are reduced to something like system by moral and mental science, with or without the theological hypothesis. The most extreme form of materialism does not dispute that moral and mental science is for logical purposes something more than physical science. So, the most extreme form of spiritualism gets its mental and moral science by observation and argument from phenomena; it does not, or it does not any longer, build such science by abstract deduction from any proposition as to an immaterial entity. There have been, in ages past, attempts to do this. Plato, for instance, attempted to found, not only his mental and moral philosophy, but his general philosophy of the universe, by deduction from a mere hypothesis. He imagined immaterial entities, the ideas, of things inorganic, as much as organic. But then Plato was consistent and had the courage of his opinions. If he imagined an idea, or soul, of a man, he imagined one also for a dog, for a tree, for a statue, for a chair. He thought that a statue or a chair were what they are, by virtue of an immaterial entity which gave them form. The hypothesis did not add much to the art of statuary or to that of the carpenter; nor, to do him justice, did Plato look for much practical result in these spheres. One form of the doctrine alone survives,—that man is what he is by virtue of an immaterial entity temporarily indwelling in his body. But, though the hypothesis survives, it is in no sense any longer the basis of the science of human nature with any school. No school is now content to sit in its study and evolve its knowledge of the moral qualities of man out of abstract deductions from the conception of an immaterial entity. All without exception profess to get their knowledge of the moral qualities by observing the qualities which men actually do exhibit or have exhibited. And those who are persuaded that man has, over and above his man's nature, an immaterial entity, find themselves discussing the laws of thought and of character on a common ground with those who regard man as man—i.e. who regard man's nature as capable of being referred to a homogeneous system of law. Spiritualists and materialists, however much they may differ in their explanations of moral phenomena, describe their relations in the same language, the language of law, not of illuminism.

Those, therefore, who dispense with a transcendental explanation are just as free as those who maintain it, to handle the spiritual and religious phenomena of human nature, treating them simply as phenomena. No one has ever suggested that the former philosophy is not quite as well entitled to analyse the intellectual faculties of man as the stoutest believer in the immaterial entity. It would raise a smile now-a-days to hear it said that such an one must be incompetent to treat of the canons of inductive reasoning, because he was unorthodox as to the immortality of the Soul. And if, notwithstanding this unorthodoxy, he is thought competent to investigate

the laws of thought, why not the moral laws, the sentiments, and the emotions? As a fact, every moral faculty of man is recognised by him just as much as by any transcendentalist. He does not limit himself, any more than the theologian does, to mere morality. He is fully alive to the spiritual emotions in all their depth, purity, and beauty. He recognises in man the yearning for a power outside his individual self which he may venerate, a love for the author of his chief good, the need for sympathy with something greater than himself. All these are positive facts which rest on observation, quite apart from any explanation of the hypothetical cause of these tendencies in man. There, at any rate, the scientific observer finds them; and he is at liberty to give them quite as high a place in his scheme of human nature as the most complete theologian. He may possibly give them a far higher place, and bind them far more truly into the entire tissue of his whole view of life, because they are built up for him on precisely the same ground of experience as all the rest of his knowledge, and have no element at all heterogeneous from the rest of life. With the language of spiritual emotion he is perfectly in unison. The spirit of devotion, of spiritual communion with an ever-present power, of sympathy and fellowship with the living world, of awe and submission towards the material world, the sense of adoration, love, resignation, mystery, are at least as potent with the one system as with the other. He can share the religious emotion of every age, and can enter into the language of every truly religious heart. For myself, I believe that this is only done on a complete as well as a real basis in the religion of Humanity, but we need not confine the present argument to that ground. I venture to believe that this spirit is truly shared by all, whatever their hypothesis about the human soul, who treat these highest emotions of man's nature as facts of primary value, and who have any intelligible theory whereby these emotions can be aroused.

All positive methods of treating man of a comprehensive kind adopt to the full all that has ever been said about the dignity of man's moral and spiritual life, and treat these phenomena as distinct from the intellectual and the physical life. These methods also recognise the unity of consciousness, the facts of conscience, the sense of identity, and the longing for perpetuation of that identity. They decline to explain these phenomena by the popular hypotheses; but they neither deny their existence, nor lessen their importance. Man, they argue, has a complex existence, made up of the phenomena of his physical organs, of his intellectual powers, of his moral faculties, crowned and harmonised ultimately by his religious sympathies,love, gratitude, veneration, submission, towards the dominant force by which he finds himself surrounded. I use words which are not limited to a particular philosophy or religion-I do not now confine my language to the philosophy or religion of Comte-for this same

conception of man is common to many philosophies and many religions. It characterises such systems as those of Spinosa or Shelley or Fichte as much as those of Confucius or Bouddha. In a word, the reality and the supremacy of the spiritual life have never been carried further than by men who have departed most widely from the popular hypotheses of the immaterial entity.

