we ascend, the wider our field of vision, the deeper will be our humility. This chief of scientists said, at the close of life:

'I know not what the world may think of my labors; but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me."

Only false science is lofty in spirit.

causes.

Only it ignores the sphere Newton did not forget that

and limits to which it is confined. the discovery of law is no adequate solution of the problem of While he reduced the heavens to the dominion of gravitation, gravitation itself remained an insoluble problem. He could track the course of the comet, and measure the velocity of light, yet was he powerless to explain the existence of the minutest insect or the growth of the humblest plant. Through all his labors he looked reverently up to the great First Cause. Thus ends his Principia:

'We know God only by His properties and attributes, by the wise and admirable structure of things around us, and by their final causes; we admire Him on account of His perfections; we venerate and worship Him on account of His government.'

Kepler, too, had thus opened his sublime views:

'I beseech my reader that, not unmindful of the divine goodness bestowed on man, he do with me celebrate and praise the wisdom and greatness of the Creator which I open to him.'

In old age and darkness Galileo wrote:

'Alas! your dear friend and servant has become totally and irreparably blind. These heavens, this earth, this universe, which by wonderful observation I had enlarged a thousand times beyond the belief of past ages, are henceforth shrunk into the narrow space I myself occupy. So it pleases God, it shall therefore please me also.' The piety of Boyle is shown by his literary remains,― Style of Scripture, Seraphic Love, the Christian Virtuoso, in which he affirms that a man addicted to natural philosophy is rather assisted than indisposed thereby to be a good Christian.' In the present day, when the study of the laws of matter has assumed an extraordinary development, it is gratifying to know that the mountain minds which mark the great steps of scientific progress, and which now throw their lengthening shadows over us, bowed their honored heads before the Jehovah of the Bible.

Philosophy.-Hobbes' ethics were the result of his psy

the greatest thinkers. Archimedes was so absorbed in meditation that he was first aware of the storming of Syracuse by his own death-wound Plato reports that Socrates, in a military expedition, was seen by the Athenian army to stand for a whole day and a night, until the breaking of the second morning, motionless, with a fixed gaze.

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chology. Good and evil can be nothing else than expressions for pleasure and pain, if ideas are nothing else than sensations. He says, in general:

'Concerning the thoughts of man, . . . they are every one a representation or appearance of some quality or other accident of a body without us, which is commonly called an object. Which object worketh on the eyes, ears, and other parts of a man's body; and by diversity of working, produceth diversity of appearances. The original of them all is that which we call Sense, for there is no conception in a man's mind which hath not at first, totally or by parts, been begotten upon the organs of sense. The rest are derived

from that original.'

To be specific, thought is an internal movement caused by an external shock:

All the qualities called sensible are, in the object that causeth them, but so many several motions of the matter by which it presseth on our organs diversely. Neither in us that are pressed, are they anything else but divers motions; for motion produceth nothing but motion.'

The gradual ceasing of the initial impulse is imagination, which he reduces to the power of forming images:

'When a body is once in motion it moveth, unless something hinder it, eternally; and whatsoever hindereth it, can not in an instant, but in time and by degrees, quite extinguish it; and as we see in the water, though the wind cease, the waves give not over rolling for a long time after: so also it happeneth in that motion which is made in the internal parts of man; then, when he sees, dreams, etc.'

The cause of this diminution is the impulse of some succeeding and stronger motion, by which the former is obscured, as the stars fade when the sun rises. If you wish to denote, not the decay itself, but the character of it, as something old and past, you will call it memory. If now you would know how one thought suggests another in a continuous and uninterrupted chain, the explanation is:

All fancies (i.e. images) are motions within us, relicts of those made in sense; and those motions that immediately succeed one another in the sense continue also together after the sense; insomuch as the former coming again to take place and be predominant, the latter followeth by coherence of the matter moved, in such manner as water upon a plain table is drawn which way any one part of it is guided by the finger.' Could anything be more candid, clear, and distinct? Sensations, and their traces, form the elements of all knowledge; the various commixtures of these form the intellectual faculties. What we perceive or think, forms part of the material universe. Matter is the only reality.

Hobbes, applying the empirical method of Bacon to the investigation of mental and moral phenomena, is thus the precursor of modern Materialism. One of the names that mark an era in the

advancement of knowledge, by creating fresh resources for the development of coming ages, is that of John Locke, an Oxford scholar, so profoundly contemptuous of the University' studies that he regretted in after-life the waste of so much time on such profitless pursuits, so deeply convinced of the vicious method of college education that he went to the other extreme of thinking self-education the best; devoted himself to medicine, then to politics; incurred the displeasure of the Court by his liberal opinions, and fled to Holland, where he finished his celebrated Essay on the Human Understanding; returned to London, after the Revolution, to find security and welcome; wrote much, did much, to strengthen the government; was appointed to a responsible and lucrative office, but failed in health; passed his remaining years in peaceful retirement at the house of his friend Lady Masham, daughter of Cudworth, where he expired in 1704, aged seventytwo, having created, by his ideas on speculative method, civil rule, value of money, and liberty of the press, a new vein of thought for philosophic delvers and political economists. As a man, upright, amiable, and accomplished; as an author, his fame and influence are European; as a thinker, of a practical cast and cautious habit, forbidding himself lofty questions and inclined to forbid them to us. Like Hobbes, he pronounced Psychology to be a science of observation; like him, he resolved to explore the field of intellect as Bacon had explored the field of nature. What is his philosophy?

