He was the most democratic of teachers. He held that the thinker was only a pioneer going before his fellows, and making straight the path in the wilderness of conflicting opinions. "The true possessor," he writes in a fine passage,1 "of this visionary faculty is only a pioneer, and his duty is to make the way of airy speed, along which his thought shot up to the light, the king's highway for all sorts and conditions of men. The prerogative of genius is not to find out a private way of his own, a special method for élite spirits; but to lead the multitude at the cost perhaps of his own martyrdom and long, solitary waiting in hope, to see that the way of true genius must ultimately be the way of all."

From another side also he held that the philosopher had a practical function to perform, which ranked him. with the politician and reformer. The reformer is the man who feels the restraint which some worn-out form or institution-the old clothes of our civilisationimposes upon the free movement of the human spirit, and struggles to be free himself and set others free. The philosopher, too, bears about with him the burden of the old and outworn, and feels the need to find deliverance for himself and others. The difference is that the burden in the case of the reformer is what is practically unbearable, in the case of the philosopher what is mentally unintelligible. As the one feels himself borne down by the weight of custom, heavy as frost and deep almost as life, so the other is borne down by the burden of all this unintelligible world. As the reformer aims at readjusting a nation's habits, so as to make them serve the ends of its spirit, so the philosopher aims at readjusting men's beliefs about the 1 Schopenhauer, p. 103.

world they live in, after such a manner that they may feel at home in it. Philosophy has been defined as the home-coming of the soul. But it is a home-coming that has to be fought for and won on the soul's behalf, and it is the thinker's duty so to win it. For the philosopher also is a man, and, as Wallace held, "das heisst ein Kämpfer sein." "Of all philosophy," he tells us, "it may be said that it aims at emancipation, liberation, freedom."

Nor ought it to be supposed that though Wallace has left nothing that could be called a system, his own point of view is a varying one, or he is in any sense an eclectic. It is quite true that his work was mainly that of the expositor and commentator, and if you were to seek for direct expressions of his own views, you would have to be content with a series of asides, which might make a volume of striking obiter dicta, but could hardly be called a philosophy. Yet no one who has understood his exposition of Hegel can fail to recognise the Hegelian in all that he wrote. It is not here and there, but through whole sections of his comment that the reader feels the author's text to be only a thin veil hiding the commentator's own deeply felt convictions. The difference between Green and Wallace is not that the one is a consistent and systematic writer, while the other is not, but that they put a different interpretation upon the part they were called on to perform, and the contribution they severally were able to make in building up the system of thought, which will hereafter be known as Nineteenth Century Idealism. Green, with his sturdy English dislike of German fashions of thought, used to maintain that we must go back to Kant, and that "the whole thing must be done over again." Wallace, with his touch of poetry and a

profound sympathy with the more transcendental and theological side of German speculation, thought it was better to have a clear understanding of what "the whole thing" is. Perhaps, when properly understood, it would turn out not to be the wire-drawn thing it was commonly supposed to be, nor so wholly alien to common sense. And if this were so, it would save a good deal of trouble to take what had been done by the successors of Kant as a solid contribution to philosophy, and continue the building on the lines which they had laid down.

Professor Wallace's writings as at present published include several smaller and more popular works, his three larger volumes, consisting partly of introductions and comments, partly of translations from Hegel, together with several articles in the Encyclopædia Britannica, which are, for the most part, condensations of his books. To the first class belongs his Epicureanism, published in 1880 by the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge. Here the features of the age of Epicurus are sketched in a few masterly strokes. A picture of the Epicurean Brotherhood is drawn, which will give those of the younger generation, who are interested in such things, a somewhat different idea than used to be common of the "stye of Epicurus." Even the dry bones of the old Atomic philosophy are here brought together and live again. These ancient forms of life and doctrine are apt to appear dead and colourless to the modern student. It requires a talent like that of Wallace's to reanimate them with something of the genius of the men who first conceived them, and even to see in them illustrations, perhaps corrections, of more modern ideas. Is it the Oxford professor's love of paradox, or is it his sympathy and

insight, which lead him to find in the Garden of Epicurus an anticipation of the gentle society of early Christians, who had all things in common, to remark that Epicureanism is, "of course, a great deal more than (modern) utilitarianism," to point out that the modern developments of the molecular theory do not for a moment "rank for philosophical importance with the Atomic doctrine" of Epicurus, and to discover a strong family resemblance between the Epicurean theory of knowledge and the conclusions of the Critique of Pure Reason? His Kant was published in 1882 in Blackwood's Philosophical Classics. For a condensed and luminous statement of Kant's theory of knowledge, Chapters XI. and XII. of this little book are probably unequalled in the great library of books that have been written upon the philosopher of Königsberg. Many things are here admirably stated, none better than the conclusion of the whole matter, which will correct any impression that I may have left with the reader that Wallace glorified Hegel at the expense of

Kant:

"Kant left behind no system, but he threw out suggestions of matchless fertility, and marked out with the instinct of genius the true form of philosophic problems. . . . For those who have learned Kant, many questions have ceased to trouble: many are bright with a light unknown before: and others are at least placed in a fair way for further solution."

His Schopenhauer was the last, and, as became the subject, the most popular of these works, yet, more than any other, it illustrates Wallace's method, and gives scope to his faculty for combining literary biography with philosophical criticism. He gives us a vivid picture of the great pessimist and mystic,

making us feel (as none could better) the close connection between a man's character and his philosophy. Pectus theologum facit; and this is true of the philosopher as well as the theologian. In Schopenhauer's case it was in great part the tormenting weakness and waywardness of his own heart that sent him for peace and consolation to a doctrine which found the haven of the soul in the crucifixion of all its desires, and of the will to live itself. Referring to the busts that Schopenhauer had set up in his study (a "plaster-ofparis Kant" standing on his desk, and a "bronze Buddha" occupying a higher position still), Wallace writes:

"His devotions to the victoriously perfect One of the East were not altogether a whim; and if he spoke of the Upanishads in Duperron's translation as his service-book, it meant that his trust was in the Atmân, and his face set towards Nirvana; it indicated that, amidst the acerbity, vain-glory, and egotism, his excessive sensitivity led him. into, he cherished an inner life in the sanctuary, where he at least craved after the eternal tranquillity of the sage. The gentle smile in the Buddha's face of glorified renunciation was his consolation against his own yet clinging weaknesses."1

Critics have spoken as though it must have been sadly against the grain with Wallace to give so much time to a writer with whom he can have had so little in common as Schopenhauer. It is certainly true that he had little in common with the Schopenhauer he has so graphically described as the "irritable, petulant, paradoxical creature plagued by a most unconquerable vanity. . . selfish, harsh-mannered, and sordid dead to the sweet ties of domesticity, and deaf to the

1 Schopenhauer, p. 210.