MR. R. H. HUTTON.

The imaginative glow and rhetorical vivacity which are visible throughout Mr. Harrison's Essays on The Soul and Future Life' are very remarkable, and should guard those of us who recoil in amazement from its creed or no-creed

from falling into the very common mistake of assuming that the effect which such ideas as these produce on ourselves is the effect which, apart from all question of the other mental conditions surrounding the natures into which they are received, they naturally produce. It is clear at least that if they ever tended to produce on the author of these papers the same effect which they not only tend to produce, but do produce, on myself, that tendency must have been so com

The article by Mr. Frederic Harrison on which this discussion is based appeared in the June and July numbers of the Nineteenth Century. The discussion will be concluded in our December number.-ED.

NEW SERIES.-VOL. XXVI., No. 5

pletely neutralised by the redundant moral energy inherent in his nature, that the characteristic effect which I should have ascribed to them is absolutely unverifiable, and, for anything we have the right to assert, non-existent. There is at least but one instance in which I

should have traced any shade of what I may call the natural view of death as presented in the light of this creed, and that is the sentence in which Mr. Harrison somewhat superfluously disclaimsand moreover with an accent of hauteur, as though he resented the necessity of admitting that death is a disagreeable certainty-his own or his creed's responsibility for the fact of death. We make death,' he says; we do not deny its terno mystical or fanciful divinity of rors or its evils. We are not responsible for it, and should welcome any reasonable prospect of eliminating or postponing this fatality that waits upon all organic nature.' After reading that admission, I was puzzled when I came to

33