or source or previous condition or indispensable antecedent of the sensations in Mr. Mill from which the induction departs and by which it is confirmed.* This being so it is a permanent possibility of sensation for Mr. Mill, and the question is what are the specific differences and limits which distinguish it from possibilities of the unconscious kind. The popular distinctions between conscious and unconscious, living and not living, are left far behind by the ultimate, widest generalizations of philosophy. By Spinoza thought and extension (mind and matter) are identified as two essences of the same Universal Substance; the material Monad of Leibnitz is a sensitive, intelligent being, receiving impressions and replying to them; with Hegel, Nature is a phase of the Absolute Idea, with Schopenhauer of the Absolute Will, and with Hartmann it is the Unconscious Idea; for Mr. Lewes' sensation and motion are two sides of the same differentiation of the Plenum; and Dr. Tyndall is surprised to find the potency of Mind in Matter. Nor have the distinctions lost by philosophy been found by science. Its highest molecules are they organic or inorganic? its lowest organisms-plant or animal? The three kingdoms, mineral, vegetal, animal, meet in a bit of protoplasm. Which will it be? All these groups of possibilities, with their unstable boundaries and vanishing differentia, are represented in Mr. Mill's consciousness by groups of sensations certainly not more distinguishable. What criterion enables

The series established by the induction is:-(1) The Ego of A which is the common element of (2) A's consciousness whose universal condition is the group of possibilities constituting (3) A's body, modified by (4) sensations whose source is (5) B's body united to (6) the thread of B's consciousness integrated by (7) B's Ego. Now the extremes of the series, the Ego of A and the Ego of B affect one another across or through all the intermediate terms 2-6, that is, are possibilities of sensation for one another. Add that the series may be indefinitely extended by interpolating between Nos. 4 and 5 which stand for the direct action of B's body on A's, all those intermediate possibilities by which absent bodies act on each other, e. g., the Pyramids, the Iliad, the Telegraph, any monument of art, any work of literature, any change whatever wrought by men in the Permanent Possibility called Matter. Mr. Mill turned, not very adroitly, the objection of one of his critics that his theory made no provision for the intercourse of bodies. What he ought to have been asked for was an explanation of the intercourse of consciousness or Egos, the only concrete reals he admitted. A concrete real B produces real changes in the concrete real A: if this is done indirectly the intermediates must be as real as the extremes A, B: the Pyramid as the Pyramid Builder.

him to say, this group of sensations represents a conscious, that one an unconscious, group of possibilities? Resemblance to his own body? But all bodies in their essential properties (all groups of possibilities in their elementary relations) resemble his; all in their contingent modifications differ from his. Non-connexion with his thread of consciousness? No body but his own is connected with it. The production of the criteria, the classification of Mr. Mill's sensations, would have been a revolution in human intelligence. The lack of the criteria exposes Mr. Mill's idealism to the invasion of universal realism. The induction which warrants the inference of a consciousness like Mr. Mill's at one point, warrants the inference of some kind of a consciousness at any point. However suppose the criteria found and the frontiers erected. Then a particular group of sensations warrants the inference, or putting it upon stronger ground, requires the postulate, of an objective ego in explanation of the origin and grouping of the sensa tions. Another group, say the group called the paper-weight, requires no such postulate, authorizes no such inference; an objective ego is not the source or antecedent of the sensations composing it. But indisputably, as much as the others, they authorize the inference or require the postulate of some kind of an objective reality, if not conscious then unconscious, as the source or previous condition of them. For equally with the others, they intrude themselves upon consciousness in spite of it, in relations maintained in spite of it, and in relations of the same elementary kind. If room can be found for the conscious reals imported by Mr. Mill to account for one class of his sensations, room must be found for reals of some kind behind the other class which equally requires accounting for. The possibility called the paper-weight, or the solar system, or the stellar universe, is quite as remarkable in its way as the possibility called Mr. James Mill; or at any rate is as real as he.

Without pursuing the discussion any farther let us sum up by saying, that to accept with the inexplicable facts of Memory a common element of consiousness is to re-instate Mind; to accept with the inexplicable facts of Sensation a permanent possibility of sensation is to re-instate Matter. We concluded before that if any of the realities which are taken for granted

in practical life are abandoned to criticism, all must be abandoned: we conclude now that if any are admitted against criticism all must be admitted.

