Dr. Whewell's Moral Works.

383 cannot venture to speak, for in some grand and wholly superhuman way the 'increasing purpose,' running through the ages, brings many things to pass which, till the moment of their becoming historical, are freely pronounced impossible, and reconciles many things in harmonious and living co-operation which before seemed contradictory and insuperably opposed.

ART. VI.-(1.) Elements of Morality, including Polity. Third Edition.

(2.) Lectures on the History of Moral Philosophy. New Edition.

1862.

(3.) Lectures on Systematic Morality. 1847.

(4.) Platonic Dialogues for English Readers. Three Vols. 1862. (5.) On a Liberal Education in general, with particular Reference to the Studies of the University of Cambridge.

DR. WHEWELL has a reputation for general learning hardly second to Lord Brougham. Both have taken the whole boundary of knowledge for their province. They have pushed all the sciences abreast. There is some similarity, too, in the subjects they have ventured to illustrate, as well as those in which they have been allowed to excel. History, mathematics, both pure and applied, law, poetry, theology, classics, metaphysics, moral philosophy-each have borne witness, if not to the wisdom, at least to the earnestness of their labours. Here, however, the likeness ends. The Whig ex-Chancellor is not unmitigatedly dull. There is an occasional spice of humour, now and then a lofty flight of eloquence, which redeems even his mistakes. We toil on, it is true, much after the fashion of a traveller in a barren country, but are occasionally refreshed by falling in with enchanting prairies, which dissipate the sense of the fatigue we had undergone. But in Dr. Whewell's pages we find one interminable wilderness of sand, unrelieved by any oasis to make the region endurable. The most prosaic diction is always allied to the most trite commonplace. If Lord Brougham's writings are the wilds, his are the desert of the human intellect.

These two gentlemen are supposed to be the most accomplished men of their generation. In a certain sense this is true. Their studies have not only embraced a wider range than those of any of their contemporaries, but they have given, in the shape of books, to a greater extent than most of their contemporaries

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the fruit of their multifarious reading to the world. Both appear to have learnt enough of everything to make a display about it. We have yet to learn, however, that the mere absorption of other men's thoughts, and the reproduction of these in a diversified form, confers any great benefit either on the recipient or the public. It was a saying of Horace Walpole that he did not think any more credit was due to an author for having read so many books than to a footman for having run so many miles. We are inclined to go further. For where such perusal has not stimulated intellectual parturition, where it has not winged reflection into higher regions of thought, where it engenders no conception of a bold and original character, but simply ends in prosaic comment, or the mere remoulding of what had been better left in its original form, we are fairly entitled to say, with Thomas à Kempis, that in much reading there is emptiness and distraction of spirit. There may be, of course, incidental advantages to society arising from a thorough devotedness to letters, even when the world is not made wiser, or when no heirlooms are transmitted to future generations which it would behove them to cherish with lasting regard. When a gentleman is at the head of an aristocratic college the force of example must be felt. When he occupies a leading position in Parliament, and is gifted with great oratorical power, he must, if a man of any earnestness, be instrumental in spreading among the masses a love for those pursuits in which he has found his well-being. In these respects we do not deny that Dr. Whewell and Lord Brougham have conferred great services upon their contemporaries. It is well that the five hundred young men who annually flock to Cambridge should have a senior set above them who never seems happy except with his books, who leads a life in strict keeping with his philosophic pursuits, who, though surrounded with all the luxuries which wealth and rank can enjoy, applies himself as sedulously to the literary anvil as any author in St. Giles's whose daily meal depends upon the amount of matter he has furnished to the last Temple Bar' or the next 'Morning Herald.' It is also well that, in a commercial age, there should be some one in high places who could bring all the force of an energetic nature to the spread of knowledge among the people for the mind's sake, and who was ready with his voice and purse to promote any scheme which carried down the lamp of science into the cottages of the poor. But that the labours of these gentlemen are advantageous with reference to the principal bject which they had in view, is more than we dare to affirm. is the same with them as with certain parties in our history, ho, instead of realizing their own purposes, worked very

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sedulously to bring about results quite opposite to those at which they aimed. The Puritans, by confronting the intolerance of their opponents with an intolerance of their own, laid the foundation of our religious liberty. Both parties spoke so long and so badly against liberty of conscience that they brought everything like restriction of conscience into contempt. In the same manner we are afraid it would require but a few more writers to edit classics, or to discuss moral, metaphysical, or theological subjects, after the manner of Dr. Whewell and the Whig ex-Chancellor, to make these subjects a bugbear to the reading world. Men would avoid them as they do most others which add a great deal to their torments but nothing to their utility. When authors rush into print without throwing new light upon the subjects of their disquisition, even when this idle parade of knowledge is without any corresponding exhibition of ignorance, what is it but involving themselves and their readers in the labours of Sysiphus? The new series of knotty problems which the evolution of every age brings to the surface are thrust aside for the re-execution of what our forefathers have done far more skilfully for us. Those who so far mistake the wants of the time and their own intellectual functions as to aid in this bootless oscillation of ideas, may surpass the most of their contemporaries in acquirements, but certainly not in wisdom. They have a great deal more knowledge than understanding. In this respect if Dr. Whewell and Lord Brougham may be regarded as the most learned, they certainly are the least intelligent men of the age.

