striven to give some general glimpse of the fine far-reaching thoughts of Hegel as expounded by James Hutchison Stirling. No other writer known to us, whether using the language of France, Germany, or England, has made such a thorough study or given such a vitally articulated scheme of the singularly gifted notionist of Germany. If it can be said, as Mr. Stirling, we think, correctly says, "that the matter of metaphysic, logic, of the philosophy of nature, of psychology, morals, politics, religion, history, criticism, art, has all, or mostly all, been exhaustively considered by Hegel, and if presented in freedom from the peculiarity of the form would speedily convince all men who cared to inquire, of his ultimate and absolute mastery of thought," little less can be averred of Mr. Stirling's own powers and acquirements. This book gives evidence of wide, general, and genial culture, of keen intellectual insight, of excellent native talent persistently trained. Perhaps there may appear to some an over-buoyancy in the spirit of the writer of it— seeing that the book is professedly philosophical. But dulness is not philosophy, tediousness is not metaphysic, prosiness is not a necessary cognate of ontology. The valour of mind which caused the author to throw aside the trammels of didacticism and pedantic over-systematising ought to be rewarded with the reader's gratitude; for he has brought the grace and the lightsomeness of modern letters to add their fascination to the consideration of the old, old questions regarding thought, spiri, immortality, sin, sorrow, faith, human responsibility, redemption, Christ, and God's Fatherhood to man. To its ultimate depths he has fathomed the great sea of thought, and he has shown that in all the out-voyagings made on it, messages are returnable—messages of hope, happiness, and heaven. Never since Socrates had his Plato, or Albertus Magnus his Thomas Aquinas, has there been a devotion so thorough shown to the comprehending and expounding of the thoughts raised and initiated by another. The self-subordination seen in Hamilton to Reid, in Mill to Bentham, in Buckle to Adam Smith, in Emerson to Carlyle, in Maurice to Coleridge, or in Scott to Irving, is outmatched in Stirling's Hegel. With, as it seems to us, an independent power and energy of intellect capable of noble and notable accomplishments in philosophy, he has given himself, in the love of truth, to the explaining of Hegel's system. No writer of similar ability in our day has had the heroic humility which he has shown in willingly occupying the place of an expositor when wide fields of farther thought lay open to him as an explorer. He has been the Galileo to an intellectual Copernicus; let him now give us his own system of the intellectual universe, with a luckier fate before him! With the perspicacity of Hume and the industry of Reid, he conjoins a learning varied as Mill, and a vital energy like Whewell's. We accept this work as the result of his lehrjahre (apprenticeship), his minor works as that of his wanderjahre (preparation-time). We await with confidence the time when he shall become Meister, and do work befitting the years of masterdom that lie before him.

It will be remembered or observed by those who refer to our previous paper on Hegel, that we then started a few objections to the logic of Hegel as an exhaustive, all-sufficing exposition of the genesis and growth of thought from the single germ-cell, notion, to the universe, man, and God, with all their manifold interrelations. We are now in a position which enables us to furnish the replies which an Hegelian can give to these objections. As these objections were made in the interest of truth, not of any specific system or theory, it seems but just that the reader should know in what way these may be met by the thinkers who follow the lead of the Aristotle of modern thought. In the British Controversialist, May, 1862, p. 333, the statement of the objections is made. Here we shall give the best answers Hegelianism seems able to supply, without debate or remark, for either would destroy the impartiality of the proceeding which we now adopt, in that having given the con. before we now present our readers with the pro, i.e., both of the elements of a debate on the Hegelian logic:

1. Thought is its own locus (inasmuch as if it is, it must possess a wherein-tobe), and its own transition: hence space and time are but that locus and that transition externalized, i. e., looked on as outward.

2 "All that is thought is real" as thought, and as possible; "all that is real is thought" as thought, and, in experience, communicates itself to thought in that regard. The particular comes to us as apprehension, that it may be transformed into thought.

