animals fare, if they were treated thus? What would Landseer's dogs or Paul Potter's bull be, if you had merely the countenance? I do not deny that a sketch of a dog's face may be very spirited, but at best it is only a fraction of the animal; you want him from nose to tail, if you are really to enjoy him. If dogs had any voice in the matter themselves, I am convinced that they would be unanimously in favour of full-length portraits.

And there is a remark which may be made, but which I have never seen made, with reference to the human face divine, as compared with the visage of the inferior animals, namely this, that the human face alone of all faces is capable of increasing in dignity, and even in beauty, with age. The great number of years which belong to human life is in itself a fact to be taken into account in comparing man with beast; but this is not the point upon which I am now dwelling; I am referring to the fact that old men, and old women too, have sometimes a beauty which is quite distinct from that of youth, and which, so far as I know, has no parallel in the lower levels of life. It may be said that human creatures would be seen to decline in beauty if you saw them as you see animals, and if your observation was not confined to the face, while the poor withered body is enveloped in handsome garments. But this only brings us back to the remark before made, namely, that it is the face, and not the whole carcass, which serves for the portrait of a man. And certainly it strikes me as a point worthy of being dwelt upon, indicating, as it does, the high spiritual level of man's being, that it is possible to see in his face lineaments of exquisite beauty when his physical powers are failing, and his earthly life almost ebbing away. Who cannot call to mind faces, or remember portraits, which fully bear out the observation which I have now made? The hoary head' may be a crown of glory,' artistically as well as morally and spiritually.

But there is a higher view than any that I have yet taken with regard to man's place in nature. The main miracle,' as Tennyson puts it, is

that I am I,

With power on mine own act and on the world."

This power over ourselves, power of resisting inducements presented to the lower parts of our nature, and determining our actions upon grounds of justice, morality, conscience, religion, appears to assert for men a position in the world, to which the most gifted of the inferior animals can lay no kind of claim. It may be argued, as it is argued, that man is only the highest of organisms, that there is no difference in kind between him and the lowest ascidian out of which he has been evolved, that the whole question of human conduct is a matter of nerves and brain, and that morality itself is ultimately

De Profundis.

a form of phosphorus ; but I think that this view is only one of those puzzles which are necessarily presented by the complex nature of man. Man is undoubtedly material, but it would be contrary to all our highest belief and experience to say that he was simply and wholly material; the existence of anything besides matter in man may be the main miracle' of his existence, but it would seem to be a miracle which the most sceptical mind would do well to accept; the sense of honour, the dominion of conscience, the bonds of friendship and pure love, may be taken as belonging to a region into which the introduction of chemical and electrical considerations means nothing else but absolute confusion. Considerations depending upon matter must undoubtedly enter into almost all moral questions; the degree of criminality attaching to an act may depend upon the question whether the criminal was sober when he did it; proclivity towards moral faults, such as intemperance or unchastity, may be, and often is, connected with inherited physical infirmities; the condition of the atmosphere at a given time may have not a little to do with the commission of crime; but all such considerations as these do not touch the fundamental question, whether for man there is not a right and a wrong, and the power of doing what is right because it is right, and of abstaining from doing wrong because it is wrong.

I have referred in a former part of this paper to Socrates; I will make one other quotation from Plato's Dialogues, which bears forcibly upon the point which I am now discussing, and which is interesting because it shows that precisely the same kind of diffi culty, which is suggested by some of the modern students of physical science, existed and was discussed by philosophers more than two thousand years ago.

Socrates is speaking of a certain philosopher to whose writings he had looked for instruction concerning the human mind, and he expresses himself thus :—

What hopes I had formed, and how grievously was I disappointed! As I proceeded, I found my philosopher altogether forsaking mind, or any other principle of order, but having recourse to air, and ether, and water, and other eccentricities. I might compare him to a person who began by maintaining generally that mind is the cause of the actions of Socrates, but who, when he endeavoured to explain the causes of my several actions in detail, went on to show that I sit here because my body is made up of bones and muscles; and the bones, as he would say, are hard and have ligaments which divide them, and the muscles are elastic, and they cover the bones, which have also a covering or environment of flesh and skin which contains them; and as the bones are lifted at their joints by the contraction or relaxation of the muscles, I am able to bend my limbs, and this is why I am sitting here in a curved posture ;-that is what he would say, and he would have a similar explanation of my talking to you, which he would attribute to sound, and air, and hearing, and he would assign ten thousand other causes of the same sort, forgetting to mention the true cause, which is, that the Athenians have thought fit to condemn me, and accordingly I have thought it better and more right to remain here and undergo my sentence; for I am inclined to think that

these muscles and bones of mine would have gone off to Megara or Boeotia if they had been guided by their own idea of what was best, and if I had not chosen as the better and nobler part, instead of playing truant and running away, to undergo any punishment which the state inflicts. There is surely a strange confusion of causes and conditions in all this. It may be said, indeed, that without bones and muscles and the other parts of the body I cannot execute my purposes. But to say that I do so because of them, and that this is the way in which the mind acts, and not from the choice of the best, is a very careless and idle mode of speaking.10

