Mr. Lecky has given us a book replete with interesting matter; and yet, owing to some lack of intellectual mastery in him over his materials, it leaves a singularly vague and dispiriting impression on the mind in reading it. The author has a plethora of knowledge in regard to the surface changes in history, but no insight whatever apparently into the meaning of history itself, into the philosophic causes which these changes attest and obey. He is a man of uncommon bulk, but deficient muscle. His mental furniture enfeebles his intellectual faculty. His body obstructs his soul. Sumptus fructum superat. His book costs the author more than it comes to. He is so absorbed in the contemplation of the accidents of history as to forget that history itself is but a narrow river, conducting to the broad, illimitable ocean of human brotherhood or equality,—and that to stand upon the bank, therefore, and watch its successive waves, instead of manfully leaping in and committing one's life and fortunes to it, is scarcely the part of a wise man. Mr. Lecky's essay would seem to have originated more in a desire to try his hand at theorizing than in any necessity to ventilate some previous drifts from the beginning to the end of his book. You never feel yourself in a compact, water-tight boat, obedient to rudder and sail, but at most on a raft, drifting at the absolute gré of the tides, in a certain general direction, no doubt, but with no foresight of the specific intellectual port at which you are to bring up. Occasionally the mist condenses, the rain patters down, you catch a glimpse of far-off mountaintops, and suppose the entire landscape will soon be bathed in sunshine. But no, a new inrush of illustrative facts takes place, and all is fog again. There is a great deal of good writing in the book, and it leaves nothing to be desired in the way of advanced sentiment. But we fail to perceive its bearing upon the progress of ideas. It may flatter a superficial scientific optimism, but it will obstruct rather than promote the interests of philosophic thought, for this reason, that it inclines the reader to suspend his convictions upon some fated progress of events which will of itself do the world's thinking for it, and turn both heart and mind at last into cheerful, complacent pensioners of science.
The object of Mr. Lecky is to trace the history of the spirit of Rationalism,—the spirit which disposes men to reject all belief founded upon authority, and to make the causes of phenomena intrinsic and not extrinsic to the phenomena themselves. Rationalism, if we rightly apprehend Mr. Lecky, is not any precise doctrine or system of doctrine, but only a diffused bias or tendency of the mind to regard the power which is operative in Nature and history as a rigidly creative or constitutive power, rather than a redemptive or formative one. Doubtless Mr. Lecky, if he should ever consider the subject, would be free to admit that the creative action implies a necessary reaction on the part of the creature. But he has manifestly no sympathy with the early or imaginative faiths of the world, which represent creation as a physical rather than a rational exhibition of the Divine power. His entire book is written in the service of the opposite conception. To be sure, he does not discuss the new faith as a theologian, but only as an historian. It is not an affair of the heart with him, but only of the head. He takes no pains to commend it as an advance in point of truth upon the old faith, and does not once even avow his own intellectual identification with it. In short, he is not the retained attorney of the new faith, but its disinterested annalist, treating it simply as an historic change wrought in the texture of men's thought, promoted by such and such causes, attested by such and such effects, but independent of all partisan judgment and clamor either favorable or adverse. Still there is no doubt of the historian's own private bias. He applauds ex animo the change he records; and his book would have gained greatly in interest, if he could only have written it a little more from the heart and a little less from the head. For then, apart from the incidental advantage which would accrue to it, to the reader's imagination, as being a revelation of the author's living personality, we think the author himself could hardly fail to have seen, before he had finished his task, that there is no essential contradiction between the world's earlier and later faiths; that these faiths differ not as good and evil or true and false differ, but only and at most as root and stem and flower differ in the plant, or birth, growth, and maturity in the animal.
The lesson which Mr. Lecky inculcates upon his reader is this: that civilization and miracle are fatally opposed; that the former waxes or wanes precisely as the latter is discredited or accredited. History shows civilization to have thriven precisely as men have outgrown their belief in miracle, or the possibility of any outward Divine intervention in Nature, and have learned to insist upon strictly natural causes for all natural effects. The fruits of Mr. Lecky's research on this subject are varied and interesting, and we cordially commend his volumes to the reader as an inviting storehouse of materials for reflection; but we very much doubt whether the school of thought he represents has, on the whole, mastered the problem of civilization any more thoroughly than its rival. The difference between the two schools is, indeed, one of principle more than of words; but we cannot help thinking, nevertheless, that the controversy is needlessly protracted on both sides, for want of a sufficiently definite and comprehensive statement of the point in dispute. Let us see whether we cannot make at least an approximation to such a statement.
