word "selfish." It tells us not what a person is, but what he is not. It is not distinctively moral, and when used to indicate a negative attribute may be a correct designation of an early period in the life of the individual. But if used in an ethical sense, or to imply in its subject certain moral attributes, the word "unselfish" is probably as inaccurate in its application to children as its opposite. Selfishness implies some knowledge or conception of meum and tuum, my right and thy right, a knowledge which children cannot be said to possess at a very early age. They have not reached the conception of selfishness or unselfishness. These ideas and the attributes pertaining to them are only reached after a lapse of time, and are developed by the tendency of the individual, the practice of his companions, and the example, precept, and authority of parents, guardians, teachers. As the race passes from family to state, and thence to individual rights, the individual goes through probationary stages in reaching the high position of an independent moral being.

To destroy selfishness, Plato would deprive man of private rights and property; and, to raise the individual, he would substitute a general or universal motive in the place of a particular impulse.

Bacon says "Wealth is the impedimenta of virtue." Property hinders virtue, yet virtue cannot proceed without property. It is as necessary as warlike stores or baggage to an army. The greater number of virtues require for their exercise the relinquishment upon one side, and the bestowal upon the other, of individual rights and properties. Suppose a state of society in which there are no private rights and no private property-a society Plato and certain modern communists advocate-where would the virtues which depend on property and rights for their exercise find place? Clearly nowhere. There would be no place even for that first step in morals and religion-selfsacrifice.

Many of the motives which most power fully operate upon us are private motives or mixed motives, i. e., motives which have a private object or partly a private and partly a general object in view. A motive purely for the public good or universal bene-¡ fit, though it may be exalted in character, and in certain ways of widespread influence, is not so intense, does not effect so much

and is not found among so many individuals as a motive which is confined to one or two objects. The logical rule of comprehension and intention seems to apply. When Plato, therefore, in building his society, introduced public to the total exclusion of private and mixed motives, he substituted a weaker for a stronger principle of action. The world has advanced beyond the position wherein a purely private motive is considered necessarily evil. Duties to self are an important part of any scheme of morals, and, while these are insisted upon, general motives, so far from being excluded, are fostered with great care. While in Plato's communism there could be only one incentive to action, and that a comparatively weak incentive-the public good-society, as it is framed, has the benefit of all the stronger and weaker motives that can impel man.

The morality of Plato's communism was a state morality. Duties were state duties; its religion, a state religion. It was systematic and in character resembled somewhat the morality of Sparta and of early Rome. It is doubtful if, even at the time of Cicero, Rome had advanced to a higher conception of morality than that conveyed in the Roman definition of the good man: 'Quis est bonus? Is qui leges patrice senatusque decreta observat. It mattered not what the laws of fatherland were, or what the senate decreed, disobedience of or resistance to these constituted the extremest form of individual depravity known to the ancient world. One is much inclined to think, on reading his orations against Catiline, that Cicero himself was not altogether free from the same ideas. That Plato should have reverted to state theories is explicable from his circumstances. He saw that private rights were sapping the foundations of the State, that the State was decaying, and that scepticism and immorality were becoming prevalent; and he identified the State and the individual. But his system was unsuited to his times. A morality, to be valid among a people where private right is acknowledged, must be a morality which operates on that private right. As the moral code of the clansman-fidelity to his clanwould not suit a society formed of a collection of clans, but there must arise a higher obligation to the State, so, obedience to state decrees, and conformity with tradition, is an unsuitable conception of morality wherever independent private right is acknowledged.

A necessary part of Plato's communism is the destruction of the family tie. No one acquainted with the history or the writings of Plato would accuse him of immoral practice in life, or immoral intention in his works; yet the obvious result of his system of politics would, in our civilization, be a general depravity. If we have any safeguard to morality other than religion, it is the sanctifying influence of the family tie. The best deserved compliment yet paid by religion to a social relation was that by which marriage, in a portion of the Christian Church, was raised to the dignity of a sacrament. Whatever the effect of communal marriage or no-marriage may have been in patriarchal times, or when the font and origin of obligation was the State, there needs not much examination to see, that in modern times the absence of marriage must inevitably lead to the opposite of the ennobling public good.

