the bodies of the brutes. Surely it would be a strange object of ambition to try to think that we are not included in the vast system of adjustment which we have thus traced in them; that our nobler faculties have no share in the secure and wonderful guarantee which it affords for the truthfulness of all mental gifts. It is well that we should place a high estimate on the superiority of the powers which we possess; and that the distinction, with all its consequences, between self-conscious Reason and the comparatively simple perceptions of the beasts, should be ever kept in view. But it is not well that we should omit from that estimate a common element of immense importance which belongs to both, and the value of which becomes immeasurably greater in its connection with our special gifts. That element is the element of adjustment-the element which suggests the idea of an apparatus-the element which constitutes all our higher faculties the index and the result of a preadjusted harmony. In the light of this conception we can see a new meaning in our "place in Nature;" that place which, so far as our bodily organs are concerned, assigns to us simply a front rank among the creatures which are endowed with Life. It is in virtue of that place and association that we may be best assured that our special gifts have the same relation to the higher realities of Nature which the lower faculties of the beasts have to the lower realities of the physical world. Whatever we have that is peculiar to ourselves is built up on the same firm foundation on which all animal instinct rests. It is often said that we can never really know what unreasoning instinct is, because we can never enter into an animal mind, and see what is working there. Men are so apt to be arrogant in philosophy that it seems almost wrong to deprecate even any semblance of the consciousness of ignorance. But it were much to be desired that the modesty of philosophers would come in the right places. I hold that we can know, and can almost thoroughly understand, the instincts of the lower animals; and this for the best of all reasons, that we are ourselves animals, whatever more ;-having, to a large extent, precisely the same instincts, with the additional power of looking down upon ourselves in this capacity from a higher elevation to which we can ascend at will. Not only are our bodily functions precisely similar to those of the lower animals,—some, like the beating of the heart, being purely "automatic" or involuntary-others being partially, and others again being wholly, under the control of the will,— but many of our sensations and emotions are obviously the same with the sensations and emotions of the lower animals, connected with precisely the same machinery, presenting precisely the same phenomena, and recognizable by all the same criteria.

It is true that many of our actions become instinctive and mechanical only as the result of a previous intellectual operation of the self-conscious or reasoning kind. And this, no doubt, is the origin of the dream that all instinct, even in the animals, has had the same origin; a dream due to the exaggerated "anthropomorphism" of those very

philosophers who are most apt to denounce this source of error in others. But Man has many instincts like the animals, to which no such origin in personal experience or in previous reasoning can be assigned. For not only in earliest infancy, but throughout life, we do innumerable things to which we are led by purely organic impulse; things which have indeed a reason and a use, but a reason which we never know, and a use which we never discern, till we come to " think.” And how different this process of " thinking" is we know likewise from our own experience. In contemplating the phenomena of reasoning aud of conscious deliberation, it really seems as if it were impossible to sever it from the idea of a double Personality. Tennyson's poem of the "Two Voices" is no poetic exaggeration of the duality of which we are conscious when we attend to the mental operations of our own most complex nature. It is as if there were within us one Being always receptive of suggestions, and always responding in the form of impulse -and another Being capable of passing these suggestions in review before it, and of allowing or disallowing the impulses to which they give rise. There is a profound difference between creatures in which one only of these voices speaks, and Man, whose ears are, as it were, open to them both. The things which we do in obedience to the lower and simpler voice are indeed many, various, and full of a true and wonderful significance. But the things which we do and the affections which we cherish, in obedience to the higher voice have a rank, a meaning, and a scope which is all their own. There is no indication in the lower animals of this double Personality. They hear no voice

but one; and the whole law of their Being is perfectly fulfilled in following it. This it is which gives its restfulness to Nature, whose

abodes are indeed what Wordsworth calls them

"Abodes where Self-disturbance hath no part."

On the other hand, the double Personality, the presence of "Two Voices," is never wholly wanting even in the most degraded of human beings their thoughts everywhere "accusing or else excusing one another."

Knowing, therefore, in ourselves both these kinds of operation, we can measure the difference between them, and we can thoroughly understand how animals may be able to do all that they actually perform, without ever passing through the processes of augmentation by which we reach the conclusions of conscious reason and of moral obligation. Moreover, seeing and feeling the difference, we can see and feel the relations which obtain between the two classes of mental work. The plain truth is, that the higher and more complicated work is done, and can only be done in this life, with the material supplied by the lower and simpler tools. Nay, more, the very highest and most aspiring mental processes rest upon the lower, as a building rests upon its foundation-stones. They are like the rude but massive substructions from which some great Temple springs. Not only is the impulse, the

disposition, and the ability to reason as purely intuitive and congenital in Man as the disposition to eat, but the fundamental axioms on which all reasoning rests are, and can only be, intuitively perceived. This, indeed, is the essential character of all the axioms or self-evident propositions which are the basis of reasoning, that the truth of them is perceived by an act of apprehension, which, if it depends on any process, depends on a process unconscious, involuntary, and purely automatic. But this is the definition, the only definition, of instinct or intuition. All conscious reasoning thus starts from the data which this great faculty supplies; and all our trust and confidence in the results of reasoning must depend on our trust and confidence in the adjusted harmony which has been established between instinct and the truths of Nature. Not only is the idea of mechanism consistent with this confidence, but it is inseparable from it. No firmer ground for that confidence can be given us in thought than this conception, that as the eye of sense is a mechanism specially adjusted to receive the light of heaven, so is the mental eye a mechanism specially adjusted to perceive those realities which are in the nature of necessary and eternal truth. Moreover, the same conception helps us to understand the real nature of those limitations upon our faculties which curtail their range, and which yet, in a sense, we may be said partially to overpass in the very act of becoming conscious of them. We see it to be a great law prevailing in the instincts of the lower animals, and in our own, that they are true not only as guiding the animal rightly to the satisfaction of whatever appetite is immediately concerned, but true also as ministering to ends of which the animal knows nothing, although they are ends of the highest importance, both in its own economy and in the far-off economies of creation. In direct proportion as our own minds and intellects partake of the same nature, and are founded on the same principle of adjustment, we may feel assured that the same law prevails in their nobler work and functions. And the glorious law is no less. than this-that the work of Instinct is true not only for the short way it goes, but for that infinite distance into which it leads in a true direction.