Its object is to ascertain the origin, certainty, limits, and uses of our knowledge. Its leading doctrine appears to be, that the ultimate source of this knowledge is experience, which, however, is of two kinds,- sensation and reflection. The first presents no great difficulty. Of the second he says:

'The other fountain from which experience furnisheth the understanding with ideas, is the perception of the operations of our own minds within us; as it is employed about the ideas it has got; which operations, when the soul comes to reflect on and consider, do furnish the understanding with another set of ideas, which could not be had from things without; and such are perception, thinking, doubting, believing, reasoning, knowing, willing, and all the different actings of our own minds, which we, being conscious of, and observing in ourselves, do from these receive into our understandings ideas as distinct as we do from bodies affecting our senses. This source of ideas every 'man has wholly in himself, and though it be not sense, as having nothing to do with external objects, yet it is very like it, and might properly enough be called internal sense. But

1 Then, as now, attached to the past. To this day, its students are drilled in the philosophy of Aristotle.

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as I call the other sensation so I call this reflection, the ideas it affords being such only as the mind gets by reflecting on its own operations within itself."'

No ideas are allowed to be in the mind except those which can be shown to spring from one or other of these inlets:

'When the understanding is once stored with these simple ideas, it has the power to repeat, compare, and unite them, even to an almost infinite variety, and so can make at pleasure new complex ideas. But it is not in the power of the most exalted wit, or enlarged understanding, by any quickness or variety of thought, to invent or frame one new simple idea in the mind not taken in by the ways aforementioned.'

The thing perceived is the idea:

'It is evident that the mind knows not things immediately, but by the intervention of the ideas it has of them. Our knowledge, therefore, is real only so far as there is a conformity between our ideas and the reality of things.'

What assurance have we of such conformity?-The assumption that God would not constitute us with faculties fitted only to deceive:

'Our ideas are not fictions of our fancies, but the natural and regular productions of things without us really operating upon us; and so carry with them all the conformity which is intended, or which our state requires, for they represent things to us under those appearances, which they are fitted to produce in us.'

Whence this idea of God? As a philosopher, he argues that it is not innate, and holds that its absence is a strong presumption against innate ideas generally; as a theologian, he argues that we can prove the existence of God as conclusively as we can prove that the angles of a triangle are together equal to two right angles. The proof upon which he chiefly insists is derived from causation,—that for every effect there must be an efficient cause. The causal idea he derives from experience. This would be satisfactory, if by origin or source were meant, not creation (the sense in which Locke seems to employ either term), but occasion. It is allowed that, apart from experience, the mind can have no ideas; still it is not experience which creates or produces our necessary ideas, it is merely the occasion of their development. Thus, without the perception of body, there could be no idea of space; but, while the former is chronologically first, the latter is its logical condition, and involves it, since we cannot conceive of body except as in space. Without the observation of an effect, there could be no idea of cause; but, the former being presented, the latter—already potentially in the mind. is ready to spring up. He acknowledges intuition,' but over

1Sometimes the mind perceives the agreement or disagreement of two ideas immediately by themselves without the intervention of any other, and this I think we may call intuitive knowledge.'

looks its rules or laws-the primitive cognitions and beliefs included in the exercises with which the mind starts. He acknowledges necessary truth, but it does not form a part of his general theory, and sceptics have shown that he cannot reach it in consistency with his system.

On the whole, it will be clear to the most careless observer that Locke, as a theorist, has a rational side; it will be equally clear that he has a strong sensational side. The latter is conspicuous in his account of moral distinctions, and leaves little behind but ruins. Like Hobbes, he declares that 'good and evil are nothing but pleasure and pain, or that which occasions or procures pleasure or pain to us.' The obligations to morality are the Divine rewards and punishments, legal and social penalties; that is, a more or less far-sighted love of pleasure, and an aversion to misery. That the beauty of excellence alone should incite us, is the delusion of pagans:

'If a Christian, who has the view of happiness and misery in another life, be asked why a man must keep his word, he will give this as a reason, because God, who has the power of eternal life and death, requires it of us. But if an Hobbist be asked why, he will answer, because the public requires it, and the Leviathan will punish you if you do not. And if one of the old heathen philosophers had been asked, he would have answered, because it was dishonest, below the dignity of man, and opposite to virtue, the highest perfection of human nature, to do otherwise.'1

In opposition to the intuitive moralists who affirm a native power of distinguishing between the higher and lower parts of our nature, he insists at great length on the argument derived from uncivilized life,—that the moral standard is variable in different races and ages. This only recalls the distinction already made between innate ideas independent of experience and innate faculties evolved by experience. The difference between a savage and Angelo is not one of mere acquisition; it is the difference between the acorn and the oak,- the one is in the other as the flower in the bud, or as the grain contains the ear that is to wave in the next summer's sun, requiring only favorable conditions for the full expansion of its inherent energy.

1 Mr. Lewis, in defending Locke's originality against the critics who assert that he only borrowed and popularized the ideas of Hobbes, says that Locke never alludes to Hobbes but twice-then distantly-and adds, like a warm admirer of his client: 'His second allusion is simply this: "A Hobbist would probably say." We cannot at present lay our hands on the passage, but it refers to some moral question.-History of Philosophy. The passage,' had he found it, could hardly have been serviceable to Mr. Lewis as an advocate. It must appear evident from single references and from doctrinal points of resemblance, that, so far from having never read the writings of Hobbes, Locke was familiar with them.

Professor Sedgwick, in criticism of Locke's notion of the soul being originally like a sheet of white paper, says: Naked man comes from his mother's womb, endowed