Plato's theory for the amelioration of society could not have been reduced to prac

tice even in his own day. The teaching of the State, for a time sufficient, had brought forth powers of mind which criticized that teaching, and found it wanting. A further march in civilization was possible only upon the introduction of new principles and doctrines. The elements of these were not found in Greece. She had already exhausted herself, and was drifting into nothingness. She had no basis upon which to proceed forward; and on looking back to the time of Plato, and considering the subsequent history of his country, one is inclined to think it a most fortunate circumstance for Western Europe, that, at the downfall of the State, Greece had no religious reformer, who, as Confucius and Mahomet, should improve, revive, and stereotype, as it were, for ever, the stale theories of an incomplete civilization. But the Greeks were a philosophical rather than a religious people.

T. B. BROWNING. (To be concluded in next number.)

A

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VERY one must have noticed the great tendency that exists now-a-days among the smaller fry of the scientific and literary worlds to belittle the labours and the results of men who are, in verity, Tritons among these minnows. There seems to be no choice for writers who cannot be great scholars themselves, but to carp at those whose bigger brains and better directed industry have really achieved something for mankind: the position of appreciation from a lower level does not seem to occur to them; and every modern hod-bearing builder, just capable of running up a temporary house whose faults of construction are hidden with plaster and stucco, deems himself qualified to squint askance up the Pyramids and hint that the masonry, to say nothing of the design, of Cheops is no better than it should be, while he astonishes his own little circle of groundlings with an "an I would, I could."

I have lately learned from men of this stamp some surprising things in Art and Science. It was new to me, I confess, that Turner, of all men the most faithful lover and follower of Nature, and the most rewarded by her for that love and that pursuit, got his designs from letting children mix coloured beads together or by running damp colours promiscuously over his palate. With all the shifting imagery of cloud-scape and sea-scape before him, was Turner likely to have stooped to this? I could have marked this anecdote as a lying clot of dirt, flung from below, without the positive evidence afforded by the vast and inimitable series of sketches, still extant in every stage of finish, which he has left behind him to attest the fatherhood of his paintings and redeem them from such an imputation of bastardy.

All our great men are compelled in these times to take some particular department of truth under their cognisance. Science has extended its researches so far that another Verulam, if we had him, would have to drop that proud motto, "I have taken all Nature to be my Province." Spencer, perhaps, is the most extended thinker of the day and

the one whose range is widest; but the ordinary leaders of thought wisely confine themselves each to his own branch, knowing full well that there is more than he can master there; feeling that his investigation will aid the labourers in cognate fields of thought; and that when, for purposes of generalisation and of checking his own results, he desires to go outside his own section of nature, it will be better for him to accept the laws laid down by other specialists, than to plunge into the experimental verification of their rules at the cost of much precious time and energy. But while Huxley or Tyndall would not think of turning aside to impugn the accuracy of Dr. Hooker's account of a foreign flora they had never seen, and while the great botanist in turn would not care to controvert Max Müller's history of some obscure Semitic dialect, the ordinary little great scholar of the day (save the mark !) will rush in and set all four right all round! A political economist, like Mill, may expose as ludicrous the old Mercantile System, and the theory that whatever cause operated to keep cash in the country increased its wealth (no matter what the drain upon its resources might be), and that any state of things that tended to send gold away was ruinous, whatever other commodities might flow in to take its place. No modern student of that science will venture to support the demolished theorem, but I will venture to predict that yesterday, to-day, and tomorrow, Canadian editors and Canadian politicians will be found depicting to a people not uneducated in political economy, the hard cash disappearing over the border-line and carrying Canada's prosperity away with it.