I know no argument better fitted than this to dispel the sickly dreams, the morbid misgivings, of the Agnostic. Nor do I know of any other conception as securely founded on science, properly so called, which better serves to render intelligible and to bring within the familiar analogies of Nature those higher and rarer mental gifts which we know as genius, and even that highest and rarest of all which we understand as inspiration. That the human mind is always in some degree, and that certain individual minds have been in a special degree, reflecting surfaces, as it were, for the verities of the unseen and eternal world, is a conception having all the characters of coherence which assure us of its harmony with the general constitution and the common course of things.

And so this doctrine of animal automatism-the notion that the mind

of Man is indeed a structure and a mechanism-a notion which is held over our heads as a terror and a doubt-becomes, when closely scrutinized, the most comforting and reassuring of all conceptions. No stronger assurance can be given us that our faculties, when rightly used, are powers on which we can indeed rely. It reveals what may be called the strong physical foundations on which the truthfulness of Reason rests. And more than this-it clothes with the like character of trustworthiness every instinctive and intuitive affection of the human soul. It roots the reasonableness of faith in our conviction of the Unities of Nature. It tells us that as we know the instincts of the lower animals to be the index and the result of laws which are out of sight to them, so also have our own higher instincts the same relation to truths which are of corresponding dignity and of corresponding scope.

Nor can this conception of the mind of Man being connected with an adjusted mechanism cast, as has been suggested, any doubt on the freedom of the Will,-such as by the direct evidence of consciousness we know that freedom to be. This suggestion is simply a repetition of the same inveterate confusion of thought which has been exposed before. The question what our powers are is in no way affected by the admission or discovery that they are all connected with an apparatus. Consciousness does not tell us that we stand unrelated to the system of things of which we form a part. We dream—or rather we simply rave -if we think we are free to choose among things which are not presented to our choice, or if we think that choice itself can be free from motives, or if we think that we can find any motive outside the number of those to which by the structure of our minds and of its organ we have been made accessible. The only freedom of which we are really conscious is freedom from compulsion in choosing among things which are presented to our choice,-consciousness also attesting the fact that among those things some are coincident, and some are not coincident, with acknowledged obligation. This, and all other direct perceptions, are not weakened but confirmed by the doctrine that our minds are connected with an adjusted mechanism. Because the first result of this conception is to establish the evidence of consciousness when given under healthy conditions, and when properly ascertained, as necessarily the best and the nearest representation of the truth. This it does in recognizing ourselves, and all the faculties we possess, to be nothing but the result and index of an adjustment contrived by and reflecting the Mind which is supreme in Nature. We are derived and not original. We have been created, or-if any one likes the phrase better-we have been "evolved;" not, however, out of nothing, nor out of confusion, nor out of lies,-but out of "Nature," which is but a word for the sum of all existence-the source of all order, and the very ground of all truth-the fountain in which all fulness dwells.

ARGYLL.

VOL. XXXVIII.

3 B

HOW TO NATIONALIZE THE LAND:

A RADICAL SOLUTION OF THE IRISH LAND PROBLEM.

"Land is not and cannot be property in the sense that movable things are property. Every human being born into this planet must live upon the land if he lives at all. The land in any country is really the property of the nation that occupies it; and the tenure of it by individuals is ordered differently in different places, according to the habits of the people and the general convenience.

"To treat land, with the present privileges attached to the possession of it, as an article of sale, to be passed from hand to hand in the market like other commodities, is an arrangement not likely to be permanent either in Ireland or elsewhere."-J. A. FROUDE, in the Nineteenth Century, Sept. 1880, pp. 362, 369.

HE Irish Land League has proposed that the Government should buy out the Irish landlords (at an estimated cost of two hundred and seventy millions), and convert the tenants into a peasant proprietary who are to redeem their holdings by payments extending over thirtyfive years. That a scheme so impracticable as this-and even if practicable so unsound and worthless-should be put forth by a body of educated men, who have, presumably, studied the subject, is a noteworthy fact, and one which shows the importance of a thorough and fearless discussion of all questions relating to the tenure of the land, in order that we may arrive at some fundamental principles on which to base our practical legislation.

The total neglect of the study of this most important subject is further illustrated by the way in which the daily Press have promulgated, either without criticism or with expressed approval, an objection to the Land League's proposal which is more absurd than that proposal itself, inasmuch as it involves and rests upon an oversight so gross as almost to constitute a true "Irish bull." Mr. W. J. O'Neill Daunt, an old colleague of O'Connell, is the author of this remarkable piece of criticism, the most important part of which, and that which has been quoted as so especially crushing, is as follows:

But

"There are, roughly speaking, about half a million of tenants in Ireland. there are about five and a half millions of people in the country. Suppose the half million of tenants are established as peasant proprietors, what is to be done with the claims of the remaining five millions? Have they not a right to say to the peasant landocracy, 'You are only one-eleventh of the nation. Why should one-eleventh grasp all the land? Our right to the land is as good as yours. We will not permit your monopoly. We insist on getting our share of your estates.'

But neither Mr. O'Neill Daunt himself, nor the writers who approv