would be in man criminal may be praiseworthy and righteous altogether in an all-wise God. Clearly his censure of Auguste Comte (somewhat frivolous, and responsible for any flippancy in the present article) and his relegation of John Stuart Mill to a bygone age of thought obligate Mr. Fiske to do better than both. He is to save the omnipotence along with the all-goodness. What does he actually achieve? A brilliant presentation of the modern (and ancient) theory of the unity of nature (implied in such words as "cosmos and "universus"); a clear precision of the content of conscious life-successive changes and discriminations; and then the positive assertion is ventured that, without evil and pain for contrast, good and pleasure must remain unknown and as though, therefore, they were not. The moral progress of

the world is, however, believed to be the elimination of evil. Wherefore, to save himself and his readers from the preposterous paradox that moral progress tends to moral annihilation, Mr. Fiske quite ingeniously suggests that good may be some time discriminated only from a lower form of itself (why not so discriminated at the start and ever after?), and finally, in the day when all base metals turn of their own sweet will to gold, good will be distinguished from a mere memory—a mental presentation of something whereto no existing external thing corresponds any more! (One asks then, legitimately enough, why not always distinguished from some hallucination or nightmare of phantasy, rather than from a hideous, God-devised reality?)

But

It seems to us that Mr. Fiske has only limited the power of God less overtly, but no less disastrously to religious sentiment, than John Stuart Mill. He has tried to show that God could not (or would not) make man capable of discerning good without the distressful contrast which evil affords. we should be disposed to question altogether the truth of Mr. Fiske's assertion concerning the knowledge of good. May not pleasure (one kind of sensation or emotion) be differentiated from a lack of sensation or emotion-one variety of pleasure from another (as Mr. Fiske admits himself on p. 55), sweet from no taste as well as from sour or bitter, moral

good from the indifferent as well as from moral evil? And so to us the latter seems to vitiate the former portion of Mr. Fiske's argument. It appears, indeed as though out of sheer reluctance to hang on either horn of the angry dilemma, he has permitted himself to be gloriously tossed up by both horns of the logical monster into the "intense" though, we are compelled to admit, stylistically beautiful" inane.”

In the second essay Mr. Fiske devotes twenty pages to stating difficulties. The peaceful seeming of nature is surface illusion; really there is everywhere internecine, truceless war without quarter. The prodigality of means to ends in the cosmic process seems in a high degree "unintelligent, not to say immoral." A Caliban philosophy explaining this universal waste as wanton mockery, a monstrous piece of cynicism, is set aside with deserved contempt. Finally Mr. Fiske respectfully protests against what seems the import of a famous address of Mr. Huxley. To set the ethical process over against the cosmic process would involve an intolerable breach of continuity. In language of considerable grace the cosmic process is credited with an original intention of initiating the ethical process, and of being itself ultimately more and more replaced by the same as human history advances toward some "far off divine event." This intention, thus charitably ascribed, is not so easy to substantiate if we muse on Mr. Fiske's frank admission (p. 66) that the fittest for survival is not always the best or most highly organized; that, in a word, evolution sometimes spells degeneration. Clearly the cosmic process is so well satisfied with its good intentions as to be in no great haste! For twenty-eight pages Mr. Fiske gives us a portrayal of the genesis of man. First, natural selection as understood by Darwin produces the rough physical man. Then, as Wallace saw, variations of intelligence become more profitable than variations of body, and the brain develops. Next, according to Mr. Fiske's own contribution to the theory of evolution, the period of infancy was prolonged because the antenatal sufficed not for the registration in nerve centers of the parent's complicated experience. Helplessness of progeny brought about affectional

relations between mother and young, greater permanence of the family, whence in due season the clan and the subordination of individual and parental interests to social good. In ten pages a little farther on Mr. Fiske speaks with no common exquisiteness of sentiment concerning the part maternity has played in the beginnings of altruism.