What is agitated, then, between the two rival schools of thought is the Divine power: not the existence of such power, for there is no noticeable difference on that point, but only its quality or mode of operation. The Orthodox attribute to God a strictly moral, which is a specific method of action, addressed to purely personal or subjective issues; their opponents, a strictly physical, which is a universal method, addressed to purely impersonal and objective issues. The one party assigns to God a finite personality, or one limited by Nature; the other, an indefinite personality, as identified with natural law. The Orthodox, of course, maintain that God's creative action was universal, inasmuch as it contemplated only cosmical issues; but as that mode of action was exhausted by its own universality, His subsequent relation to His creatures must be purely administrative, as expressing His personal pleasure or displeasure in their various functioning. The other side do not dogmatize about the Divine power, or its method of action, in the abstract. They only insist, as against their antagonists, that the Divine administration of Nature is not, within the limits of our science, personal; that it is not a power exerted upon Nature, or from without, and in contravention of her ordinary processes; that, so far as our knowledge goes, on the contrary, whatever may be our faith, it is a power invariably exerted through Nature, or from within, and therefore in habitual consistency with her ordinary effects. In other words, they insist, that, so far as the Divine power is cognizable to us, it falls exclusively within and never without the routine of Nature; and as universality is the characteristic of that routine, they do not hesitate, on behalf of science, to affirm that the Divine action is never addressed to specific or differential results, but always to universal or identical ones. In short, they logically refuse to the Divine power as exhibited in Nature all personal or moral quality, as inferring on the part of Deity any possible unequal or inequitable relations to the creatures He has made; and assign to all such reputed partial exhibitions of it a purely educative, and therefore universal, bearing upon the mind of the race.
Such, in brief, is the question agitated between the old and new faiths; whether God acts outwardly upon Nature, or inwardly through Nature,—that is to say, whether His action is specific as addressed to private ends, or strictly universal as addressed only to public ends. If the former hypothesis be true, then sense rightfully controls reason, and everything is exactly what it appears. If the latter hypothesis be true, then sense rightfully serves reason, and nothing is as it appears to be, namely, absolute and independent of everything else, but simply phenomenal and relative to everything else. It is evident to a glance that a controversy so eminently scientific could never have gone to the unwholesome lengths which it has reached in our day, unless there were something in it more than meets the eye: unless, for example, the interests of morality, which is the only recognized bond of our existing societies, were at stake. For if one and the same law binds all Nature, then plant and animal and man have one and the same destiny, so far as their nature goes. If, for example, the plant as one form of natural existence, and the animal as another form, are what they severally are, by no means absolutely, or in themselves, but only by relation to all other plants and animals, then man, who is only a higher, that is, a moral, or evil absolutely or in himself, but only relatively to all other men. And if we allow morality only this relative force,—if the good man is not good absolutely or in himself, nor the evil man evil absolutely or in himself,—why, then our existing civilization, which is built upon such absoluteness, has a fictitious basis, and must fall to the ground.
Hinc ilia lachrymæ. This is why a question apparently of pure science turns out practically so full of inward heartburning and mutual reviling. Neither theology nor science is competent to the philosophic recognition of man's associated destiny, and hence have neither of them the secret of those perturbations which ever and anon gloom our political atmosphere and shut out to the eye of sensuous thought the entire future of the race. Philosophy alone possesses this secret, because it alone perceives that all our political, civil, and even domestic broils grow out of this identical warfare between men's religions and scientific convictions,—have no other source than that persistent insubmission which the interests of force, as represented by priesthoods and governments, are under to the interests of freedom, represented by society. Philosophy mediates between the religious and secular thought of mankind, by making the sphere of God's universal action identical with that of man's organic necessities, and the sphere of His specific action identical with that of man's moral freedom: so harmonizing the two in one subject. Philosophy alone, in short, is competent to the future of human destiny, because it alone adjusts the relation of morals to physics, alone adjusts the specific interests avouched by religion with the universal interests avouched by science. And its competence is owing to this fact exclusively, that it alone apprehends or appreciates the distinctively social destiny of man, a destiny in which the interests of the most intense and exquisite freedom or individuality are bound up with the interests of the most imperious necessity or community,—or, what is the same thing, which presents every man no longer in subjective or moral, but only in objective or æsthetic, contrast with his kind, that so the general harmony may be inflamed by the widest partial diversity. Thus philosophy bids society recognise itself at once as God's perfect work on earth,—bids it rise to instant self-consciousness as the real Divine substance which Church and State have only feebly typified, and put on all Divine strength and peace as its rightful breastplate and ornament. For if all these fleeting phenomenal discords among men, upon which our existing civilization proceeds, claim no longer an absolute, but only a relative Divine sanction, a sanction in relation to the interests of human society exclusively, what remains for society to do but to organize itself afresh upon an eternal basis, that is, upon the acknowledgment of a force in man infinitely transcending his moral force, because it forever unites instead of disjoining him with God, being the force of spontaneous or productive action?
