algebraic expression-and thereby ignoring the numberless intervenient positions of neutrality or suspense which are easily conceivable in such circumstances. Professing, as we do, to render some account of the unbeliefs of philosophers, we must concede, at least theoretically, that a tabula rasa is not an impossible condition of mind for even profound thinkers. And we must abstain in every such case from inscribing on its virgin surface the writing which it seems to us, for whatever reason, ought to be found there.

ARUNDEL. Allowing that to be desirable as the aim of our researches, it appears to me that we shall find its practical realisation very difficult. A man's mind is so compounded of beliefs and unbeliefs, of convictions, probabilities, and uncertainties of every degree of assurance and doubt-and these are blended together so indissolubly, oftentimes, like the lights and shadows in a painting, being different aspects of the same truth-that it is almost impossible to eliminate any single conviction or non-conviction without doing violence to the rest.

TREVOR. The difficulty you speak of lies, I think, in us, rather than in the objects of our studies; that it is, if I may be allowed the terms, subjective rather than objective. Partly by natural instinct, but still more by prejudices of education and habit, we have acquired an almost invincible tendency to sum up a man's intellect by its positive rather than by its negative characteristics, to formulate creeds rather than to enumerate doubts and uncertainties. Hence any such operation as the summing up of a man's unbeliefs is assumed to be impossible. You cannot, it is urged, make a sum-total of a collection of cyphers. But in this method of putting the matter there lies a fallacy which is readily detected when we consider the nature of belief, viz. that it is a certain relation or attitude of the mind towards a given object or idea.1 The primary fact of the possession by the mind of such a relation is entirely unaffected by its nature, which may be affirmative, or negative, or neither. In regard, therefore, to commonly accepted or current beliefs, the denial of any specific article

'Le doute comme la croyance est un mode, une forme de la pensée. Bartholmess Huet, p. 13, note.

of faith is by no means an unimportant fact—a pure negative to be denoted by a cypher. It expresses a positive relation just as much as an affirmative does. Hence a man's disbelief or his unbelief, his mental hostility or indifference to any given proposition, are just as susceptible of enumeration as his beliefs are, and a non-credo may be compiled as readily as a creed. Indeed the advance of a community in intellectual progress is often better described by its negations or cast-off beliefs, than by the affirmations it has substituted for them; just as the progressive growth of an animal that casts its skin every year would be more distinctly marked by a collection of such exuviæ, than by the record of its actual present dimensions. Besides, the prevalent conception of the human mind as a kind of vessel containing so many articles of faith or knowledge, whence unbeliefs are held to imply its emptiness, is misleading; for in reality a mind stored with reasoned unbeliefs may be fuller of truth than one bursting with unverified convictions. To which I may add the fact that many forms of negation have taken, especially in the East, a positive and dogmatic aspect. What we regard, e.g. as the creed of the Buddhist is in reality a non-credo of progressive Skepticism commencing with the external world, and gradually eliminating all objects and modes of knowledge until it ends with a denial even of self-consciousness.

HARRINGTON. It is just this unceasing equipoise of affirmation and negation that constitutes, in my opinion, the peculiar and surpassing excellence of Hellenic speculationthe sublime indifference to every interest and consideration excepting truth. This it is which has made its thought the fullest and most comprehensive, the most calm and unimpassioned, the purest and most Skeptical of all the great products of human culture and mental activity.

ARUNDEL. In your high estimate of Greek thought I concur-generally. I have at least only two faults to find with it as a whole-(1) It puts everything too much in a lumine sicco, a dry light of pure intellectualism. (2) It does not take sufficient account of human infirmities; makes little allowance for our natural sympathies; and that is one reason why when in its prime it influenced social life so unfavourably from an

ethical point of view. A union of extreme æsthetic and artistic development with moral depravity, like the marriage of a goddess to a satyr, is to me a painful object of contemplation. A cold light, like that of the moon, merely sheds a weird, ghastly paleness over vegetation. The light that nourishes, expands, vivifies must be accompanied by heat. Unfortunately truth itself is in this respect frequently like moonshine, as Schiller says:

Sie geben ach nicht immer Gluth
Der Wahrheit helle Strahlen.

Greek thought seems to me to have been a truth of this kind. Unsuited to weak, erring men and women, it was admirably adapted for a nation of philosophers.

