call of public and national interests; sinking, as the years passed by, into a solitary cave, whence, like the giant in Bunyan's allegory, he raged impotently at the heterodox wayfarer." But there was another Schopenhauer whom Wallace hints at in the above passage, the Schopenhauer who, freed from the weaknesses of the flesh, "draws close to the great heart of life, and tries to see clearly what man's existence and hopes and destiny really are, who recognises the peaceful creations of art as the most adequate representation the sense-world can give of the true inward being of all things, and who holds the best life to be that of one who has pierced through the illusions dividing one conscious individuality from another, into that heart of eternal rest where we are each members one of another, essentially united in the great ocean of Being, in which and by which we alone live. With this Schopenhauer Wallace had all things in common. He cared nothing for the fact that he was a rebel against the great dynasty of the Idealists. Indeed, it was observed that he had a curious sympathy with all the great rebels in life and philosophy, to whom, besides Schopenhauer, belonged Epicurus, Rousseau, Nietzsche. It was not every one who called Hegel Lord who, according to Wallace, would obtain an entrance into the heaven of the philosophers, and of those who did, many would be surprised at the company they were expected to keep.

But the works on which Wallace's reputation will chiefly rest are his three volumes upon Hegel: The Logic of Hegel, Translation (2nd ed., 1892); The Logic of Hegel, Prolegomena (2nd ed., 1894); Hegel's Philosophy of Mind (1894). This is not the place to review them. Taken along with the Master of

Balliol's Hegel in Blackwood's series, they are the best possible introduction to the study of Hegel. It was said of the earlier English expositors that if, as some of them claimed, they had discovered the secret of Hegel, they had managed to keep it pretty well. This cannot be said of Wallace. He has made it an open secret, so that he who runs may read. In this he stands midway between the older generation of Hegelian scholars, who wrote somewhat obscurely of the central mysteries of the great idealist, and the younger generation, in whom the study of Hegel is entering upon a new phase, which might be called microscopic. This last development is no doubt in the right direction. Hegel said himself that, "The condemnation which a great man lays upon the world is to force it to explain him"; and this condemnation extends, in the case of a great philosopher, to the minutest details of his system. But a philosophy is of interest to mankind at large according to the light it throws on the great questions of life and destiny, not according to the consistency and exhaustiveness with which it has treated of a particular department. There will, therefore, always be a place for commentators who, like Wallace, remind us that idealist philosophy is more than logic and epistemology, and that at least one of its functions is to attempt an answer to the three great questions, “What can I know? What ought I to do? What may I hope for?"

This intimate connection indeed between philosophy and the great practical interests of life, especially the supreme interest of religion, is the characteristic note of Wallace's teaching. It may be of interest, therefore, to inquire more particularly how these two are

related to one another in his view. But before doing so, we have to ask how he would have defined religion.

It need not be said that his view as to what the essence of religion is differs widely from what nine out of ten middle-class people in England think it to be. Religion does not consist in holding to some form of creed or confession prescribed by church or synod. "There are," he says, "religions of all sorts, and some of them which are most heard of in the modern world only exist or survive in the shape of a traditional name and venerated creed." Neither does Wallace mean by religion that vague discontent with the limitations of our knowledge which goes by the somewhat plaintive name of Agnosticism:

"The desire of the moth for the star,

Of the night for the morrow,

The devotion to something afar

From the sphere of our sorrow.”

The essence of the Agnostic theory is that the object towards which the soul in its religious moments aspires is an unattainable one. How can we love what we cannot know, and how can we know what does not enter into consciousness? We may indeed be conscious of the existence of an absolute and eternal, and, if we like, we may call this consciousness religion, but it is a consciousness which is wholly unrealisable and untranslatable into anything that is of value either in theory or practice. And this is sufficient to reduce religion to a quite negligeable quantity, a marginal or residual element in life without significance for human endeavour. To this doctrine the whole of Wallace's teaching is diametrically opposed. He did not indeed believe in the value or necessity of attempting to prove the existence of a Personal Super

natural God. Belief in such a Being was not, in his view, essential to religion. "Religion," he says, "is not necessarily committed to a definite conception of a supernatural-of a personal power outside the order of Nature." What it is necessarily committed to, and what constitutes the essence of religion, is the assurance that there is a unity or whole in things, in their relations to which, if we could but penetrate to them, we should find their purpose, meaning, or significance. This is the faith which in all ages has sustained the religious soul, and which has found in Robert Browning its most conspicuous modern interpreter. Its general nature is thus defined by Wallace :

"Religion is a faith and a theory which gives unity to the facts of life, and gives it, not because the unity is in detail proved or detected, but because life and experience in their deepest reality inexorably demand and evince such a unity to the heart. The religion of a time is not its nominal creed, but its dominant conviction of the meaning of reality, the principle which animates all its being and all its striving, the faith it has in the laws of nature and the purpose of life. Dimly or clearly felt and perceived, religion has for its principle (one cannot well say its object), not the unknowable, but the inner unity of life and knowledge, of act and consciousness, a unity which is certified in its every knowledge but is never fully demonstrable by the summation of all its ascertained items."1

If this be the true nature of religion, so far is it from being true that this kind of consciousness is unrealisable and untranslateable into anything of value to human life, that we are here for nothing else than to realise it and translate it into thought and act. Religion, indeed, without works is vain, but why need such a religion as that just described remain without 1 Hegel's Philosophy of Mind, p. xxxvii.

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works? What is all morality but one mode of realising it in works? "Morality," says Wallace, "gives a partial and practical realisation of the ideal of religion.” It may be said to be religion in action. Another mode of realising it is art. The artist aims at translating into forms that appeal to us through the senses the meaning that his soul discerns in things. But the final and, according to Hegel, the highest mode of realisation is Philosophy, which aims at translating into terms of thought that which in art, religion, and morality we merely feel.

Here, then, we have the relation of which we are in search. Philosophy, so far from being, as is sometimes supposed, antagonistic to religion, is really only the highest form or phase of it. "Das Denken," as Hegel said, "ist auch Gottesdienst." If the astronomer can say that he "thinks God's thoughts after him," this is true in a special sense of the philosopher who "thinks about thought," and thus endeavours to catch a glimpse of reality on its inner side. As Wallace puts it::

"Philosophy does but draw the conclusion supplied by the premisses of religion; it supplements and rounds off into coherence the religious implications. . . . Its task-its supreme task, is to explicate religion. But to do so is ... to show that religion is the truth, the complete reality, of the mind that lived in Art, that founded the state and sought to be dutiful and upright; the truth, the crowning fruit of all scientific knowledge, of all human affections, of all secular consciousness. Its lesson ultimately is, that there is nothing essentially common or unclean; that the holy is not parted off from the true and the good and the beautiful."1

These are high claims, but it ought to be remembered 1 Hegel's Philosophy of Mind, p. xlvi.