3. God, as the origin-thought of the universe, is the Abiding and Eternal One, changeless amidst all the flux of finite thought and life.

4. Thesis, the position of thought, equals simple apprehension; antithesis, the opposition of thought to the mere apprehensions of sense, coincides with judgment; and synthesis, the composition of thought into a new form, the conclusion resulting from the preceding inclusion of ideation and exclusion by the judgment; and hence, so arranged, they do "express the ordinary process of logical reasoning."

5. "Man," inasmuch as he is made in the image of God, is, so far as the truth of thought goes, "the measure of all things."

6. Thought is the one άváyкŋ, primal element and originating point of philosophy; as the prins it must be assumed. Somewhere we must begin; and wheresoever we do begin there is an assumption. Hegel prefers to assume the existence of thought; others may, if they choose, assume matter, but can they bridge the chasm from matter to mind as readily as he can show the transformation of thought into reality? Is it as easy to "look through nature up to nature's God" as from God's own being to deduce the existence of nature?

In Hegel's philosophy the freedom of the human will, the existence of nature, and the being of God, are shown to be inevitable necessities of thought. In Mr. Stirling's book the mode in which this is accomplished is clearly shown. The value of the book is so great that merely to read it is an education in philosophy. We may mention, as one of the component parts of its value, that it contains a translation of more than a third and an analysis of much of the rest of Hegel's "Logic."

S. N.

Philosophy.

DOES SCIENCE INDUCE SCEPTICISM?

AFFIRMATIVE ARTICLE.-II.

SCIENCE versus Theology again! So has it been always. The student of nature will not recognize the supernatural. The student of revelation will not condescend to re-examine his conclusions drawn from "holy writ," with the facts of science honestly before him. The naturalist ignores Scripture, and the theologian excommunicates or bans the reading of "sermons in stones" by men who profess to find "good in everything," except the pulpit and the men who minister at the altar. Strange perversity of man! He will not accept of truth from all sides, but insists on getting all his light from one source. Each insists on making the belief of the other the dark background against which his own brilliant light may be best seen. The man of science bids us mark how ineffective are the explanations given by theology "of all this wondrous world we see ; while the theologian retorts upon the man of science that by him there is no light thrown upon the things which are unseen, yet eternal." It is a continually renewing quarrel, and a truce seems to be impossible.

66

The question brought before us now is as to a mere matter of fact. It is "Does science induce scepticism?" not Ought science to induce scepticism? That this question may be answered in the affirmative we think may be argued from one patent fact, viz., that towards the close of 1864 and in the early part of 1865 a paper was circulated to procure the signature of "men of science" to an averment, that science did not, in them, induce scepticism. This was met boldly by some of the leading thinkers of the day as an unwarrantable inquisition; as a pushing of "the right of free inquiry," on the part of the theologians, a little too far. And it was rightly so, we think, for we have confessions of faith in the world already, without our beginning to draw up another. The right of private judgment gives no right to inflict public condemnation upon others who will not or cannot think with you; and if you are free to believe as you do, ought not you to grant a similar freedom to your antagonist? With what measure ye mete it shall be measured unto you again." So far the resisters were right, and I do not intend to use their resistance to the adhibition of their signatures to any such document as a tacit and implied confession of their theological heterodoxy as has, we are sorry to say, in some cases been done. 1866.