HARRINGTON. Which Greece, immediately before and after the death of Sokrates, actually was.... I think you regard Greek thought too exclusively from a religious point of view, Arundel. No doubt its main characteristic is enlightenment—an intellectual clarifying process; but surely there is no real deficiency in its stress on natural weaknesses nor in its recognition of them. In every department of its artistic and literary energy-in its sculpture and painting, dramatic and lyric poetry—you have ample proofs of this. In fact, the Greeks could not ignore what was so clearly and indisputably natural as the emotional, wayward, and erring side of humanity. That Hellenic thought and art do not constitute a religion, as we commonly understand the term, and that the Dialogues of Plato and the Tragedies of Sophokles do not produce on minds trained by Christianity the soothing or ascetic influence of the Psalms of David or the Gospel of St. John, is doubtless true; but it is equally true that we have no right to expect them to do so. Nor do I think your quotation from Schiller applicable to Greek culture. At least it is an application he could not have sanctioned. What you make an objectionable feature in Hellenic thought was to Schiller a positive merit; so he says, in his well-known 'Götter Griechenlands'

Finstrer Ernst und trauriges Entsagen
War aus eurem heitern Dienst verbannt.

But instead of bemoaning such a defect, or regarding it as light without heat, he, on the contrary, thinks that it is we with our excessive other-worldliness, and our repression of the joyous naturalism of the Greeks, who have caused to disappear the life-warm forms of Hellenic Nature personation. Ach! von jenem lebenwarmen Bilde Blieb der Schatten nur zurück.'

But what is the second charge you bring against Greek thought?

ARUNDEL.

Precisely what, if you agree with Schiller's 'Gods of Greece,' you may consider a merit. Hellenic life and morality, the Çŷv kaτà þúσw, is too nakedly animalistic, in my opinion, to be adopted in any state of really high civilisation-I mean a civilisation in which matter and material interests are distinctly subordinated not only to intellectual but to spiritual culture. The very quality that gave excellence to the art-conceptions of the Greek impaired his moral character.

HARRINGTON. But may not the idea of purely intellectual self-development, the elimination by natural reason of the mere animal in man, which occupies no inconsiderable space in the best Greek literature, form a corrective to excessive animalism, as potent and as valuable as the Christian theory of asceticism and self-denial?

ARUNDEL. Possibly in the case of a few select mindscertainly not in the average Greek man or woman. To Christians Nature and her laws are subordinated or largely modified by religious restraints, by the conception of a holy God and a sinless Jesus, by the inherent sublimity of a spiritual existence. But what could the Greek have as a corrective of the pure animalism which is the undoubted outcome of many aspects of Nature? His whole Pantheon was only a collection of varied forms of sensualism.

It should, perhaps, be noted that Schiller's interpretation of the relation of Hellenic thought to Nature varied at different times. In his earlier works, e.g. über naive und sentimentalische Dichtung,' he complains that the Greek interpretation of Nature was too intellectual, and insufficiently emotional. But later, in his Ode to the Gods of Greece, he allows that there was a correspondence between the suggestions of Nature and the emotions of man that is no longer possible in our time.

TREVOR. I think you are unjust in denying self-abnegation as well as a capacity for heroism and virtue of the highest order to the Hellenes; though the precise mode of evolution those virtues took was more akin to the self-development of philosophical morality of our own times than to extraneous commands or sanctions of a religious nature.

ARUNDEL. The self-development you speak of which may exist among those who do not profess to owe any part of it to Christianity seems to me oftentimes an unconscious but real plagiarism from its spirit. The self-mortification of Christthe lesson of the Cross-has been before the world for so many centuries that it has won its way unnoticed into philosophical and other systems which would otherwise have hardly admitted it as an obligation. Take Comtism, for instance, with its plagiarised Altruism: originally it was meant as a substitute for Christianity, while all that it actually did was to copy it, even to its superstitions.

HARRINGTON. What you have alleged seems not improbable; only do not, in your tribute to the secret and unacknowledged power of Christianity in the modern world, be guilty of injustice to the Greeks, or, for that matter, to any heathen virtue. Take, e.g. the characters of Antigone and Electra. In these you certainly have the noblest self-denial inculcated without any morbid excess or obvious self-interest to detract from its merit; while in Sokrates you have a magnanimous and self-sacrificing devotion to truth and freedom, unparalleled, except in the case of Christ himself, in the history of humanity.

MISS LEYCESTER. I was just on the point of instancing Antigone-a very favourite character of mine-as an example of heroism and self-sacrifice that, if displayed in the interests of Ecclesiastical Christianity, might have procured her posthumous beatification as well as a place in the 'Acta Sanctorum;' probably, however, she is destined to a longer immortality in the beautiful drama of Sophokles.

TREVOR. Our discussion has lasted somewhat long if regarded in respect of the time it has taken up. As to its subject, the free thought of the Greeks, no discussion could