It was only the other day that a Professor * in a Canadian University, whose fame has not yet reached the dimensions attained by either Spencer or Tyndall, dubbed the latter a Philistine; kindly explaining that this term implied "impenetrability to ideas be

Watson, March number of CANADIAN MONTHLY, "Professor Tyndall's Materialism." By Prof.

p. 282.

yond the more or less limited circle of conceptions within which the mind from habit finds it easy to move." Sometimes, as I find the case to be with this critic's own arguments, the "impenetrability" is not so much due to the obtuseness of the block-headed recipient as to the lack of point in the should-be-penetrative idea, and I would add that a greater feeling of modesty might have induced the Professor to ask himself whether Tyndall's smallest circle of conceptions might not be apt to overlap his own. It is of a piece with this, when Professor Watson in the same paper describes Herbert Spencer's philosophy, which he clearly fails to understand, as a "mechanical mixture of science and metaphysic," and tells us that no intelligible meaning can be extracted from this or that statement which it contains.

But the above examples sink almost into insignificance by the side of Professor Gregg, whose lecture on the Mosaic Authority of Deuteronomy set my mind at work upon this subject. His views are so refreshingly amusing, and at times so ingenuously open as to his own want of study of the subject, that I hope I may be permitted to run shortly over them. The difficulty is just this: Ewald and a host of other authorities, the leading lights among modern Hebraists, and by Hebraists I mean those who have studied the history, customs, manners, and literature of the nation, as well as its mere naked language,—have come to the conclusion, after mature deliberation, that Moses did not write the fifth book of the Pentateuch. It would not be necessary for my present purpose, even if I had the material before me, to give the grounds and reasons they adduce for this belief. It is enough to say that most of the best critics concede that their position is unassailable, and that even those who differ from them yet allow that they are of all men the best qualified to speak upon such a subject. One would have thought that the evil fate which Boyle and Temple met with when they impugned the justice of Bentley's criticism upon the Epistles of Phalaris, would have taught all minor scholastic lights not to attack too rashly the soundness of the views held by men confessedly occupying the first rank in their profession; but it is not so. Luckily for himself, Professor Gregg keeps at a sufficient remove from the arcana of his subject

to prevent much risk of a rejoinder from any German scholar of notoriety.

In the first place, how touchingly candid is the admission our Professor makes, that the last chapter, recording the death of Moses, "may have been written by some one else! There is an air, too, of coy reluctance about even this concession, as if the lecturer were aware how much his position is weakened by it! For the same hand that penned this finish may have added other parts, may have strung together traditions or even fragments of a previous record, originally compiled by one or more writers of different dates, thus accounting for the clear internal evidence detected by Ewald, and by others before him, that parts of the book in question were the work of a man who called his God by the name Elohim, and the rest by one who worshipped the Lord Jehovah, no mere verbal distinction, but one which coincides with two varying phases of belief in God and two comparatively distinct periods..

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Professor Gregg then intimates that no. very profound scholarship is absolutely required" to settle this vexed question. According to him, "a diligent, judicious, devout student of a good English translation of the Scriptures, is fairly competent to discuss and pronounce a decision on the controversy, and is just as likely to arrive at a right conclusion as are those who make a great parade of scholarship," &c., &c. Now this flattery of your audience, "who do not pretend to be profoundly versed in oriental literature," will not deceive many. I, for one, am no Hebraist, but it does not require a knowledge of the mysterious vowel points to teach me that no common-sense student of our authorised version can pronounce the dogmatic decision which he is asked to do. When Niebuhr first analysed the legendary history of Rome and traced it back to its original ballads and oral traditions, he met with much opposition from pedants, but I have yet to learn that anybody ventured to say that the ordinary English reader of a translation of Livy could have adduced reasons against which Niebuhr's learned objections would not have "a feather's weight." And how much greater is the difficulty in this case. Adopting for the purpose of the argument the ordinary Biblical chronology, the question here is as follows: Professor Gregg affirms that Deuteronomy was written