An Address on the Limits of Education, read before the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, November 16th, 1865. By Jacob Bigelow, M. D. Boston: E. P. Dutton & Co.
Dr. Bigelow has had the honor of naturalizing, if not of inventing, the name of the Institute before which he delivered this address. His work on the Elements of Technology was the first in which this name appeared, at least in recent times. It designates that class of sciences which bear on art,—sciences of practical application. Dr. Bigelow, in this address, places himself emphatically with those who believe that mental discipline can be obtained as well by useful as by useless studies, and who think it a waste of time "to spend five years of the most susceptible part of life in acquiring a minute familiarity with tongues which are daily becoming more obsolete." We welcome this address as an important ally for those who desire that our schools and colleges shall not insist that every young man wishing for their advantages shall devote one half of his time to the details of Greek and Latin Grammar and Prosody. Dr. Bigelow is no rash reformer, no youthful enthusiast, no reckless radical. He has the confidence of the whole community for his science, scholarship, and ripe judgment. When, therefore, a man of his character and position, without passion or prejudice, publishes the conclusions which this address contains, we may hope that a change is at hand in the course of study now pursued in our colleges and universities, and in the schools which prepare for them. Dr. Bigelow does not desire Latin or Greek to be excluded from the college course; but he thinks that "under the name of classical literature they premise and afterward carry on a cumbrous burden of dead languages, kept alive through the dark ages, and now stereotyped in England, by the persistent conservatism of a privileged order." He thinks that the mind might be disciplined and trained quite as well and more cheaply by other studies than that of the Greek language. He is of opinion, that, if Greek should once cease to be made a requisite in our universities, though it would be studied still by a certain class, it would never be adopted again as an indispensable academic study.
In all this we quite agree with him. Thus far, almost everything else has been subordinated in our college course to the study of Greek and Latin. At least one half of the time of a young man desiring a liberal education, from twelve to twenty years of age, is given up to Greek and Latin. The other half is left for Mathematics, Geography, History, Geology, Chemistry, Natural History, Metaphysics, Ethics, Astronomy, and General Reading. Before entering college, his time must be almost wholly occupied with the study of Latin, Greek, and Mathematics. For he is required, in order to enter our principal university, to know Virgil, Cæsar, Cicero, Xenophon, three books of the Iliad, Arithmetic, Algebra, and Geometry, and to have the whole Latin and Greek Grammar at his tongue's end. He must also be able to write Latin, and to write Greek with the accents. But he need not know a word of American or Modern History (he must know the History of Greece and Rome),—not a word of any modern language or modern science,—nothing of Chemistry, Astronomy, Geology,—nothing of modern literature. Though he must be able to write Greek, he need not be able to write English. And so, after being obliged to spend the largest part of his time before entering college in learning Greek and Latin philology, is he then allowed to drop these studies and begin others? Not so. He is not even permitted to leave off Greek and Latin philology, in order to become acquainted with Greek and Latin literature, much less to become acquainted with any other. Nearly all the way through college he keeps on writing Creek and Latin exercises; and the result of it all is, that he not unfrequently becomes so disgusted with these languages that he forgets them as soon as he can, and on leaving college can hardly read with ease the simplest Greek or Latin book.
Such being, as is well known to all graduates of college, the present state of affairs, we welcome with profound gratitude the present address of Dr. Bigelow. Coming from such a source, containing such unanswerable arguments, expressed in so lucid and striking a form, the effect must be excellent. We have dwelt upon a single point of the address, because it seemed to us the most important and valuable part of it. But there is in it much besides, that is both instructive and interesting; and we recommend the pamphlet as one to be carefully read, and by no means to be confounded with the commoner style of public addresses.