H

Those are the truly orthodox who preserve the human mind from fetters and confessions. Right thinking is only possible when all sides of an opinion may be looked at and judged of. But while we coincide with the nonconformists to this concordat between science and theology, we have an argument to deduce from it to prove that, as a fact, science does induce scepticism. It is simply this,- He who excuses himself accuses himself. If there were no doubts of a man's innocence, he need be at no pains to proclaim it. Our argument therefore stands thus. Such a document as that referred to was thought necessary, and the implied assertion of its necessity was acquiesced in by no fewer, we believe, than seven hundred cultivators of science. Well, it must have been felt to be necessary, éither because the consciences of these men smote them with a sense of the truth of the saying that there is an antagonism between theology and science, or because such an opinion had become so widely prevalent amongst thinking men that it was thought advisable to dispel the so-called illusion. But in the first case (supposed) the signers are themselves witnesses that science does induce (not, mind you, produce) scepticism. And in the second case enough of evidence is assented to, as existing among scientific men, to lead thinking men (for to protest against the hasty conclusions of thoughtless men would be nonsense) to believe that science does induce scepticism. It is extremely improbable that thinking men would readily and extensively form a wrong opinion on such a subject; and it is still more improbable that they would have had the justice of their grounds for such a belief admitted by such a patent fact as a public disclaimer of scepticism, circulated by scientific men, if there had not been some tolerably sufficient cause for the opinion that science induces scepticism. Hence we argue that this is either the fact of the matter, or that the men of science of our day are egregious fools in excusing themselves from a proofless accusation.

So far goeth our first argument, which is valid at any rate thus far, viz., that there is a considerable probability that science does induce scepticism.

I pass on to another. The scientific Sundays in St. James's Hall, which, at the close of last year and the beginning of this, excited considerable interest, seem to me a very tolerable proof that science induces scepticism. Those who got up and favoured these scientific Sundays either thought the theological Sunday effete and useless, and so were sceptical of the religious duty of sabbath observance; or they thought that theology and its teachings were less efficacious than science and its revelations, and so were sceptical of revelation (other than scientific) altogether. Here, then, is most palpable proof that science induces scepticism-scepticism of sabbath duty and worship; scepticism of any revelation of God besides that which He has given in the earth, the sea, the sky, and their contents. Had these men believed in the theological tenets of the Christian churches, they would have left the Sunday free to wor

shipful observance, and they would not have advanced any record of the discoveries of man to a place of rivalry with the revelation of God, His purposes, His will, and His salvation. This fact alone proves, at least, that science, through its chief men, sought to induce scepticism.

Whence come these endless discussions on Genesis and geology? Whence all these schemes of "reconciliation" between Moses and Lyell? Have Miller, and Whewell, and Birks, been labouring zealously under a mistake? and has there never been any direct or indirect attempt on the part of geologists to cast doubt on the records of creation given in Scripture by inspiration of God? Have physiologists never hinted at any discrepancy between their readings of the human frame and God's record of its formation? Have questions regarding selections of species not been opposed to the divine statements regarding the election of species? Has not the Deluge been spoken of as a delusion, at least, if not a deception? and do not some men of science deny that God has "made of one blood all men to dwell upon the face of the earth"? This is scepticism; it is a doubting of what, according to theology, God has revealed. It is evident, therefore, that science induces scepticism.

There has been opened up recently a whole literature, which may be called the literature of the supernatural. It concerns itself with such questions as-Is inspiration possible or probable? Are miracles believable? Is the will subject to unchanging law as nature is? Are miracles consonant with science? &c., &c. Is all this useless? Has it no purpose? Have no suggestions of science given rise to scepticism upon these points? and does the existence of such a literature not prove that science induces scepticism?

A short time ago, in almost all the large cities in England, the Owenites and Rationalists had meeting-places. These were in general called "Halls of Science." This proves, at least, that they thought that science induces scepticism; and that the use of the word science was quite enough to act as a synonym for nontheological.

Take, again, the literature called Rationalist. It is filled with references to science and its revelations. It erects science into Scripture, and pins its faith to that which is constantly changing and debatable. It prefers the revelations of man (science) to the Revelation of God (Scripture). Its trust in science induces scepticism of Scripture.

The settled antagonism of science and theology in all past ages argues to the same effect, and shows that, in the opinion of the past as of the present, science induces scepticism.

I have argued all this as matter of fact from matter of fact. I presume that the facts are indubitable, and that the deductions are irrefragable. I am far from thinking, however, that the mere fact that science induces scepticism proves that it ought to do so. I hold a different opinion. I hold that truth and faith are not necessarily opponents, that men commit grievous error in making them