought, prevail, it is evidently impossible that in the laws
collectively approved any moral ideas should dominate, except those
which are common to all who are morally cultivated. To dread moral
considerations in the debates of an English Parliament, lest the
morality prevailing in its laws become one-sided and arbitrary, pedantic
and ascetic, is so baseless, so wanting in good sense, as scarcely to
seem sincere. When people tell us, "We shall be liable to have laws
against dancing and cardplaying, or laws compelling us to go to church,
if we insist that legislation ought to study for the public virtue,"
they not only make themselves ridiculous, they even force us to suspect
that they fear lest vice be repressed in ways inconvenient to the
vicious. So much is premised, lest it be imagined or pretended that in
pointing at moral limits to beneficial commerce any morality is desired
less broad than that which all noble and well-reputed schools
accept--the morals of mankind. At the same time, what is here advanced
is intended to bear less immediately on law than on the general tenor of
public opinion and practical writing.

Many economists write, as assuming that it is a step forward in
civilization when a barbarous people learns artificial wants. If a New
Zealander, instead of being satisfied with a mat for his back, which,
made by himself, will last him for years, betakes himself to an English
coat, which he must buy with a price,--which indeed less effectually
shields him from wet, and sooner wears out,--he does that which is
convenient to the English trader, but to him is a very doubtful gain:
perhaps rather he brings on himself colds, cough, and consumption. If a
thousand Maoris did the same, the commerce might figure in a Maori
budget, and a Maori economist might point to the new trade as a step
forward in national prosperity. The Zulus, as described by Englishmen
who have travelled in Zululand or lived in the midst of them in Natal,
are an upright, generous, faithful, honest race; and strange to say,
Englishmen, who have such experience of them, are found to corroborate
the utterance of Cetewayo, "A Zulu trained by a missionary is a Zulu
spoiled"--that is, when trained in our habits they lose their national
virtues. How can this be? why should it be? Apparently, because from us
they learn artificial wants. While an apron suffices a Zulu for
clothing, and a very simple hut for shelter, he can in many ways afford
to be hospitable and generous. A man with very few wants has all the
feelings of superfluity and wealth while surrounded by possessions so
slender that we count him very poor: and when with an amount of toil
which to his hardihood is not at all severe, he can always calculate on
providing for himself and family all that their simple habits need, he
is not deterred from present generosity by studying for his own future.
But if he learn to covet and count necessary a number of articles which
require from him threefold labour, he feels himself no longer rich, but
poor; then, instead of giving small favours gratuitously, he claims to
be paid for everything; instead of being princely, he becomes mercenary
and stingy. If he imitate the dress, he is liable to envy the wealth of
the Englishman, and in schemes of laying up for the future he easily
becomes avaricious, perhaps fraudulent. Such are the steps by which one
may justly calculate that some or many barbarians degenerate from the
normal goodness of their fellows. The artificial wants which they learn
when housed with our missionaries, or imbibe from the crafty allurements
of traders, are not (_primâ facie_) a benefit at all, do not conduce to
independence, to the sense of wealth, nor to the practice of virtue.
They are simply a convenience to the European trader. If a Maori or Zulu
chief frown upon such trade, which judgment does he deserve--to be
scolded as barbarous, or to be praised as sagacious? With them, perhaps
also with us, to account but few things necessary is a foundation for
many virtues. Our economists often reverse the picture.

No stress is here laid on the fact that the historical saints of
Christendom thought it an excellence to be satisfied with a minimum of
external appliances for the comfort of the body. So much of arbitrary
opinion may be imputed reasonably to them, and so much of fancy and
credulity to their biographers, that it does not occur to the present
writer to account their practices or principles any support to his
argument. But the case of Socrates, and many other Greek philosophers,
is different, and much to the point. With them, high thought, cheap
feeding, and mean circumstantials frequently went together; and perhaps
even those philosophers, who were somewhat mercenary and rich, would
vehemently have renounced the idea that it is a good thing to acquire
habits and tastes which make necessary to us things previously needless.
But there is danger of drawing the reader's thoughts into a new channel
by this allusion to Greek philosophers when an argument of national
economy is chiefly intended, not of personal virtues. As it is better
for an individual to be satisfied with supplies that are sufficient,
close at hand, and easy of attainment, than to have fastidious tastes
which cannot be supplied without considerable effort and labour, so it
is better for a nation to have a taste for its native products, so far
as our lower wants are concerned. If we can get all that the health and
strength of the body needs from our own soil, and with small
expenditure, this is better for us than to be enslaved to artificial
tastes, which multiply labours for mere bodily supply. To fix ideas, let
me illustrate the principle here contained by discussing those popular
beverages, tea and coffee.

Tea undoubtedly, as superseding beer, cider, and wine, has wrought much
benefit to England, even if it have been (when heavily taxed) dearer
than our native intoxicants. When taken with little food, in strong and
frequent cups, it may often have weakened the nerves; but it does not,
like alcohol, pervert the brain and inflame the mind, thus leading to
folly, vice, and crime. The present writer is, and always has been, a
tea drinker; nor have the many assaults on this beverage which have been
sent to him shaken his belief that, taken in moderation, it has no evil
comparable to its good. The present argument does not aim to prove that
tea is in itself bad, only that the too-exclusive addiction to it has
hurtfully excluded the trial of native beverages, which are perhaps
better, certainly cheaper, and far more accessible.