It simply gives up the
Criticism never stunted

A philosophy is never refuted. ghost and is gathered to its fathers. its growth or hastened its decay, for it is the highest satisfaction possible in its place and time of the not yet exhausted impulse of the intellect to speculation. But on the other hand no curative or tonic or stimulant will keep it alive when its hour comes, and its hour comes when the abstractions, coherent enough to resist the strains of criticism, break up beneath the overwhelming pressures of reality. The fabric stands intact within the shelter of its cell; and goes to pieces when taken abroad and put to practical use. It survives there so long as it is fit to survive, and the fittest survives the longest; but the delicate adjustments of secluded speculation are no match for the violences of Natural Selection, and it goes down in its turn in the universal Struggle for Life. We have not dwelt on Mr. Mill in the hope of confuting him but principally because there was that in the blended earnestness, candor and carelessness of his thinking which exposed him more directly than most philosophers to the supreme confutation which awaits all alike. For there was no trace of the dilettante and virtuoso in Mr. Mill. His doctrine of the universe was not worked out at all as a contribution to the cabinet of ancient and modern curiosities in speculation, but as a rule and way of right living. It was an interpretation of human Experience by one of the sincerest of men, for the highest of all ends, that human experience in the future might be better and happier than in the past. What Mr. Mill taught he was the first to practice. Probably no thinker, certainly no English thinker, since Berkeley came so near to the realization of his own abstractions; permitted so much of the temper of secluded thinking to pass into his character and life. He carried with him the close air, the stained lights, the delicate precautions and the shelter of his cloister wherever he went; fought his own calamities and the rough realism of English Society under the

perpetual reserves of idealism. So it came about that the confutation we spoke of as awaiting all philosophies found Mr. Mill out in his own time and is on record in his own words. We have only to turn from the strange induction by which he satisfied himself of the existence of other consciousnesses like his own to the passage in the Autobiography where the son speaks of the father and the husband of the wife, or from the notion of Possibilities of Sensation with which he abolishes the Matter of Sir William Hamilton to the Essays on Nature and Theism, to see that the artifices of the metaphysician had nothing to do with the convictions of the man. All the delicate devices of methodical afterthought, the patient rehearsals of disciplined abstracts within the brain, go down at once before the inrush of human feeling with its interrupted transports and its inevitable agony; while Nature rises beyond, formidable and menacing, with her intractable material, her malignant forces, and her discomfitted God. Naturam expelles furca, tamen usque recurrit! The argumentum baculinum in the hand of Dr. Johnson was a poor affair; but if it is the retort of the universe? Let us say it with the affection and honor due to a good and a great man, and to everything he loved and honored: the refutation of Mr. Mill's philosophy is in nobody's criticism but in the grave of Mrs. Mill.

And what philosophy is there that can sustain this ordeal of life and death? The hostilities of rival systems it sustains and is no whit the worse for them, coming out of the conflict like one of Milton's angels with much effusion of ichor but sound and whole as ever. Yet it disappears and is heard of no more. The Cartesians were filing out of the arena when Locke rode into it. Transcendentalism was dying already, like the Templar in his saddle, when touched by the lance of Positivism. Who killed Transfigured Realism? Not the critics, for Mr. Spencer is equal to the whole throng of them. Or Reasoned Realism? The critics have hardly troubled Mr. Lewes. The truth is that the mob of human passions is perpetually breaking into the ring of the philosophers, or, to give a worthier expression to a great fact, the practical realities of human life are forever busy making away with the frail abstracts which express them. It is the Cosmos which insists on being affirmed and refuses to be represented that overpowers the Cosmologies.

ARTICLE VIII.-SOME NEW YORK CUSTOM-HOUSE | INVESTIGATIONS.

WHEN President Hayes said in his letter to Secretary Sherman that he wished the collection of the revenue to be free from partisan control, it is said there was no little jest and merriment among Custom-house officials over the idea that that powerful institution should ever lose its political character. They had heard talk of reform all their official lives, and yet the Custom-house has continued to be a tremendous political engine, which, as they suppose, could hardly be worked on any other system than that of the spoils. More than thirty years. ago a man who had seen more of the Custom-house than was good for him, declared it was the most powerful piece of politi cal machinery for neutralizing opinion and controlling elections that he had ever seen or heard of in any country. Even as far back as 1826, Mr. Benton, who, with others, were appointed a Committee of the Senate to inquire into the patronage of the New York Custom-house, exclaimed, in view of its officers, at that time less than two hundred: "A formidable list indeed! Formidable in numbers, and still more so from the vast amount of money in their hands, the action of such a body of men, supposing them to be animated by one spirit, must be tremendous in elections, and that they will be so animated is a proposition too plain to need demonstration." This was said more or less in prophecy, but in prophecy which could not be expected to anticipate altogether that the connection of politics with the New York Custom-house would be the fruitful source of that fraud and corruption which in a generation or so have called for half a dozen investigations at the hands of Congress.

Now, from 1789, when the revenue business of the country began to take shape, down to 1830, though there were more or less mismanagement and looseness among Custom-house officers, this was not especially the fault of politics, and on the whole collectors and their subordinates in those days were such as they naturally would be when the affairs of the country were