As regards Christianity: in the first place, it is scarcely possible that the historical proof can at this late day be materially strengthened. That proof, we may fairly suppose, will continue to seem adequate to many minds which nature or grace has cast in the Christian mould. But as to the Christianity without miracles-the Theism with a Christian colouring, which in England is sometimes suggested as a substitute for the orthodox creeds-for this growth there seems in France no soil prepared, no temper from which this religion of compromise could spring. The same is the case with mysticism, and with the a priori or affirmative schools of metaphysic. Names which command respect might be cited in either group, but none have a real hold on the national intelligence. With perhaps greater plausibility the neo-Stoics-if we may so term the agnostics who still cling to duty and feel their last enthusiasm in resignation to universal law-might claim for their creed the prospect of ultimate triumph. Assuredly men like these are essential in every country, if any high morality is to be upheld in this ebb of fixed beliefs. Yet an act of faith, for which the French mind in general is ill-prepared, is still necessary if we are to accept the Cosmos even on Stoic terms. For there is a possibility that even here we may be duped once more ; that we may find vacuas sedes et inania templa in the sanctuary of Duty herself; that in the veritable and intimate scheme of the universe there may be no such conception as Virtue.

I will not, however, press into my argument any of the darker currents of French thought-the cynicism or the pessimism of a Flaubert, an Ackermann, a Baudelaire. I will rather sum up the situation in one of the last utterances of a noble mind, the conclusion of the whole matter' as it seemed at last to Emile Littré— once the most enthusiastic of all those who embraced the toosanguine synthesis which still draws back some wistful glances to the memory of a Worship of Humanity which has brought little strength to man. The words which I shall quote are simple and personal; but they may stand as the expression of more than an individual fate.

Voltaire in old age writes in one of his letters that at the sight of a starry night he was wont to say to himself that he was about to lose that spectacle; that through all eternity he should never see it more. Like him, I love to contemplate-with the reflection that it is perhaps for the last time-the starlit night, the greenness of my garden, the immensity of the sea. I go yearly to the seaside; I went thither this year. My room opened upon the beach, and when the tide was high the waves were but a few paces from where I sat. How often did I sink into contemplation, imagining to myself those Trojan women who pontum adspectabant flentes! I did not weep; but I felt that these solemn spondees best harmonised with the grandeur of that sight, and with the vagueness of my own meditations.®

Pontum adspectabant flentes! Fit epigraph for a race who • Conservation, Révolution, Positivisme, Remarques, p. 430.

have fallen from hope, on whose ears the waves' world-old message still murmurs without a meaning: while the familiar landmarks fade backwards into shadow, and there is nothing but the sea.

(2) As regards the revival of what I have called the political illusion, the enthusiasm either of loyal subordination or of co-operant equality, there is no need for much discussion here. Changes of some kind impend; but the peculiarity of the situation is that from no change is any real or definite good expected by reasonable men. And of course, on the view taken in this essay, little advantage can be hoped for a mere rearrangement of existing material-the material in this case being represented by the beliefs and aspirations of the best minds of France. There must be, not rearrangement only, but renewal-a fresh influx of hope, conviction, felicity, if outward institutions are to reflect anything save the inward uncertainty or despair.

(3) And still more markedly is this the case as regards that ideal relation between the sexes which, as I have already intimated, seems to be in danger of fading in France into something less permanent and pure. Our estimate of the value of human affections must depend largely on our estimate of the value of human personality itself. Now it is of course true that the Stoic may rank human dignity high, though he looks for no individual survival; his loves may even take an added solemnity from the nearness of their final hour. But from man's transitory state we find French dramatists and romancers drawing, not this, but the opposite, the more obvious inference; and amid all the brevity and instability of human life there is nothing that seems to him more brief or more unstable than the passion in which that life culminates with strongest charm. There is something melancholy, and the more melancholy for its very unconsciousness, in the way in which ' quelques années' come to be assumed as the natural limit of any intimate fusion of souls. A few years! and the lovers who enter thereupon are resigned already to an ultimate solitude, and count beforehand the golden moments which are all that they can steal from fate.