Rigid enemies of alcoholic drink often assure us, in poetical and
ecstatic language, that water is the only reasonable and right drink for
man, as for other animals; but the water which they recommend and
describe as gushing and sparkling in mountain rills does not come to the
hearth and home of every mountain dweller, much less is it attainable by
the inhabitants of cities or boggy plains. The hardy beasts of the
field, if they can get the water pure, manage to endure its coldness in
all seasons; so perhaps might we, if we could recover robustness of the
stomach without losing any advantage of a developed brain. That such
recovery is impossible is not here asserted, but simply that, under the
existing circumstances, the water (through its impurities or its
coldness) often needs to be cooked, to be warmed, to have then some
taste superadded which shall overcome mawkishness. When this is
conceded, the question arises, will no native botany suffice? Are we of
necessity driven to import tea from China or Assam? Such are the
wonderful and deep harmonies of Nature that in each long-inhabited
country the constitution of animals becomes adapted to its plants as
well as to its climate, and finds among them not only its food, but its
remedies for disease. Native herbs are often found more health-restoring
than pretentious foreign drugs; nor is it extravagant to imagine that
native leaves and berries might adapt themselves as well to the palate
of Englishmen as tea and coffee, and better to their stomachs, if,
instead of buying from the foreigner, we had duly studied our home
resources. In the case of coffee, it curiously happens that there are
persons among us who prefer what is called dandelion coffee to the
coffee of Arabia; and that the preference is sincere seems proved by the
accident that the dandelion thus prepared is dearer than the best Mocha.
Nor does this dearness weigh against our argument. Twenty years ago
brown bread was charged by bakers as fancy bread; ten years ago lentils
were double their present price; in each case because the demand was so
uncertain. The price of dandelion would quickly come down if it were in
large and daily request. As substitutes for tea many leaves may be named
which will not be called simply medicinal, prominently those of the
sweet bay, the peach, and the black currant. If we were by any cause cut
off from tropical markets, some combination would soon be discovered
which carried off public preference; and when a national taste in it had
once been established, every good purpose would have been attained
without the foreign article. Should we not in that case moralize with
wonder over the vast apparatus of great ships, which had been built, and
manned, and stored, and sent to sea, with loss of sailors' lives,
entailing widowhood and orphanhood, for no better reason than to bring
back leaves, for which adequate substitutes abound at home? This
argument undertakes not to prove, but to illustrate. It is not specially
confined to the case of tea or coffee. It does not make positive
assertion that we can now change the English taste, nor does it urge a
transition which would be violent, if at all sudden. It merely points to
reasonable probabilities, as showing that a vast trade with a distant
country to gratify an artificial want, if it prove how much we can
afford to spend without being ruined, yet does not at all prove that we
enrich ourselves by the exchange. At the same time, so great is the
facility for making drinks, that we might assume higher ground and press
our argument farther. The deliciousness of Oriental sherbet is no matter
of doubt or controversy. Its basis is simply barley-water; to flavour
it, the foreigner, of course, uses some of his own fruits, but we have
plenty of substitutes at hand, at least while sugar abounds to us. It
may be warmed, if necessary: so little need we depend on the Chinese.
Besides, some among us are satisfied with, and warmly applaud, the drink
prepared from simple oatmeal. If we all had this taste, we should
nationally be richer.

It may be retorted, "Did you not name _Sugar_? Do you advocate making
sugar of beetroot?" But no general renunciation of foreign commerce is
for a moment here suggested as expedient. While we can bring sugar made
from cane, and save our lands for other uses than beetroot, we presume
this commerce to conduce to wealth. Not but that we may suspect the
cheapness of sugar to conspire with other causes in slackening our zeal
for _Honey_. Bees do not occupy and use up arable land. An abundance of
cottage gardens and little rockeries satisfy them. Their depredations do
not lessen the sweetness of flowers, nor the savour of herbs. They add
to our wealth, at very small expense. They greatly add to the
fertilization of plants. By all means let us get from the foreigner what
we need; only let us not therefore neglect and forget our native
resources.

In other and greater matters a like topic recurs. When the controversy
against the Corn Laws was at its height, the advocates of repeal were
taunted with wishing to explode native wheat. They replied, "Wheat is
now largely sown in England where the climate or soil is unfavourable;
in such fields only, the culture will be discouraged; where it can be
produced and ripened with greater certainty it will still be grown, and
the price will no longer be forced up; the lands less suited to wheat
may well yield, either some other grain in rotation, or other needful
crop." Valid as this reply seemed, grand and glorious as are the results
of opening our ports to foreign corn, the retrospect of thirty years
nevertheless suggests new lines of thought. Want of food in Ireland when
the potato crop failed was the argument which converted Sir Robert Peel;
but the desire of selling cotton and woollen fabrics, or hardware, to
those whose "chief coin" was wheat, gave an earlier impetus to the
Anti-Corn Law League. Cobden and his associates were in the right, and
performed well the task of the day; but the existing state of our
agriculture is now discerned to be highly unsatisfactory. Every year
widens and deepens the conviction that our laws of Land Tenure are
fundamentally wrong; indeed, they are diverse from those of all the
world; if they are not signally better than those of all other nations,
they are gravely and lamentably worse; and the idea now presents itself,
that the temporary relief given to us by the free importation of wheat
has proved a buttress to an evil system of land laws, and has blinded us
to the essential evils contingent on a perpetual increasing ratio of the
population in great towns to that of the rustic districts. Much
wealthier, no doubt, we are, and our poorer classes are less
hard-worked. To dwell on the drawbacks through higher expectations,
artificial wants, higher prices of coal, bricks, and houses--not to
mention worse matters--might lead into too long digression. But, to
bring out the idea here pointed at, we may speculate as to the results
which must have followed, if no foreign markets had been able to give
us permanent supplies of necessary food. Suppose that barely we had been
able in 1847 to save from starvation as many poor Irishmen as we did
save, but that in succeeding years the United Kingdom had been cast on
its own resources for grain and cattle; will any one maintain that by a
proper use of the land we could not have fed our own population?

If any one is of that opinion, let him consider the phenomena of French
agriculture. A century ago France seemed unable to feed her inhabitants.
Thousands of the population died of starvation, even the king's own
servants. Misery among the peasants and the poorer classes in towns was
universal. No one imagined that the country could afford to export food,
or had any idea of its vast capacity of production. Her climate is not
now superior to what it was; her area is somewhat enlarged by the
sagacious plantings on dunes of sand; the soil is improved by a
century's tillage; the produce is more valuable, because the peasants
have been taught many secrets of fruit culture. Most important of all,
millions of peasants are owners of small freeholds. The "magic of
property" has made them industrious, saving and ever vigilant to
increase and improve the crops. We in England censure and deplore the
compulsion on a French parent to divide his petty freehold and his gains
equally among his children. If this be a grave evil, yet so much the
more remarkable are the marvellous results of the union in one man of
landlord, farmer, and labourer: for we see that by the universal and
untiring industry which this fact elicits, not only were the great
extravagances of the Second Empire and its wars sustained, but, in spite
of the scarcely calculable losses of the Franco-German war, the fine of
two hundred and fifty millions sterling, which France had to pay, was
paid within four or five years, while a larger army than ever was raised
and maintained. No one can dispute that the unexampled buoyancy of
French finance is due mainly to the sound conditions of French landed
tenure. Ireland, Scotland, and England all await a similar development,
and never can be satisfied without it: but we have postponed the day of
necessary reform by buying our food of almost every kind, in dangerous
amount, from foreign countries, while our own arable land goes back into
grass and pasture.

