the very meaning of the name, is uncertain. Its possible connection with the Hebrew word signifying righteousness may refer to the stress which some leading thinkers of the school placed upon the Stoical dogma of absolute morality. This theory harmonizes both with the Hellenic affinities which characterized the Sadducees, and with their polemical attitude to the Pharisees, who undoubtedly made righteousness' to consist of, and depend on, an elaborate ecclesiasticism. It is mainly as opponents to the extreme dogma and ritualism of the latter sect that the Sadducees emerge in Hebrew history. They represent the free-culture which, in opposition to the theocratic instincts of the nation, was foremost in embracing and assimilating those foreign elements of thought and life that resulted from the contact of the Jews with Assyrians, Persians, and Greeks. Their intellectual impulses were chiefly derived from the last-named. To the Greeks they were indebted for the love of discussion, a novel feature in Jewish minds-the mooting questions as themes for controversy and conducting the discussions in the pro and con. manner which betokens a regard for logical ratiocination. In the latter respect they have been compared to Greek Sophists, but their starting point and religious environment supplied a limit to these dialectical exercises which must have greatly impeded their free scope. But in contrast to the Pharisees and their dogmatic leanings, the Sadducees were undeniably rationalistic and free-thinking. Their tendencies were secularly political as opposed to theocratic. They represent culture as against Ecclesiasticism, and Gentilism in contradistinction to a narrow and exclusive Judaism. But while their leanings and sympathies were generally in the direction of freedom intellectual and spiritual, there is some difficulty in determining exactly how far their actual tenets followed in the wake of these generous impulses. In their conception of deity their views were undeniably broader and more tolerant than those which distinguished the older theocracy. Their traditional stress on Mosaism was probably adopted not as a belief in the exclusive superiority of that legislation as the only existing revelation of divine truth, but as an obvious mode of confining the dogmatic tendencies of the Pharisees within some reasonable limits, and preventing that stress on oral tradition by means of which the Pharisees, like other religious hierophants, sought to obscure the simplicity of the old law. The direction of Christ's own teaching was, in this particular,

'Comp. articles on Sadducees in Herzog, Real-Encyclopädie and Smith's Bible Dictionary; Wellhausen, Pharisäer und Sadducäer; Keim's Jesu von Nazara, i. 273, &c.

altogether in harmony with Sadducean tendencies, nor is this the only instance of a resemblance between the doctrine of the Sadducees and the first form of Christianity. Their relation to the Pharisees is not unlike that of Protestants who, in the interests of spiritual freedom as well as dogmatic simplicity, oppose the religious bondage of Romanism, while their political position is well illustrated by Wellhausen's remark,' that they adopted the secular principles of Jewish kings as against the theocratic hopes and aims of the prophets. The motive which suggested the curtailment of the dogmatic sources of Pharisaism may also have prompted their denial of the existence of angels, spirits, and generally of a future state. Thereby they cut at the root of the various theophanies, supernatural appearances, &c. which occupy such a conspicuous place in the early history of the Jews, and were so often employed to the detriment of the national welfare by unscrupulous pretenders. They also affirmed the entire freedom of the human will as opposed to the fatalism which necessarily forms a part of every theocratic system of thought. They set themselves too against the elaborate ritual, the fastings and endless purifications, on which the Pharisees so loudly insisted. In their social habits they appear also to have been less formal and ascetic than their opponents, who were scandalized, e.g. at their use of gold and silver vessels in their feasts. In a similar spirit they advocated the free enjoyment of such pleasures as earth has to offer, and deprecated all religious restraints in the direction of needless austerity. In a word, the Sadducees represent the wealth, culture, intelligence, social dignity, and refinement of the highest class of Jewish society, and may be compared both in these respects and in the common possession of Free-thinking aptitudes to the highest ranks of Athenian society in the time of Perikles. Some have thought that the standpoint of Koheleth represents that of the Sadducees. For my part, I think there is much to be said for such a theory. Independently of the fact that the author of Koheleth belonged to the Jewish aristocracy, not a few of the arguments employed and opinions enunciated in that book are known to have distinguished the Sadducees; and as they are put forward by a confessed sympathizer, it is no violent hypothesis to assume that the author was in all probability a Sadducee. If this supposition were provable, we should then have what we now lack, some authentic record of the tenets of the Sadducees represented from a friendly point of view instead of being, as we are now, compelled to learn their opinions from hostile sources.

Die Pharisäer und die Sadducäer, p. 87.

The Sadducees were not, like the Pharisees, a popular sect. They stood too far aloof from the theocratic sympathies, the austere asceticism, the religious pretentiousness, which were the readiest avenues to Jewish popularity. Besides which, there was a difference in social status and intelligence which contributed to sever them still further from the populace. As a result of this separation, few sects of Free-thinkers have been more vilified and traduced by their dogmatic opponents than the Sadducees. The Talmud brands them as heretics, no doubt on account of their indifference to the theocratic beliefs of their race. They were stigmatized as Epikoureans, probably for no better reason than their objection to the religious austerity of the Pharisees. They were saluted as 'profane,' 'worldly,' 'men-pleasers,' &c. because of their secular tendencies in politics. There was no phase of their Free-thought and religious moderation on which their adversaries did not affix some depreciatory or contemptuous epithet. Ultimately they may be said to have paid the penalty of cherishing ideas and opinions out of sympathy with their race and religion, the penalty that has so often overtaken liberal views and aspirations in a community of religious zealots. As a school with a distinctive name and more or less definite tenets they ceased to exist. But in the subsequent history of Judaism, the freer tendencies which gave birth to the Sadducees have been productive of no inconsiderable effects. Every Jewish Free-thinker of the Middle Ages may claim to be an intellectual descendant of those who first introduced breadth, tolerance, and Gentile culture into the narrow confines of their own faith. Maimonides, Levi ben Gerson, and other Skeptical philosophers, only carry on the tradition of the Sadducees. These later Jewish Free-thinkers rival in extent of knowledge, in boldness of speculation, in intellectual versatility, and, in a word, in philosophical competence, the leading names in the history of modern thought; and prove that the inferiority so often charged against Hebrew speculation is mainly due to creed, education, and religious and political surroundings, rather than to the single cause of inherent or racial peculiarity.