(4) It seems, then, that in our search for some prospect of a renewal of spiritual energy in France we are driven back on our fourth heading, on what I have termed the personal illusion; or, in other terms, the belief in the unity and persistence of the personality of man. For in no other direction can we foresee any great change to be effected either by subjective emotion or by scientific discovery. Speculations on the moral government of the universe lie too far beyond the range of proof; and on the other hand the problems of social progress and the elevation of the sexual tie depend in the last resort on what is held to be the profounder truth as to man's inward being, and his place in the scheme of things.

But have we any instrument of self-investigation such as this in

quiry needs? Shall we not here also be reduced to mere vagueness, to mere emotional appeals, or to those metaphysical arguments which are little more than disguised or regulated emotion? Is our psychology more than a mere descriptive system? Can the introspective method' afford anything beyond an empirical knowledge of the processes of thought as they appear to the thinker? Or if we turn to psycho-physiology, with its new promise of exact experiment, what do we get beyond such determinations of the rapidities and connections of nervous processes as merely prolong into the brain itself the analysis already applied to the operation of the organs of sense? Can either of these methods get down into the region where the answers to our real problems might perhaps be found?

No doubt the lessons of introspection are limited; the lessons of objective experiment are as yet rudimentary. Yet in France at this moment psychology is in a more rapidly progressive, a more revolutionary condition than any other science whatever. It has so happened that to a new group of theoretical conceptions-namely, to the evolution doctrine, as applied to mankind by Darwin, and the psychical analysis of Spencer and Taine-has been superadded a still newer group of psycho-physiological observations and experiments: the observations, namely, on hysteria and the experiments in hypnotism of which Dr. Charcot's wards at the Salpêtrière form the most celebrated centre. We have here in psychology some kind of approach to a prediction of small perturbations; to something deeper than the old-fashioned manual's sharp partition of the sane mind and the insane; the sane mind treated like some orrery unwinding itself with diagrammatic regularity; the insane mind relegated to an inscrutable chaos. Readers of Dr. Hughlings-Jackson's Croonian Lectures on the Evolution and Dissolution of the Nervous System' and similar tractates are of course prepared for novel methods of analysis, for the discovery of unsuspected lines of cleavage amid the strata of mental operation. But to the ordinary English reader such a book, for instance, as Binet and Féré's Hand-book of Hypnotism (miscalled Animal Magnetism) in the International Scientific Series will come with a string of surprises which will almost suggest a mystification. Yet Dr. Féré is one of the most distinguished of rising French physiologists; M. Binet is a psychologist of repute; and the book is a quasi-official résumé of the doctrines of the Salpêtrière school. And if we take a somewhat wider view, I believe that many Frenchmen will concur with me in accounting the Revue philosophique, with the Société de Psychologie physiologique (including MM. Taine, Charcot, Ribot, Richet, Janet, Sully-Prudhomme, &c.), as perhaps the most vital, the most distinctive nucleus of modern French thought.7

As I write these lines I observe in the Revue des Deux Mondes for April 1 an article of Professor Paul Janet explaining a very unusual step which has been taken by the authorities of the Collège de France, 'the transformation of the old traditional

Yet even if this be so, and the strongest tide of French speculation is now running in the channel of experimental psychology, can we expect that these specialised researches can deeply influence. men's general conception of human fates? It is at least not easy to say in what other way that general view is to be affected. It will hardly be permanently altered by emotion, by rhetoric; if modified at all, it must be modified by scientific discovery. And if by scientific discovery, then why not by discovery in that which, if a science at all, is the highest of sciences? In default of other revelations, de calo descendit γνῶθι σεαυτόν.