And what reply does the Right Hon. John Bright make, when addressed with
a claim of reformed landed tenure? His name is here adduced for honour,
as an eminent type of the Cobden School; but the habitual reply is,
"Good! we are in favour of Free Trade in land:" as though Free Trade
were in itself a charm which can scare away all evils; as though the
existing freedom to accumulate land to any extent by purchase were not
one of our greatest mischiefs. Men cannot live in the air. Land for a
dwelling is as essential as air and water. Land is very limited in
quantity, especially land conveniently situated, with favourable
conditions. Land primitively belongs to a nation, and no man naturally
has any right to more of it than he can himself cultivate and use. Large
landed estates are a vast power, social and political. Their possession
was originally in England an official trust, coupled with political
duties and customary dues in payment: but without right of ejectment
while those dues were paid. The commercial idea of land is a perversion
and abuse. Those who fancy that the abolition of entails and
primogeniture and whatever makes conveyances expensive, will bring about
the desirable reform, boast that their remedy will hoist up the market
price of land; in other words, it would make an effective purchase by
the State more and more difficult, more and more burdensome to the
community. Nay, it might even delay the necessary reform, until the
patience of a nation under a landlord Parliament broke down, and such a
revolution followed as that of France under Louis XVI. As there is a
moral limit to the magnitude of beneficial commerce with the foreigner,
much more is there a moral limit to the beneficial magnitude of landed
estates. Happily some despots are philanthropic; yet we are not in love
with despotism. Some great landowners are philanthropic: higher honour
be to them! but we must calculate that very many will covet power over
all who reside on the estate, and will use the power not always kindly;
or will employ it as a political engine to win state-offices and
salaries for their families; others, more directly and unblushingly
mercenary, will think chiefly how to raise rent, and will forbid both
crops and inhabitants, if wealthy lovers of occasional sport outbid
ordinary farmers. If from mere pride and love of the romantic a landlord
make his estate a wilderness, the nation still suffers the damage. Its
population is cooped into towns or driven into exile, its markets are
starved, its military force is lowered. While the Cobden School
pertinaciously connives at these great evils, and juggles with the
phrase "Free Trade" as if land were an article which ought to be on the
same footing as moveables, they are playing into the hands of their
nominal adversaries.

The first measure which we need is not one which shall facilitate the
purchase of new and new estates by the over-wealthy, who, if they are
not gamblers or otherwise vicious, often know not what to do with their
vast incomes; but much rather a measure which shall set a maximum area
for estates. The mildest thing to do is, not in the first instance to
pass any new _Act_, but only a resolution or _Vote_ of the Commons,
declaring that it is against the public interest for any individual to
possess more than a thousand acres of rustic land, or more than five
acres of town land; and that whoever bequeaths to one person more than
the above-named, ought to be subjected to a heavy and special land tax.
In the same direction we need other special votes of the House, to the
effect--that by legislation, by purchase, and by taxation the recovery
of the national soil for the nation from year to year ought to be
systematically pursued, wherever now held in large masses by bodies of
men or by individuals; and that in order to give to cultivators the full
results of their own industry, it is expedient that the State, out of
its own present or future domains, carve out numerous small farms to be
held under it as by copyright tenure, not subject to rise of rent.
Space does not permit further detail, or reply to objections; but the
idea intended is to work in the direction of _virtual_ freeholds, ever
increasing in number, which cannot be bought out of the hands of the
cultivators by tempting prices from the rich, because they are legally
State property, and destined to remain as areas of small culture. By
buying up from time to time the lands possessed by large charities, by
legacy taxes directed to discourage bequests of land in great mass, and
by direct purchases of land or rather by taking the legacy tax in land
itself, the State would beneficently in the course of many generations
undo the injustices and frauds of the past.

Land is so far from being a desirable object of unlimited commerce
(called by the Cobden School Free Trade), that, especially under the
modern interpretation which makes the lord (or chief man) _owner_ of the
land, the most jealous limitations ought to be imposed on it by the
State. So long, indeed, as a man holds no more of it than one family can
cultivate, jealousy is needless; for the holder (especially if he pay a
quit-rent for it) is sure to cultivate it, and cannot offend by
excluding population. Town land ought, as soon as possible, to become
town property; and, meanwhile, as early as possible, all town building
to be subjected to a public veto for sanitary reasons. To make away into
mercenary hands, as an article of trade, the whole solid area on which a
nation lives, is astonishing as an idea of statesmanship. There is
another matter connected with land as to which the State may justly feel
great jealousy--namely, as to the consumption and exportation of
material which cannot be reproduced. It is said that Sicily, under the
Romans first, was largely deteriorated by the perpetual exportation of
corn, exhausting even very fertile soil. Ireland in the past may have
suffered by the constant sending out of cattle and pigs, with no
back-current of commerce to restore all that their bones and flesh took
out of the earth. Virginia and other States of the American Union
largely ruined their soil by unceasing exportation of tobacco and other
products. But to come closer home, no crops of coal can be grown in
England and Wales. We reap where we have not sown, where we cannot sow.
We export in enormous mass what we cannot reproduce. We allow
individuals to become, out and out, proprietors of the national coal,
and then sanction their unlimited exportation of it, with the high
probability that this may cripple industry in the near future of
England. This surely is a commerce, the benefit of which is very
doubtful even in a cosmopolitan view. It may seem better to stimulate
other nations to search for coal on their own soil than to use up what
we cannot replace. And as for some other articles of immense commerce,
as tobacco, it may seem doubtful which nation loses more by it--the
importers or the exporters. Surely in all these cases the quality of the
things bought and sold must be considered carefully, before we regard
the magnitude of any trade a national benefit or a source of national
wealth.

    F. W. NEWMAN.

FOOTNOTES:

[4] "Reciprocity," by Sir Louis Mallet, C.B., 1879: Printed for the
Cobden Club.




THE MYTHS OF THE SEA AND THE RIVER OF DEATH.


At the present time, when theologians and those who have most aptitude
for such discussions are arguing "in thoughts more elevate" of the
soul's future life, and its rewards and punishments therein, the
pre-historic student is tempted to let _his_ thoughts wander backwards
over a different aspect of the same subject, in an effort to link again
the chain of belief concerning heaven and hell, which joins this present
with a long-forgotten past. The difficulty which we feel in uniting
ourselves in thought with past ages, arises surely more often from the
imperfection of our sympathies than from the deficiency of our positive
knowledge. So many questions which were once new have long been settled,
so many experiments have been tried, such experiences have been lived
through since then; it is so impossible that the earlier conditions of
life and society should return; and we cannot bring ourselves to make
the effort of imagination necessary to place us in harmony with bygone
times. But there are some few questions which seem as far from
settlement now as they ever were; one of these is the question
concerning the destiny of man after death, the character of his journey
into that undiscovered country, and the sort of life he will lead when
there.

    "A riddle which one shrinks
    To challenge from the scornful sphinx."

Some would dissuade us from the continuance of these (so they say)
unfruitful speculations; but it is very certain that man must change his
nature before they will lose their fascination for him; and until he
does so, he cannot read without sympathy the guesses which past
generations of men have made towards the solution of the same problems.
For them, indeed, these solutions have lost their interest, as ours will
soon do for us. Whatever lot that new condition may hold in store,
eternal pleasure or eternal pain, they have tried it now; whatever
scene the dark curtain hides, they have passed behind it. This is very
certain: as that we soon must. But so long as we remain here upon this
upper earth, we must be something above or below humanity if we refuse
ever to let our thoughts wander toward the changes and chances of
another life.