It is admirable to observe how nobly Socrates eschews the notion of being merely a collection of limbs and muscles-the argument is just the same if we should speak of nerves and tissues and electricity and phosphorus, how he feels within him the power and determination to do what he considers to be good and right, how clearly he asserts that this power, whatever it be, is more truly Socrates' own self than the limbs and outward person which his companions saw, and which they would have called by the name of Socrates. He felt absolutely certain that he had within him, or rather that he himself was, something different in kind from bone and muscle; and that in virtue of this real self he could act as he thought right, and could in all circumstances say, I will do this, I will not do that. It may be well even in these days to remember the old puzzle: Suppose a donkey is placed with his head between two equally tempting bundles of hay, what will he do? the inducements to eat on either side are by hypothesis exactly equal; therefore the logical conclusion would seem to be that he will eat neither, and therefore starve with plenty on either side of him. Perhaps this might be the logical conclusion in the case of a donkey; but if a man were so placed, he would show the power of independent will, and would do this or that because he chose to do it, and for no other reason whatever.

I have spoken of the sense of justice and morality, the power of conscience, and the like, as distinctive marks of man's place in nature. It is impossible not to carry this view further, and to speak of the religious sentiment as being characteristically and supremely human. The question of natural religion is one so extensive that it needs to be treated by itself, if at all; and religion in its widest sense, as including revelation and all the different forms of religious truth which have influenced and do influence mankind, is a subject well nigh infinite. All that I shall consider it necessary to do for the purpose of this essay, is to refer to the almost universal prevalence of the religious sentiment in some form or another. We are told that there are races of savages to whom all conception of God is wanting; and in like manner we are told that there are races, deficient in those thoughts and feelings which we are disposed to regard as belonging to the very essence of humanity; but these partial and painful anomalies, if they really exist, can scarcely be regarded as interfering with the main proposition, that man as man has a capa10 Phado, vol. i. p. 448.

city for conceiving thoughts concerning God which no other creature has. The proposition is almost a truism: no one for a moment would dream of attributing the possibility of religious feeling to an animal however high in the scale. But what a magnificent truism it is! It is not even necessary for my present purpose to postulate the truth of God's being: the question is only of the possibility of framing thoughts concerning such a being as God is conceived to be. A poet is not judged by the literal truth of his representations: he may exhibit the grandest powers that he possesses in the region of pure and absolute fiction; and so, putting aside if one can for a moment the question of the actual truth of God's existence, the fact that man's mind has been able to rise to the conception of a being omniscient, almighty, which was and is and is to come,' the first cause of all created things, and the loving father of all that lives -this fact is sufficient to difference the mind of man by an absolutely impassable gulf from all that can be called mind in the lower levels of the living world.

And having reached this point I feel as if we had attained an eminence upon which we may 'rest and be thankful,' while calmly contemplating mightier heights still, to climb which might take us into an atmosphere more distinctly theological than would befit the character of this essay.

HARVEY CARLISLE.

THE

NINETEENTH

CENTURY.

No. LIV.-AUGUST 1881.

ISOLATED FREE TRADE.

I.

I THINK few people are now inclined to deny that there is a very strong reaction in public opinion about free trade.

To the great majority of Englishmen it is no longer what the worship of Brahma is to the priestly caste in India, a matter for devout contemplation only, far too sacred for discussion, but under the name of Reciprocity, Retaliation, Protection, Fair Trade, it is discussed right and left in a very critical spirit; and, what is worse, common sense is leading the opposition.

There is a very general suspicion that political economy is not one of the exact sciences, invariable in its rules and results, but a tentative science that varies and changes in every industrial community in the world.

It is very well to say that a man must have the courage of a fool to advocate a return to protection, but, on the other hand, there are many who think that in the face of the experience of the last six years it requires more of that particular kind of courage to nail to the mast the insular flag of free trade than to hoist the cosmopolitan flag of protection!

I believe it is now generally allowed that every prophecy uttered by the apostles of free trade thirty years ago is unfulfilled, or has proved false; and to my mind ridicule attaches rather to those who VOL. X.-No. 54.

M