the poet and artist. It was one to which he set himself with even an excess of self-consciousness. One of his means was by the artistry of language to effect a new intimacy between word and thing. His choice of words and epithets has often been dwelt upon by his critics. To some it has seemed too fastidious, too manifestly careful and deliberate. But surely no pains are too great which are directed to the union of words and things in a living whole, form and matter coalescing in the single substance which is the soul of poetry. Judging of the result, at any rate, Stevenson's method more than justifies itself. Phrases such as these (they could be indefinitely multiplied), "the crouching jumper," "the crystal quiet," "essential daylight clean and colourless," "tumultuary silences," the "wallowing stone-lighters," the "cathedral flanching down upon the plain," break on us like morning light renewing our vision of the things which they describe. Professor Raleigh has noticed how his use of a word in a special connection sometimes reacts upon its meaning so as to restore something of the image it originally bore, instancing his use of "tremendous" to describe the effects of a volcanic eruption. But this is only part of the charm; the other and greater part is that his use of language renews the image of the thing itself.

But the gift of romance is more than an aptitude of words touching here and there a feature of the world above us with new light, but leaving its main expanse in darkness. Its peculiar power is to cover what it touches with the shimmer of mystery, and thus bring it into connection with the larger life about it the buried life beneath it. Here also Stevenson would have agreed with a very different writer.

"Imagination," says Kant, "as a productive faculty is powerful to create as it were another nature out of the matter which actual nature supplies. By its aid, when ordinary experience becomes commonplace, we frame to ourselves a new world, which, though subjected to laws analogous to those of the natural world, yet is constructed on principles that occupy a higher place in our reason. is thus that we are delivered from the yoke of association which limits our ordinary use of imagination and are enabled to work up the materials supplied by nature into something that goes entirely beyond nature."

It

Hence the note of warning which is struck in the Essays against the deadening power of custom and familiarity changes in the stories to a bold appeal to the imagination as the revivifier of man's life and of the world of nature. Stevenson tells us of the ways and works of simple men, their sailorings, their fightings, their treasure-seeking, their love and hatred. In all this he appeals to elemental instincts and scenes to carry us back to a time when the world was young. But he does more. For the doings he describes he sets on a background of the familiar things of our present life. A brick-lined street, a lamp-lit alley, a seaport tavern we pass on the railway, a highland cave, a mountain pass, a lighthouse on the cliff, a villa in the sand are common things enough in our working or our holiday time. Yet round them all Stevenson weaves that great web of romance that sets them in a new relation to one another and to the spirit of man.

But I am straying-somewhat awkwardly, it will probably be thought-into the field of the literary critic. My text is that Stevenson had more of a coherent creed and exercised his art with more consciousness of purpose than the critics have given him credit for. It is enough to have called attention to

this side of his genius. Yet there is one other passage so striking in itself, and so directly bearing on this contention, that I cannot forbear quoting it in conclusion.

M The Fable of the Touchstone, with its Platonic distinction between mere sense - knowledge, in which things by division lose their meaning, and the higher imagination in which they come together and find their reality as parts of the whole, is the best allegory of his own conception of the artist's functions. The King's words strike the keynote: "Little reck I of gear and little of power. For we live here among the shadows of things, and the heart is sick of seeing them. But one thing I love, and that is truth; and for one thing I will give my daughter, and that is the trial stone. For in the light of that stone the seeming goes, and the being shows that all things besides are worthless." The artist (Stevenson well knew it) needs the seeming for his clay. Like the elder son in the story, he holds that "at least there must be seeming." But he holds, too, that "plain truth" is no truth; "there must be more than seeming." His own insight (the clear pebble of the fable) is the true touchstone before which seeming deepens into being, as the part merges in the Whole. Is not this what is meant by the quest, and the discovery which the traveller makes: "And he took the pebble and turned its light upon the heavens, and they deepened about him like the pit; and he turned it on the hills, and the hills were cold and rugged, but life ran in their sides, so that his own life bounded; and he turned it on the dust, and he beheld the dust with joy and terror; and he turned it on himself, and kneeled down and prayed."

IV.

ABSTRACT AND PRACTICAL ETHICS.1

THIS paper is meant as a reply to a criticism that

was recently made in public on the method of the London Ethical Society and kindred organisations. The method in question, so far as I understand it, is to assist practice by popularising, through public lectures and printed papers, the best results of the systematic study of ethics. But now we are told that "these results are 'abstract,' and, as such, irrelevant to the problems which the practical reformer has to face. At a time when the chief duty of the moralist, who is more than a mere student of ethical theories, is to touch the conscience and stimulate to active service in the cause of social justice, it is a species of solemn trifling to invite people to academic discussions upon the nature of the good and kindred topics." In opposition to this view I wish to submit that the method of studying moral and social problems which we here aim at encouraging is not so far removed from everyday life as might at first be supposed, and that the kind of ideas for which we stand, so far from being "abstract" in any sense that is opposed to practice, are the only kind that are really practical.

I shall begin with a definition of our terms. What is meant by "abstract" and "practical" ethics, respectively?

1 Lecture delivered before the London Ethical Society. Published in The American Journal of Sociology, November, 1896.

By abstract ethics would usually be meant the theoretic discussion of the nature of human conduct and the elements of human well-being. As an example of such a discussion we might take the controversy that has raged from the beginning among moralists as to whether the end is happiness or perfection. But this definition would not be sufficient to distinguish "abstract" from any other kind of ethics. For all ethics is abstract in this sense. It is a system of thoughts and judgments, and all thoughts are abstract in the sense that they are "of" or "about" an object; they are not the object itself.

But if we look closer we shall see that there is an intelligible sense in which we may speak of an ethics which is abstract and contrast it with an ethics which is not. For while ethics has to do with thoughts or ideas, and all ideas are abstract, yet there are abstractions within abstractions. Among ideas of an object we must recognise a distinction between the idea which is abstract in the sense that it is one-sided and partial and the idea which, by holding together different sides or aspects of the thing, aims at becoming concrete as the object itself is concrete. In the sense first mentioned, thoughts or ideas are by their nature abstract. It is no reproach to them that they are so. In the latter sense of the term abstract it is a radical defect of our thoughts to remain abstract when they might be concrete.

If now with this distinction in mind we ask who is it who thinks abstractly, we may be met by an answer that throws a curious light on the common antithesis between the abstract thinker and the practical man. For we are apt to find that the so-called practical and matter-of-fact people, instead of being