Not, indeed, that questions of this sort have ever had for the majority
of men in one age, or for the collective mass of human kind, an
all-absorbing interest. If we choose to look closely into the matter,
and to test men's opinion as it is displayed in their actions (the only
real opinion), we shall at first perhaps be struck by the slight belief
which they possess in a future state. For it is slight compared to their
"notional assent," that which they think they believe concerning it.
With the majority, faith upon this point is at best but shadowy, of an
otiose character suitable for soothing the lots of others, and
sometimes, alas! called into requisition to relieve us from the stings
of conscience on account of the pain which our own misconduct or neglect
has introduced therein. And as it is with us, so, save under exceptional
conditions, it has always been with men in the full vigour and enjoyment
of life. There have been times when one aspect of the future--its
terror--has been realized with an intensity, and has exercised an
influence upon life and conduct, such as is unknown in our days. But
these times have not been ordinary ones, and we are apt, I think, even
to over-estimate the force of faith during the Middle Ages. That term,
"dark ages," overrides our fancy; "we can never hear mention of them
without an accompanying feeling as though a palpable obscure had dimmed
the face of things, and that our ancestors wandered to and fro
groping."[5] But, then, neither have the most light-hearted and
sceptical of people been able to shut their eyes utterly to the warnings
of death. We are wont to think of the Greeks as of just such a
light-hearted, and in a fashion sceptical, temperament, and to contrast
the spirit of Hellas with the spirit of mediæval Europe. Scarcely any
thought of death, or of judgment after death, disturbs the serenity of
Greek art, such as it has come down to us. Thanatos is not to be
found;[6] even the tombs are adorned with representations of war and of
the chase, or with figures of the dancing Hours. And yet Greek art was
not without its darker side. It had, like mediæval poetry, its
Dante--Polygnotus, namely--who adorned the pilgrims' house at Delphi
with frescoes representing the judgment and the tortures of the
damned,--a Greek Campo Santo. He would have given us a different
impression of the Greek mind in presence of the fact of mortality, and
shown us how easily we are led to exaggerate the divergence in thought
between different nations and different times.

So we find as far back as we can test the belief of men, certain
theories touching the fate of the soul after death, which represent, in
the germ at least, the prevalent opinions of our own day; and out of
some of which these opinions have sprung. First among these, probably in
point of time, stands the purely sceptical theory which takes its rise
from the earliest efforts of language to give expression to the unseen.
Casting about for a name for the essential part of man, the life or soul
of him, language finds at first that it has no suitable word, and then
supplies its want by using the breath--the =psychê=, _spiritus_--in this
sense. Like the vital spark itself, the breath is seen to depart when
the man dies. Whither has it gone? The purely negative, the purely
sceptical answer would be, "It has disappeared." The answer actually
given in most religious creeds is, "It has gone to the unseen _place_,"
or the concealed _place_; as the Greeks said, to Hades (=A-idês=); or,
as our Northern ancestors said, to Hel.[7] Thus, out of pure negation we
have the beginning of a myth: the _spirit_ becomes something definite,
and the place it has gone to is partly realized. The unseen place is
underground, gained by a dark valley which stretches there from the
upper earth. Enough of the old belief remains to keep this home of the
dead itself dark and shadowy and lifeless. "The senseless dead, the
simulacra of mortals," as Homer says. And we remember how even a hero
like Achilles "would rather be on earth and serve for hire to a man of
mean estate, than rule a king among the dead."

The same thought is expressed by the Hebrew poet,[8]

    "Sheol shall not praise thee, Jehovah,
    The dead shall not celebrate thee;
    They that go down unto the pit shall not hope for thy truth;
    The living, the living, shall praise thee, as I do this day."

No people have held up this _destructive_ side of death, this negative
theory of a future, with sharper outline than the Greeks and Hebrews.
What a contrast to the teaching of modern religions is that line, "They
that go down unto the pit shall not hope for thy truth!" Other people
have found themselves unable to rest at this point; they have endowed
their place with a personality, but, still strongly impressed with its
horrors, this personality is grim and fearful. Even with the Greeks,
Hades is a person, not a place; with the Teutons, Hel has gone through
the same transformation: and a thousand other images of horror to be met
with in different creeds, devouring dragons, dogs who, like Cerberus,
threaten those who are journeying to the underground kingdom, can be
shown by their names to have sprung from merely negative images of
death, the unseen, the coverer, the concealer, the cave of night.

In contrast therefore with all these myths stand those which, after
death, send the soul upon a journey to some paradise, believed generally
to lie in the west. If these first are myths of hell, the second series
may be fairly described as myths of heaven. Nor can it be certainly
proved that the more cheerful view of the other world is of a later
growth in time than the first which seems so primitive. We see
indications of it in the interments of old stone-age grave mounds. While
among historical people the older Hebrews are the exponents of the
gloomier Sheol, the most hopeful picture of the soul's future finds
expression in the ritual service of the Egyptians. There we have a
complete history of the dead man's journey across the Nile and through
the twilight region of Apap, king of the desert, until at last it
reaches the home of the sun. And, to come nearer home, among all those
peoples with whom we are allied in blood, the Indo-European family of
nations, we shall find the evidences of a double belief, the belief in
death as of a dim underground place or as a devouring monster, and the
contrasting faith in death as a journey undertaken to reach a new
country where everything is better and happier than upon earth.

This is the myth of an earthly paradise, not, like our heaven,
disconnected altogether from the world, but a distant land lying
somewhere in the west, and forming part of the imaginary geography of
those times: so the belief is, more than others, a realistic one,
mingling with the daily experience of men and influencing deeply their
daily life. The necessary portal of death is even sometimes lost sight
of altogether, as when in the Middle Ages we find men undertaking more
than one expedition in search of the earthly paradise, and when we find
the current belief that in certain weathers was visible from the west
coast of Ireland that happy island to which St. Brandon and his
disciples had been carried when they left this world. For this reason,
though the notion of the western paradise is essentially the same for
all the human race, its local colouring constantly varies, changing with
the geographical position of each people: if they change their homes and
advance, as they will probably do, towards the land of promise, it moves
away before them, as the rainbow moves from us. The Egyptians had their
myth of the soul's journey, drawing all its distinctive features from
the special character of their land, chiefly from the commanding
influence which a great neighbouring desert exercised upon their
imagination. But for our ancestors, the parents of the Indo-European
races, the place of the desert was supplied by the sea.