De Quincey somewhere draws a distinction between the literature of fact and the literature of power. Now this distinction, though utterly lost sight of at our universities, it is well to bear in mind. The man who creates is the real sovereign of his species: whether the plastic shape which takes life at his hands be a poem, or a system, or a machine, or a bold conception fraught with pregnant consequences to his kind, he has established his title to one of the foremost seats in the intellectual sphere. But a man who simply reshapes the thoughts or discoveries of others, who epitomizes or rearranges facts, who compiles dictionaries, or systematizes or collates the experiences of the past, with a view to afford synoptical views of things, however well these labours may be performed, is still only a second-rate man; not the less useful, no doubt, than the intellectual demiurgon, but in a very subordinate sphere. The creative intellect is to that of the mere compiler as the plodding mediocrity of the early Alexandrian school is to the genius of Athens in the zenith of its glory. The works of the one have furnished well-springs

of thought for all time: the labours of the other have gone little further than to assist the student in their thoughtful comprehension. The two classes of mind differ as much as the mere bricklayer's differs from that of the architect. In appreciable results the labours of one man's life are hardly to be set against the labours of the other man's day. We would rather go down. to posterity as the writer of one or two of Burns' shorter pieces than as the editor of all the classics which have ever been commented, or of all the manuals which have ever been penned. Now it would be a great mistake to place Dr. Whewell among minds of the creative order. All his works unmistakeably belong to the literature of fact. Even as a worker in this subordinate region the most part of his books are by no means worth the trouble they have cost either himself or the printer. But his moral treatises are positively mischievous. They would, however, carry their own antidote in the general baldness of the style, if their adoption as text-books at Cambridge, and their introduction as manuals into the leading college of the university, had not given them a factitious importance in inverse proportion to their real merits. These works would doubtless not have appeared in print had their author not been the Master of Trinity; or having appeared in print, the common fate which, sooner or later, must overtake all dull writing, would have spared us the trouble of noticing them here.

As a specimen of mechanical literature the Elements of 'Morality' is the lowest that could be given. It is an invasion of the natural relation of things in connection with the highest subject, that the author may hide his own intellectual sterility under a mass of common truisms and strangely assorted facts. A stranger opening the book would be much at a loss to find the connection between the contents and the title-page. He might, for example, first turn over the pages which describe schedule A in the Reform Act; or he might meet with the growth of the English Constitution under Alfred, or fall in with a description of the Established Church in Ireland, or with a dissertation on contraband of war, or with an account of the disadvantages of the serf as contrasted with the metayer system of tenantry. This curious assortment is brought about by the author, instead of dealing with the natural difficulties of his subject, viewing it only in its material manifestations, and taking these as startingpoints for excursions into every region with which he happened to be acquainted. Morality in its source, as restricted to and fashioned in the soul of the individual, is about the only thing with which the work does not concern itself. But of morality as developed in laws and institutions, which in too many cases

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override its fundamental principles, the reader gets more than what he cares to take away.

Dr. Whewell is led into this singular treatment of his subject by the notion that law is the basis of virtue,' and that the consideration of man's rights and obligations in society lays open the whole scheme of morality in the most scientific order. How we get a knowledge of right and wrong he does not stay to inquire; but we arrive at the virtues, and the whole system of duties which they impose, by considering man's relations to his fellowman, and the tendencies to which the corresponding obligations point. These relations are ranged under five classes of rights, which arise out of five springs of action, and conduct to five cardinal virtues. Rights of exemption from personal violence impose benevolence; rights of property, justice; rights of family, purity; rights of civil authority, order; rights of contract, truth. Having thus manufactured the virtues by the application of what he denominates the supreme rule of action, viz., that it is right for ' every man to have his rights,' he feels himself at liberty to take his reader round Europe, or dip him into various anterior phases of civilization, until every general question in connection with law, political economy, political constitution, and religion, is exhausted. Now we have no objection to a man repeating on these varied topics what has been so much better said by others, and bringing the same into a synoptical view, provided he calls the collection by an appropriate name; but we have every objection to the assumption of a title which makes it pass current for what it is not. The name of morality in this case greatly aggravates the offence, for it is substituting for a precious thing profane materials which have little in connection with it, and in the name of virtue palming off some very coarse wares upon the world. If gilt wire be sold for gilt wire no one has reason to complain; the material will doubtless be found useful in its place; but everybody has reason to complain when in lieu of a treatise on the nature and acquisition of virtue he gets a mere amalgam of useful knowledge.

Dr. Whewell modestly invites a comparison between his own method of dealing with ethics and that of Aristotle, which we cannot say is very much in his favour. Indeed, the judgment which could detect any similarity in works so profoundly removed from each other as the productions of lofty genius must be from those of a bustling mediocrity, can only prove its framer's mind to be radically diseased. For no two methods can possibly be more opposite, or lead to such different results. Aristotle treats ethics purely from their subjective side; as, indeed, they must be Systematic Morality, p. 141.