Our survey, necessarily brief, of Hebrew Skepticism has brought before us enough of its salient qualities to enable us to place it among the Skepticisms of history. Until we come to those later developments which Jewish thought received at the hands of such teachers as Maimonides, until, in other words, it had ceased

The Sadducees are undoubtedly the Free-thinkers on whom so much invective and abuse are expended in the Psalter of the Pseudo-Solomon. See chap. iv. and comp. Wellhausen's notes on it, Phor. und Sadd. p. 146.

to be distinctively Jewish, there is no pretence for accusing it of any great excess of philosophic freedom, nothing, in short, which approximates to the Pyrrhonism of the Greeks or the Nihilism of the Hindus. As represented by the Old and New Testaments and other writings within the same literary cycle, it revolves round its central facts of the existence of Deity, and a supernatural revelation, as a planet does round its central sun. It has little of the breadth, the versatility, the insatiable inquisitiveness, the dialectical audacity, the intellectual vigour, the serene and passionless temperament of Greek Skepticism; nor, again, has it the daring freedom, the measureless profundity, the metaphysical acumen, the transcendental apperception, the dreamy mysticism of Hindu Free-thought. It ends as it begins, with theology, and with theology, moreover, of a peculiarly harsh, narrow, and dogmatic type. While acknowledging the blessings which Judaism has conferred on the religious life of humanity, we must still ascribe to its exclusiveness no small portion of that anti-human feeling which has made the Jewish nation amenable to the charge of 'odium humani generis.' But notwithstanding the circumscribed character of its operations, inevitable from the limited range of the convictions on which it acted, Jewish Skepticism denotes a clear advance in the mental history of the people. It was the rejection for at least some time of the theocratic swaddling-bands which kept the nation in political infancy. The contact of the Jews with the outer world, like Adam eating of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, if it lost them their terrestrial paradise of the land of Canaan, certainly gave them a higher intellectual status as well as a fuller insight-had they chosen to avail themselves of it-into the actual conditions of political and social existence. The downfall of the national aspirations, the failure of the long-cherished expectation of the advent of a terrestrial Messias, were compensated in their case, as indeed the destruction of illusions and unveracities must in any case be beneficial, by imparting wider conceptions of the nature of Deity, the scheme of Providence, and the government of the world, and by suggesting a truer because more spiritual standard of human felicity considered as a mark of divine favour.

Nor for Christians who are so largely dieted on Hebrew history and theology are the manifestations of Free-thought contained in Job and Koheleth useless. They represent a vigorous and wholesome reaction against beliefs which, whatever their religious merits, inhibited the teachings of experience and falsified the true method and order of the universe. They evince an

inclination to make the reason the supreme arbiter of all truth, and thereby to assert the mental independence of humanity. They proclaim, therefore, a warfare against sacerdotalism and all other repressive and dogmatic systems. In any age and under any circumstances the spirit that inspired Job and Koheleth must have tended to secure freedom both of thought and its expression, even if that freedom did not attain to the unlimited range and scope which is implied in the full meaning of Skepticism.

II. Skepticism in Hindu Philosophy.

In treating of the Skeptical negation contained in Hindu philosophy, I need hardly say that the phase of thought which it represents is different on most points from those we have already discussed. While possessing distinctive peculiarities to which neither Greek nor Hebrew thought can lay claim, it includes in its wide-reaching scope, its multitudinous forms, its versatile many-sided energies, all that is most striking and valuable in both. With the Hebrew it shares the meditative, pietistic, acquiescent religious feeling which forms the distinguishing attribute of the Semitic races, while it possesses affinities with all the principal Hellenic types of thought, especially the ideal, negative, and free-thinking, from the Eleatics to the Neo-Platonists. Indeed, there are few forms of modern European speculation which cannot find adumbrations and resemblances in some of the numberless outgrowths of ancient Hindu thought. Still the Skepticism of India has in its fundamental principles quite a unique and sui generis character. Not only is it negative as compared with the suspensory character of Greek Skepticism, but it has a curiously metaphysical and introspective tendency. Nowhere has the genius of abstraction ruled with such absolute sway as in Hindu speculation. Nowhere has the human mind made such persistent and determined efforts to surmount the material limits of its environment. As a result of these metaphysical flights it is also marked by an unscrupulous audacity which disdains all appeal to human experience or the actual conditions of terrestrial existence considered as limits of knowledge and as indispensable factors in every process of demonstration. Thus the Hindu thinker moves in a world of his own, a supersensual universe he has himself created. By the plastic power of his intellect and the force of his imagination he is able to transmute what is material to spiritual, and, on the other hand, to conceive in the form of refined matter what is essentially spiritual. Hindu philosophy teems with intellectual creations in which it is not easy to say whether idealistic