The most probable conjecture has fixed the cradle of our race in that
corner of land which lies westward the steep range of the Beloot Tagh
mountains, an off-shoot of the Himalayas, and northward from the high
barren land of Cabul. This country, the ancient Bactriana, is the most
habitable district to be found anywhere in Central Asia. There the hills
stretch out in gentle slopes towards the west, and enclose fertile
valleys, whose innumerable streams, fed by the mountains east and south,
all go to swell the waters of the Oxus, now called the Jihon. Farther
north lies another fruitful country, watered by the Jaxartes, separated
from the first by a range of hills much inferior to those which divide
both lands from Yarkand and Cashgar on the east, and from Cabul on the
south. Both the great rivers empty themselves into the Sea of Aral,
between which and the Caspian, sharply cutting off the fertile country
from that sea, stretches the Khiva desert, a barren land affording a
scanty nourishment to the herds of wandering Turkic tribes. There is
good reason to believe, however, that this desert did not always exist,
but that in times not extraordinarily remote the Caspian Sea, joined to
the Sea of Aral, extended over a much larger area than it at present
covers: it is known even now to be sinking steadily within its banks.
With such a contraction of the great sea the desert would grow by a
double process, by the laying bare its sandy bed and by the withdrawal
of a neighbouring supply of moisture from the dry land. So it may well
have been that the fruitful territory wherein in remotest ages were
settled our Aryan ancestors, stretched so far west as to border upon a
large inland Asiatic sea. It has even been conjectured that the turning
of so much fertile land into desert was the proximate cause of those
migrations which sent the greater part of the Aryan races westward--to
people, at last, all the countries of Europe. The root which is common
to the European languages for the names of the sea, means, in the Indian
and Iranian languages, a desert: how can we account for this fact better
than by supposing that after the European nations had left their early
home, their brethren, who remained behind and who long afterwards
separated into the people of India and Persia, came to know as a desert
the district which their fathers had once known as the sea?

Thus, these ancient Aryans stood with their backs toward the mountains
and their faces toward the sea. All their prospect, all their future,
seemed to be that way; when their migrations began they were undertaken
in that direction--towards the west. Most important of all in the
formation of a creed, their sun-god, or sun-hero,[9] was seen by many of
them quenching his beams in the waters; the home of the sun is always
likewise the home of souls. What more natural, nay, what so necessary,
as that the Aryan paradise should lie westward beyond the sea? It has
been said just now that the Indian word for desert corresponds
etymologically with the European word for sea: that word must have been,
in the old Aryan, something like _mara_, from which we get the Persian
_meru_, desert, the Latin _mare_, the Teutonic (German and English)
_meer_. But from identically the same root we likewise get the Sanksrit
and the Zend (old Persian) _mara_, death, the Latin _mors_, the old
Norse _mordh_, the German _mord_, our _murder_, all signifying
originally the same thing.[10] What, then, does this imply? The word
which the old Aryans used for sea they used likewise for death. How
would this be possible, unless this, their first sea, were likewise the
sea of death, the necessary stage upon the road to paradise?

It might have been expected that such a connection of ideas would have
endowed the sea with an entirely terrible character, precluding any
attempt to explore its solitudes, or the lands which lay beyond. It has
been already said that as a matter of experience we find that the
_earthly_ paradise often comes to be realized so vividly that men lose
the fear which should attach to any attempt at finding it. They were not
religious, heavenward-looking men who, in Mr. Morris's poem, set out in
quest of the happy land; and no doubt the bard has been guided by a true
instinct, and that of all those mediæval mariners who were lost in their
search after St. Brandon's isle, none knew that they had found what they
were seeking--Death. The Greeks eagerly cherished delusions of the same
kind; and long before they had summoned up courage sufficient to
navigate the Mediterranean they had invented the myths of their western
islands of the blest, to which yellow-haired Rhadamanthus was taken when
expelled from Crete by his brother Minos, or of those gardens kept by
the daughters of the west,[11] where decay and death could not enter. It
is likely enough that for the Aryans _their_ western sea did long retain
its more fearful meaning, _a death_; but that they at last gained
courage to look upon it only as _the road_[12] to the land of which they
had long been dreaming.

How much more weighty a position the sea takes in men's thoughts than is
warranted by their real familiarity with it! Into the mass of sedentary
lives--the vast majority--it enters but seldom as an experience,
provided a man live only a few miles inland. And yet of all countries
which possess a sea-board, how full is the literature of reference to
this one phenomenon of physical nature! The sun and the moon, and all
the heavenly bodies, the familiar sights and sounds of land, are the
property of all; and yet allusions to these are not more common in
literature than allusions to the sea: one might fancy that man was
amphibious, with a power of actually living _upon_, and not only _by_,
the water. Charles Lamb acutely penetrates the cause of a certain
disappointment we all feel at the sight of the sea for the first time.
We go with the expectation of seeing all the sea at once, the
commensurate antagonist of the earth. All that we have gathered from
narratives of wandering seamen, what we have gained from true voyages,
and what we cherish as credulously from romances and poetry, come
crowding their images, and exacting strange tributes from expectation.
Thus we are imbued with thoughts of the sea before we have had any sight
of it ourselves, merely by the sea's great influence acting through the
total experience of humanity. "We think of the great deep and of those
who go down unto it: of its thousand isles, and of the vast continents
it washes; of its receiving the mighty Plata, or Orellana, into its
bosom, without disturbance or sense of augmentation; of Biscay swells
and the mariner--

    "For many a day and many a dreadful night,
    Incessant labouring round the stormy cape;

of fatal rocks and the 'still-vexed Bermoothes;' of great whirlpools and
the water-spout; of sunken ships and sumless treasures swallowed up in
the unrestoring depths." We must not narrow the influence of the sea in
mythology within the compass of man's mere experience of it. Few among
the Aryans lived by the Caspian shore; but the Sea of Death appears in
one form or another in the religious belief of all the Aryan people. The
tradition of the sea, its real wonders, and greater fancied terrors,
must have passed from one to another, from the few who lived within
sight and sound of the waters to others quite beyond its horizon, to
whom it was not visible even as a faint silvery line.

It is natural that, in early myths, no accurate distinction should have
been drawn between the sea and rivers with which the Aryans were
familiar. The Caspian was imagined a broad river bounding the habitable
earth, the origin of the Oceanus of the Greeks; and the sea of death is,
in its earliest form, a river of death. All after-forms of mythical
geography, moreover, such as we find among Indians, Greeks, or Norsemen,
are but graftings upon this central idea. As the Aryans changed their
homes, the new experiences gradually blotted out the old. The Greek
transferred his thoughts about the Caspian to the Mediterranean, and
when his geography extended, the Oceanus was pushed farther and farther
away, until the later Euhemerist geographers came to confound it with
the Atlantic. Thus it is but by accident that we give to ocean the
meaning which it now bears. The first ocean was the mythical river which
flowed round the earth, and the real physical forerunner of the myth was
not the Atlantic or any of our oceans, but the Caspian Sea as it
stretched before the eyes of the ancient Aryan folk.