Many of these men, no doubt, have indulged in hypotheses of their own quite as arbitrary as those of theology. It is characteristic of the positive thought of our age that it stands upon a firmer basis. Though not confounding the moral facts with the physical, it will never lose sight of the correspondence and consensus between all sides of human life. Led by an enormous and complete array of evidences, it associates every fact of thought or of emotion with a fact of physiology, with molecular change in the body. Without pretending to explain the first by the second, it denies that the first can be explained without the second. But with this solid basis of reality to work on, it gives their place of supremacy to the highest sensibilities of man, through the heights and depths of the spiritual life.

Nothing is more idle than a discussion about words. But when some deny the use of the word 'soul' to those who mean by it this consensus, and not any immaterial entity, we may remind them that our use of the word agrees with its etymology and its history. It is the mode in which it is used in the Bible, the well-spring of our true English speech. It may, indeed, be contended that there is no instance in the Bible in which Soul does mean an immaterial entity, the idea not having been familiar to any of the writers, with the doubtful exception of St. Paul. But without entering upon Biblical philology, it may be said that for one passage in the Bible in which the word 'soul' can be forced to bear the meaning of immaterial entity, there are ten texts in which it cannot possibly refer to anything but breath, life, moral sense, or spiritual emotion. When the Psalmist says, 'Deliver my soul from death,' Heal my soul, for I have sinned,'My soul is cast down within me,' 'Return unto my rest, O my soul,' he means by 'soul' what we mean, the conscious unity of our being culminating in its religious emotions; and until we find some English word that better expresses this idea, we shall continue to use the phraseology of David.

6

It is not merely that we are denied the language of religion, but we sometimes find attempts to exclude us from the thing. There are some who say that worship, spiritual life, and that exaltation of the sentiments which we call devotion, have no possible meaning unless applied to the special theology of the particular speaker. A little attention to history, a single reflection on religion as a whole, suffice to show the hollowness of this assumption. If devotion mean the surrender of self to an adored Power, there has been devotion in

creeds with many gods, with one God, with no gods; if spiritual life mean the cultivation of this temper towards moral purification, there was spiritual life long before the notion of an immaterial entity inside the human being was excogitated; and as to worship, men have worshipped, with intense and overwhelming passion, all kinds of objects, organic and inorganic, material and spiritual, abstract ideas as well as visible forces. Is it implied that Confucius, and the countless millions who have followed him, had no idea of religion, as it is certain that they had none of theology; that Bouddha and the Bouddhists were incapable of spiritual emotion; that the Fire-worshippers and the Sun-worshippers never practised worship; that the pantheists and the humanists, from Marcus Aurelius to Fichte, had the springs of spiritual life dried up in them for want of an Old or New Testament? If this is intended, one can only wonder at the power of a self-complacent conformity to close men's eyes to the native dignity of man. Religion, and its elements in emotion-attachment, veneration, love—are as old exactly as human nature. They moved the first men, and the first women. They have found a hundred objects to inspire them, and have bowed to a great variety of powers. They were in full force long before Theology was, and before the rise of Christianity; and it would be strange indeed if they should cease with the decline of either. It is not the emotional elements of Religion which fail us. For these, with the growing goodness of mankind, are gaining in purity and strength. Rather, it is the intellectual elements of religion which are conspicuously at fault. We need to-day, not the faculty, of worship (that is ever fresh in the heart), but a clearer vision of the power we should worship. Nay, it is not we who are borrowing the privileges of theology: rather it is theology which seeks to appropriate to itself the most universal privilege of man.

FREDERIC HARRISON.

TEACHING TO READ.

THE late discussions at the London School Board on the best method of simplifying and shortening the process of teaching children to read, raised as they have been in the way of business by those who have the thing to do, can hardly fail to produce some good effect, unless the movers defeat their object by trying to do too much. If an attempt be made to introduce any change which would cause inconvenience, trouble, or offence to the multitudes who can read and write already, it will certainly fail. Old fashions go out and new come in-convenient or inconvenient as it may happen-but not upon the recommendation of royal commissions, or because they are likely to benefit another generation. In the mean time reading and writing are accomplishments too hardly acquired and too constantly in demand to be interfered with. All eyes, ears, fingers, and vocal organs would unite in indignant protest against any change of fashion which would make them less automatic, though it were but for a little while. To make the Times a little more difficult to read for a single day would be to raise a storm which the Times itself would hardly survive. If, on the other hand, an attempt be made to teach reading too curiously, to distinguish by letters all the minuter differences of speech, and require them to be learned,-the lesson will be too hard for the learner. He will have too many things to remember; he will learn it imperfectly; a habit of reading without regard to the rules will soon destroy the connection in his mind between the rule and the practice; and in a short time he will be in as bad a condition as he is now; when, however perfect he may be in his alphabet, he has still to learn the relation between the letters and the spoken word by a separate act of memory in each case,-each word being possibly, and not improbably, an exception to the rule which ought apparently to govern it.

Fortunately it is not necessary to encounter either of these difficulties; for it is certainly possible, by a simple change in the method of instruction, which nobody who can read already need trouble himself with,—which will task the learner's memory much less severely than the present method,-and which anybody can easily try,-to teach children to read books printed in the ordinary way both faster and more pleasantly and more perfectly than they are now taught.