In thus judging, we do but return to the doctrine of Socrates and Plato. In their eyes man's knowledge of himself was the all-important, the light-bringing truth. The central question in Plato's philosophy-it must needs be a central question in all philosophies-was whether there exists in man a principle independent of the material universe. Plato supports his affirmative view partly by metaphysical arguments which, like most metaphysical arguments, have now passed out of date. But he supports it also by an argument based on actual, though insufficient, observation and experiment-namely, by the argument that our apparently intuitive recognition of geometrical truths and the like proves that we must have been already familiar with those truths in some previous existence. This special chain of reasoning seems now no longer valid. We explain reminiscence' by heredity, or by the unconscious generalisations of the child. But Plato's method of attacking the great problem on a side where actual observation was possiblethis was surely eminently reasonable, eminently sound; and methods similar, but of greater potency, lie ready to our hand to-day.

Of course, however, any discoveries which can be thus reached by definite inquiry are likely to be of modest dimensions as compared to the large utterance of priest or prophet. They may be significant; they will scarcely be overwhelming. Personally, indeed, for reasons which I shall not here repeat, but with which some readers of this Review may be already acquainted, I am disposed to think that such discoveries are likely to prove highly favourable to human hopes. I do not attribute this view to the psycho-physiological school of France. Yet no one who watches the vigour and rapidity of the intellectual movement in which they are concerned can doubt that we are on the verge of some considerable readjustment of our conceptions of the intimate nature of man. And at the same time it becomes every year more and more difficult to conceive of a spiritual regeneration of France which shall start from an emotional, chair of Natural and International Law into a chair of Experimental and Comparative Psychology.' Of the new chair M. Ribot, the editor of the Revue philosophique, is the first occupant. See also Professor Janet's remarks (p. 549) on the Société de Psychologie physiologique.

as opposed to a scientific, basis. Her educated classes, at least, seem equally insusceptible to old and to new forms of religious contagion. Catholicism seems to be slowly dying, but the 'Religion of Humanity' was stillborn. And the moral fervour, the enthusiastic resignation, of a Clifford or a George Eliot amongst ourselves is replaced in a Taine or a Ribot by a tone of pure neutrality, as of men conscientiously analysing a Cosmos for which they are in no way responsible.

Let us hope that in this very neutrality there may be a certain element of advantage. Just as a Goncourt or a Maupassant may see certain facts of life the more lucidly on account of his detachment from moral interests, from moral dignity, so may the psycho-physiologists of France be aided in discovering some of the deeper elements in man's nature by dint of their very indifference to everything save the discovery itself.

In expressing these hopes, no doubt, we seem to be assuming that religion is essentially an affair of knowledge—the knowledge of those vital facts on which our general conception of the universe must necessarily repose. And this seems at variance with the view that religion is essentially an affair of faith-the clinging of the soul to the beliefs and ideals which she feels as spiritually the highest. Yet the two points of view are not radically inconsistent. Rather it may be said that faith in this sense will always be indispensable; but that whereas in all ages a certain nucleus of ascertained fact has been regarded as faith's needful prerequisite, the only difference is that in our own day so much of that ancient nucleus has shrivelled away that some fresh accession is needed before the flower of faith can spring from it and shed fragrance on the unseen. And to this quest of fresh material for religion the disengaged temper of the French mind may contribute some added alertness, adaptability, power.

The position of this type of Frenchman may perhaps be formulated as follows. In the first place,' he would say, I cannot respond to stimuli addressed to my emotions alone. I have had too many of such stimuli; and after the break-down of Catholicism, with its ancient appeal and its majestic promises, I have no appetite for the vague Theism, the austere Stoicism, which are all that you can now offer me. I see little reason to suppose that we survive death, or that life has a moral meaning; and I cannot feel much enthusiasm for a world so incurably incomplete, so fundamentally unjust as our own. Not that I am a fanatical pessimist; I shall simply do my work, enjoy my pleasures, and think as little as may be about anything beyond. At the same time I am quite aware that we are still at the beginning of our scientific knowledge of the universe and of man. It is possible that you may discover something which will change my attitude. You will not, I think, discover a God, or prove a moral government of the world. But short of that you may