The Norseman, especially the Icelander,[13] lived so close to the ocean,
that the older myth was forgotten beside the aspect of nature so
familiar to him. In the middle of his earth stood a high mountain, on
which was a strong city, Asgaard, the house of the Æsir or gods. Below
Asgaard lay the green and fruitful earth, man's home. Then outside
flowed or lay the great mid-earth ocean, just like the Greek ocean in
character, despite all differences of climate and country. At other
times the mid-earth sea is personified as a devouring monster,
Jörmungandr ("great monster"), the name of the mid-gaard serpent who
lies at the bottom of the encircling sea, shaking the earth when he
moves.[14] Beyond, lies the ice-bound land of giants--Jötunheim, giant's
home--dark like the Cimmerian land, and peopled with beings as weird and
terrible as the Cyclops or the Gorgons.

Gradually the myths of the river of death and the sea of death from
being one became two. The second was confined to those nations who lived
upon the sea-shore, and lost in great part its early shape; but neither
Indians, Greeks, nor Norsemen forgot the myth of the mortal river. The
Indian retained it singly; for when his turn for wandering came, he
passed over the eastern mountains and reached a land where no sea was
any longer to be seen or heard of. In the mythical language of the
Vedas, the mortal river is called Vaitera_n_i; it lies "across the
dreadful path to the house of Yama,"[15] the god of Hell.

From the belief in the river of death no doubt arose also the practice
of committing the dead to the care of the sacred Ganges; for just as the
Hindus kindle a funeral fire in the boat which bears the dead down this
visible stream of death, so used the Norsemen to place their hero's body
in his ship, and then having lighted it send it drifting out seawards
with the tide. In conjunction with that thought of the other world which
placed the final resting-place in a dark kingdom underground, the river
is seen in Greek mythology transferred to Hades; but it is multiplied
into four, which have all grown out of one, inasmuch as they were
feigned to flow out of the upper-earth river Oceanus:--

    "Abhorred Styx, the flood of deadly hate;
    Sad Acheron, of sorrow, black and deep;
    Cocytus named of lamentation loud
    Heard on the rueful stream; fierce Phlegethon
    Whose waves of torrent fire inflame with rage."

These pictures are not quite in character with the Hellenic thought
about the future state. But it is certain that the more gloomy images of
death are preserved in connection with the rivers of Hades, with Hades
itself, and all that it contains. So it is with the northern Styx,
Gjöll,[16] as it is called in the Eddas. This, too, is an underground
stream lying, like the Indian, on the road to the gates of death.

Thus a separation arises between the sea and the river myths. If we wish
for something more cheerful than the pictures of Styx and Gjöll and
Vaitera_n_i, we must look, for the tales of an earthly paradise which
sprang up when men had lost their first terror of the sea, but had not
lost the beliefs to which their earliest thoughts about that sea gave
birth.

Such beliefs are those which lie enshrined in the Odyssey. This poem is
full of images of death, but they are not self-conscious ones, only
mythical expressions first applied to the passage of the soul from life,
and then made literal and physical by their transference to the
unexplored western sea. What the Caspian may have been to the ancient
Aryan, such was the Mediterranean to the Greek. The Ægean was his
home-like water; there he might pass from island to island without
losing sight of land; and he soon learnt to trust himself to its care,
and to know its currents and its winds. Long before he had navigated
beyond Cape Malea, all the coasts of the Ægean had become parts of his
familiar world: outside this was the region of the unknown. The Iliad
tells us what the early Greeks thought about the first. Myths may have
mingled with the legend of the fall of Troy, but the story in Homer is
essentially realistic, rationalistic even. The very powers of the
immortals and their doings seem petty and limited. The Odyssey, on the
other hand, is the product of the Greek imagination working in fields
unturned by experience, free from any guiding impulse of knowledge; and
here step in those monstrous shapes and strange adventures which differ
altogether from the probable events of the Iliad. We feel at once that
we are in a new world, a world not so much of supernatural beings as of
magic; lands of glamour and illusion, most like the giant-land of the
Norsemen; for we are getting towards the twilight regions of the earth
and the borders of Hades.

Some writers have attempted to explain the Odyssey as nothing more than
a myth of the sun's course through heaven. But surely there is too much
solidity about the story, too thorough an atmosphere of belief around
it, to suit a tale relating such airy unrealities as those. The Greeks
who first sung the ballads must have been thinking of a real journey
upon this solid earth. But it is easy to see how many images and notions
which had first been applied only to the sun-god would creep into such a
history as that of Odysseus. Undoubtedly the sun-myth had first pointed
out the home of the dead as lying in the west; and nothing is more
natural than that a people whose thoughts and hopes carried them in the
track of the wandering sun should, when they came to construct an epos
of travel, make the imaginary journey lie the same way. They would
interweave in the story such truths--or such sailors' yarns--as
Phoenician mariners or adventurous Greeks brought home from the distant
waters, with many images which had been first made of the sun's heavenly
voyage, and others which had been first applied to death. Their
geography would, indeed, be mythical; for they could have no accurate
notions of the lands which they spoke of; but it would not be without a
kernel of reality. Justin and Augustine may look upon the garden of the
Hesperides or the garden of Alcinoüs as a reminiscence of Paradise;
Strabo may assign them an exact position on the coast of Libya; and both
may be right. The myth of the two gardens--the Hebrew and the Greek
paradises--sprang up in obedience to an identical faculty of belief, and
therefore the two stories are in origin the same. But each myth
supported itself upon so much of reality as it could lay hold of: and it
is likely enough that the famous golden apples which Hercules was sent
to fetch owed their origin to the first oranges brought by Phoenician
merchantmen to Greece.

Besides some such slender thread of reality, the adventures of Odysseus
are built upon what men's imagination told them might lie in the western
seas. Now in reality there was only one thing which at the bottom of
their hearts they believed actually did lie there--namely, death; and
beyond that, the home of the departed. Therefore their stories of
adventure in the Mediterranean do all, upon a minute inspection, resolve
themselves into a variety of mythical ways of describing death; and upon
this as a dark background the varied colours of the tale are painted.
It need take away no jot of our pleasure in the brilliant picture to
acknowledge this. Nay, it gather adds to it, for behind the graceful air
of the poem, sung as a poem only, we hear a deeper note telling of the
passionate, obstinate questionings of futurity which belonged not more
to Greece three thousand years ago than they now belong to us.