Yet what is after all the clear gain of the religious reader? In Sections X. and XII. he is assured that "toward the spiritual perfection of humanity the stupendous momentum of the cosmic process has all along been tending; that spiritual perfection is the true goal of evolution, the divine end that was involved from the beginning" (p. 113). "The moral sentiments, the moral law, devotion to unselfish ends, disinterested love, nobility of soul-these are nature's most highly wrought products, latest in coming to maturity; they are the consummation toward which all earlier prophecy has pointed" (p. 130). Yet on page 123 Mr. Fiske registers his disgust with preceding stages: "Nearly nine-tenths of our planet's past lifetime, measured in duration, had passed away without achieving any higher result." The sweeping victory of the mammals over the "oviparous dinosauri, crawling or bounding over the land, splashing amid mighty waters, whizzing batlike through the air, horrible brutes innumerable, with bulky bodies and tiny brains, clumsy, coarse in fiber, and cold-blooded" does not atone for the fact that the cosmic process was so long content to have them lord it over creation. If for incalculable æons "the survival of the fittest" was the only law of life, if Mr. Fiske is right in stating of such a universe that "there is not even dignity in it, nothing whatever but resistless all-producing and all-consuming energy" (p. 78); and if energy, in fine, be not in itself something good and sublime-then one asks how shall you account for the divine patience? Is it not, when coupled with all power and all wisdom, immoral, wicked? Mr. Fiske merely tries to prove the end good, and assumes that the means he has admitted to be in themselves odious are thereby justified. Not so. Nor are we content when told that "such a universe is not the one in which we live." Even if moral

ity has been produced, so as to dominate our world, the process of its production according to Mr. Fiske's own presentation appears heinously immoral. With righteous man the best end requires for its acceptable realization means in themselves wholly worthy and noble. So also with deity, or God is not as holy as holy men. Perhaps, however, he may be justified on the ground of limited power!

Furthermore, Mr. Fiske is carefully reticent as to the planet's probable future. The astronomer has something to say about dead planets and extinct suns. On the principle set forth by Mr. Fiske that the justification of the whole book of life is to be sought in the concluding chapter, what of the ugly hypothesis that the last laugher who shall laugh best, therefore, should issue conquering and to conquer from the world of the microscope, close cousin to the microbe? For our own part the entire process can alone be justified on condition that every stage is felt to have its own sufficient raison d'être. The God of the cosmic process cannot be allowed to seem cynically indifferent to means; and Mr. Fiske's whole essay, therefore, strikes us as affording a rarely charming instance of the adoption (so common by literary men) of the tactics successfully practiced for ages by their primate, the fabulous inkfish, hiding from the enemy of doubt (is God both all-good and all-powerful?) and deeming him annihilated because concealed by clouds of a non-translucent secretion.

Mr. Fiske's third and final essay may, however, save the day for him. "Deo erexit Voltaire" is an interesting section attempting to show that modern "atheism" (if there be any) is a prejudice inherited from the eighteenth century, which went too far in its revolt from mediævalism. The Athanasian conception of the immanent deity is, however, quite competent to rescue us from the Latin theology, with its god external to nature. This god of the Greek fathers Mr. Fiske proceeds to identify with the First Cause, criticising Spencer's name "the Unknowable" as purely negative and misleading, however in strict parlance correct. So far we have nothing new. The difficulties in conceiving the First Cause

as psychical are admitted to be "insurmountable." Why, then, we may ask, surmount them or appear to do so? Because "the atom and the cosmical ether" are likewise inconceivable? This is a mere argumentum ad hominem. The materialists may answer that the "atom" and the "cosmical ether" will be cheerfully given up when some more credible hypotheses are forthcoming to order as well as they do the observed phenomena. Does the hypothesis "a quasi-human god subserve any similar purpose? Is it held with similar reserve? Is not the reason for the hypothesis an emotional one? Witness the little philosophic assistance it gives, and the difficulties it creates beyond the region of all verifiable thought. In any case it is possible for some one to deny atom and cosmical ether as entities, but it is the very vital purpose of the hypothetic god to serve as ens entium. Let us leave the universe unexplained rather than offer as explanation something in itself more inexplicable yet. And this, we say, because "science can deal only with second causes" (p. 141), wherefore all dealing with the First Cause must admittedly be altogether unscientific. It must be a matter of liking, not of demonstration; of temperament rather than inherent probability-in other words, of faith and not of knowledge.

So much for our materialist's answer to the argumentum ad hominem. Mr. Fiske then proceeds to state that religion has had (always and everywhere) three essential postulates: the quasi-human god, the undying human soul, the ethical significance of the unseen world. That this is historically demonstrable may be gravely questioned. The religion of the Old Testament knows not the second and little of the third. Confucianism ignores the first. Primitive Buddhism is believed by many authorities to have denied all three. They are, however, the essentials of the Christian religion as understood by a large section of our cultured classes to-day.

Mr. Fiske proceeds to advance an argument for religionthat is, for the reality of somewhat whereto the religious life of man has been a response. Now this argument seems to be very strong indeed, but it does not prove anything so much as the essay would, by its structure, lead one to sup