Any one acquainted with the genesis of myth would at once be disposed to
see in the Odyssey the combination of two different legends; for one
series of adventures comes as a tale told during the course of the
second. We first see our hero on the island of Calypso, the sea-nymph;
and when Hermes has brought from the gods the command for his release,
he is carried thence by storms to the land of the Phæaceans. There
Nausicaa finds him and brings him to her father Alcinoüs, by whom he is
hospitably entertained, and at last sent back to Ithaca, his home. This
forms one complete legend, the simplest and probably the first, because
_into_ it is woven the account of Odysseus' earlier adventures. In the
halls of Alcinoüs the wanderer tells what happened to him before he
reached the cave of Calypso, and in this narrative we follow him to the
island of the Lotus-eaters, to the island of the Cyclops, thence to the
house of Circe, and from there to the very borders of hell itself. And
we guess that we have here got hold of a later amplified legend built up
out of the earlier myth. We find just such changes as this in Norse
mythology; a story told in a few lines by the elder Edda, is expanded
into an elaborate history in the younger. Looking again more closely at
the Odyssey, we discover that many circumstances in the expanded tale
bear close resemblance to one or other of the adventures in the shorter
category. Take, for instance, the life with Calypso and with Circe. Both
Calypso and Circe are nymphs, enchantresses; each lives alone upon her
island: with each Odysseus passes a term of years, living with her as
her husband, longing all the while to return to his own wife and his own
home, and yet unable to do so: from each Hermes is the deliverer. What
if Calypso and Circe both repeat in reality the same myth; and what if
Odysseus' other great adventure, the voyage to the Phæaceans, have
likewise its counterpart in the expanded story? The question of the real
identity or difference of the two stories can only be decided when we
have seen how much significance there is in the points of their apparent
likeness.

Who is Calypso? Her name bespeaks her nature not ambiguously. It is from
=kalyptein=, to cover or conceal. She is the shrouder, or the shrouded
place, answering exactly therefore to Hel, which, as has before been
said, comes from the verb _helja_, "to hide." How, then, can Calypso be
anything else than death, as she dwells there in her cave, by the shores
of the sea? How can Odysseus' life with her, his sleep in her cave, be
anything else than an image of dying? The gods have determined that the
hero shall not remain in this mortal sleep for ever; so Hermes is sent
to command Calypso to let Odysseus go. Hermes is the god whose mission
it is to lead souls down to the realm of Hades--the psychopomp, as in
this office he is called. But sometimes he may come upon an opposite
message, to restore men to life; the staff which closes the eyes of men
may likewise open them when asleep. On such a task he comes--

    "Wind-like beneath, the immortal golden sandals
    Bare up his flight o'er the limitless earth and the sea;
    And in his hand that magic wand he carried,
    Wherewith the eyes of men he closes in slumber,
    Or wakens from sleeping."

He comes like the breath of morning awakening the world, to rouse our
hero from the embrace of death; and the whole scene is beautifully
attuned to an image of returning life. Therefore the interference of
Hermes between Odysseus and Calypso is full of significance. We
accordingly meet the same episode in the Circe tale. That this last is a
later widening of the first story appears from many things; chiefly in
this, that there is more moral in the history; for the truest myth is
content to follow the actual workings of nature, without attempting to
adorn a story with extraneous incident, or to convert its simplicity
into the complexities of allegory. That turning the companions into
swine was a punishment for luxury--that points the moral; the original
Circe, we may be sure, only touched her lovers with her sleepy magic
rod. It was the same wand with the "slepy yerde"[17] of Hermes, and she
used it not wantonly but only because all whom she embraces must fall
into the unwakeful slumber. If Circe's name does not reveal her nature
so nakedly as Calypso's does, this is but consistent with the fact of
her later creation. Nevertheless, we easily recognise by it death in one
of its many types--a ravenous animal or bird, a hawk or wolf.[18]

When Odysseus is freed from the fatal embrace of Calypso, he is not at
once restored to the common earth, but from his descent into hell goes
heavenwards, or at least to the happy islands of the blessed. The land
of the Phæaceans, Scheria, can scarcely be anything else than this
Paradise, to which, according to one myth, Rhadamanthus fled from his
brother Minos when he reigned in Crete. The Phæaceans, too, have had
dealings with "yellow-haired Rhadamanthus," whom they carried back in
their swift barques to Euboea. The name of their island is merely land,
shore;[19] perhaps at first only the farther coast of the sea of death.

    "Far away do we live at the end of the watery plain,
    Nor before now have we ever had dealings with other mortals;
    But now there comes some luckless wanderer hither.
    Him it is right that we help; for all men, fellows and strangers,
    Come from Zeus; in his sight the smallest gift is pleasing."[20]

They live close to the gods, and in familiar converse with them. It is a
place where decay and death cannot enter. In the gardens of Alcinoüs
flowers and fruit do not grow old and disappear; winter does not succeed
to summer; all is one continuous round of blossoming and bearing fruit;
in one part of the garden the trees are all abloom; in another they are
heavy with clusters. There it _is_, as in that wizard's tower of
Middle-Age legend it only _seemed_ to be--

    "That from one window men beheld the spring,
    And from another saw the summer glow,
    And from a third the fruited vines arow."[21]

In name the Phæaceans appear as beings of the twilight--=phaiax=,
strengthened from =phaios=, dusky, dim. Their most wondrous possessions
are their ships, which know the thoughts of men, and sail swifter than a
bird or than thought. "No pilots have they, no rudders, no oarsmen,
which other ships have, for they themselves know the thoughts and minds
of men. The rich fields they know, and the cities among all men, and
swiftly pass over the crests of the sea, shrouded in mist and
gloom."[22] Yet the Phæaceans themselves live remote from human
habitation, unused to strangers. It would seem, therefore, that the
ships travel alone on their dark voyages. For what purpose? It is not
difficult to guess. Their part is to carry the souls of dead men over to
the land of Paradise.[23] We can imagine them sailing in every human
sea; calling at every port, familiar with every city, though in their
shroud of darkness they are unseen by men. They know all the rich lands,
for every land has its tribute to pay to the ships of death. They are
the exact counterparts of the "grim ferryman which poets write of;" only
that the last plies his business in the ancient underground Hades, while
the Phæacean mariners are really believed to be inhabitants of the upper
earth; albeit they can pass from this life to the other.

Their business with Odysseus is to bring him back to the common world of
Greece--to beloved Ithaca. He has passed to the cave of Hel, and emerged
from it to visit the land of Paradise; now he returns, that his
adventures may be sung in the homes of Greece. How could men ever tell
tales of that strange country, if it really were a shore from which no
traveller returned? Accordingly, this traveller is laid to sleep in the
black barque of the Phæaceans, "a sweet sleep, unwakeful, nearest like
to death; and as arose the one brightest star to herald the morning, the
sea-troubled ship touched the shore."[24] Thus end the adventures of the
wanderer; and, as far as regards the belief concerning the sea of death,
this is all his adventures can tell us. His doings with the Cyclops,
with the Lotus-eaters, have their relationship with the same belief; but
they scarcely bring in any new elements; they only change the method of
their treatment and symbolize them in a new way. Hades is more
distinctly treated of in the second series; and this is enough to show
us that the mortal character of the whole journey has been lost sight of
more completely than in the first myths; so we noticed before, that the
significance of Calypso's name is half forgotten when her part is
assigned to Circe. The journey to Hades from Circe's island, Ææa,
tallies exactly with the journey to Scheria from the island of Calypso;
only, for the island of the blest is substituted the underground home of
souls; and when Odysseus addresses there his companion, Elpenor, whom he
had but a little while ago left dead on Circe's island, and asks him how
he could have come under the dark west more quickly on foot than
Odysseus did sailing in a black ship, we see that the meaning of the
ocean journey is forgotten, and that a sort of confusion has arisen
between the Hades under men's feet, to which the souls of the dead
descend, and the Hades at the end of the journey lying far away. This
part, then, is not significant of the Greek belief concerning an earthly
Paradise. The learned Welcker, who first showed how these Phæacean ships
were the carriers of souls,[25] wishes also to connect the myth with
some non-Hellenic source. He supposes it to have been gathered from the
Teutons. But surely we are not obliged to go so far, unless we are
prepared to consider Charon non-Hellenic also; and no one can really
pretend that. For the Phæacean myth is in many ways truer than the myth
of Charon and Styx. Styx is but the earth-river (or sea), Oceanus,
transferred to beneath the earth; and the story of the ferryman is a
compromise between the two creeds--that of the _under_-world and that of
the western paradise beyond sea; while the myth of the Phæaceans is a
simple expression of the last. The connection which we find between
Greek and German in these beliefs is derivable only from their common
ancestry--not from a contact in later days. Certainly these legends have
their close counterparts in Norse mythology; the two series only require
to be stripped of local colouring, and some unessential details, to
display very clearly their common brotherhood. How curious, for
instance, is it to see that Calypso corresponds literally in name with
the Northern goddess of the dead, Hel! Another myth, the story of the
burning of Baldur, repeats the same images of death which we trace in
the legend of Odysseus.

Baldur is quite evidently the sun-god. Less of a hero, more of a god,
than Odysseus, he is nevertheless mortal--as, indeed, all the Norse gods
are--and falls pierced by the hand of his own brother, Hödur. Then his
corpse is placed upon his ship, Hringhorn, and sent out upon this, as on
a pyre, drifting into the ocean. We can imagine how to the Norsemen upon
their stormy seas, the image of the sun dying red upon the western
waters recalled the story of Baldur's burning ship. The Viking imitated
his god in this, and when his time came ordered his funeral fire to be
lighted in like manner upon a ship and himself to be set sailing, as
Baldur was. After this we are brought in the myth to the underground
kingdom of Hel, and there the goddess entertains Baldur, as Calypso
entertained Odysseus, making ready her best to do him honour, and
seating him in the highest place in her hall. Then the gods take
counsel how Baldur is to be brought back again, and one of them,
Hermödr,[26] the messenger, like Hermes, is sent to beg Hel to let
Baldur out of Helheim. Fate and death are more powerful in northern
lands than they are in Greece. The gods cannot command that this Calypso
should let her prisoner go; and alas! they do not even obtain an answer
to their prayer save on conditions which they are unable to fulfil. Hel
will set Baldur free, if all things, both living and dead, weep for him;
but if one thing refuses to weep, then he must remain in the
under-world. Thereupon the gods sent messengers over the whole earth,
commanding all things, living and lifeless, to weep Baldur out of
Helheim; all things freely complied with the request, both men and
stones, and trees and metals; until as the messengers were returning,
deeming that their mission was accomplished, they met an old witch
sitting in a cave, and she refused to weep, saying, "Let Hel keep her
own."[27] This old witch is Calypso or Circe in another guise. Her name
is Thokk, that is, darkness (dökkr).

The Teutonic people had many myths and stories about the carrying the
dead across the sea. We have signalized the belief in such a passage as
the origin of those countless mediæval legends of the earthly Paradise:
doubtless it is the parent of the modern superstition that ghosts will
not cross the running water. Side by side with the story of the
Phæaceans we may place the superstition which Procopius records touching
our own island. The Byzantine historian of Justinian seems to have had
but vague ideas of the position of Britain, which, by the tide of
Teutonic invasion across the Rhine, had long been cut off from
intercourse with the Empire. These Easterns were careless and ignorant
of the remote West. So Procopius speaks of Britannia as lying opposite
to Spain; and then he mentions another island, Brittia--evidently in
reality our island--which faces the northern coast of Gaul, and of this
he tells the following strange story:--There is, he declares, an island
called Brittia, which lies in the Northern Seas. It is separated into
two divisions by a wall;[28] and on one side of this wall the air is
healthy and the land fertile and pleasant, and all things most apt for
human habitation. But on the other side the air is so noxious that no
one can breathe in it for an hour: it is given up to serpents and
poisonous animals and plants. Yet not entirely; for this is the home of
the dead. Then he goes on to relate how the fishermen who inhabit the
coast opposite this part of Brittia have to perform the strange duty of
carrying the souls across the strait. Each does his office in rotation;
when the man's night has come he is awoke by a knocking at his door, but
when he opens it, sees no one. He goes down to the shore, and finds
there strange vessels, which, though empty to mortal eyes, lie deep in
the water as though weighed down by some freight. Stepping in, each
fisherman takes his rudder, and then by an unfelt wind the vessels are
wafted in one night across the channel, a distance which, with oar and
sail, they could usually scarce accomplish in eight. Arrived at the
opposite side--our coast--the fishermen heard names called over and
voices answering in rota, and they felt the boats becoming light. Then,
when all the ghosts were landed, they were carried back to Gaul. We may
picture them returning to the habitable world in the first glow of
morning, or with the one bright morning star which shone on Odysseus
landing at Ithaca.

So much for the myth of the sea, or river, of death. A most important
change was wrought in belief when the custom of burning the dead was
introduced. It would seem that our Aryan ancestors were the beginners of
this rite. Whence it arose we cannot say; but if the God of Fire was a
prominent divinity, the thought of committing the dead into his charge
seems a simple and natural one. Among the Aryan people the only deep
traces of fire-worship are to be seen in the Vedic and Iranian
religions,[29] while the fire-burial survived in all: but the former may
well have held a prominent place in their older creed. Or--and this is
far from unlikely--the custom of fire-burial may have arisen out of the
sun myth, just as the belief in the soul's journey after death was
suggested by watching the sun's journey to the west. The two great
fire-funerals mentioned in Greek and Teutonic mythology are the funerals
of sun-gods. Heracles burning on Mount OEta, on the western coast of the
Ægean, may have been first thought of by Greeks who saw the sun setting
in fire over that sea; and Baldur's bale on the ship _Hringhorn_ is
evidently the Norse edition of the same story, his blazing ship the
blaze in the sky, as the sun sinks into the water. Burning the dead
never seems to have been a universal practice; rather a special honour
paid to kings and heroes. But then we must remember that immortality
itself was not, in ancient belief, granted to all men indiscriminately,
only to the greatest.

We see at once that with the use of fire-burial many of the old beliefs
had to be given up; all those, for instance, which depended upon the
preservation of the bodily remains. Of old time men had buried treasures
with the corpse in the expectation that they would be of some kind of
use to it; the body itself was at first imagined to descend to the
under-world or to travel the western journey to the home of the sun. But
now the body is visibly consumed upon the funeral pile

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