again it is in the omissions and consequent implications that falsehood lurks. The corollary, so essential to aggressive religious teaching, is that God will look out for the good man in this world. . . “Nothing is so well established," says Professor Huxley," as that there is no connection between prosperity in this life and morality." This is, of course, rather bald, and needs obverse statement. It is hardly necessary to point out that if virtue meets no uniform material reward in this life, certainly the reward of sin is even more doubtful and less promising. The sinner against society not only suffers spiritual decay, but lives in uneasy outlawry until the sure moment of his selfbetrayal and conviction. Virtue and vice are their own rewards; says Milton: "The mind is its own place, and can of itself make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven."

Still the thinker in any field of human investigation must come to the same conclusion as Professor Huxley and the Psalmist,—that sometimes the wicked are seen spreading themselves "like a green bay tree"; and that here and there a Job dies before his vindication. Nevertheless, in spite of common observation, practical morality goes on preaching. "Never have I seen the righteous forsaken, nor his seed begging their bread"; and what is more, genuine returns are realized on this alloy. Franklin's version of the same morality, "honesty is the best policy," is bound to be more popular than the Golden Rule,— honesty for its own sake. Give honesty a low meaning, and I suppose Franklin was right; but carry the real spirit of honesty into business, be no more careful of your own interests than you are of the other man's,-and see how far in a world of other men this policy will carry you before you go into the hands of a receiver. Conscience bears no dividends; yet morality would feel she had been robbed of a high trump and mankind would lose their healthy optimism if honesty and success were divorced.

The

Said Epictetus: "It is not easy to exhort weak young men; for neither is it easy to hold soft cheese with a hook." Welsh-rabbit mind has always been predominant. Sharp-cutting and pointed steel in the study, but the silver spoon in public when the truth has been successfully reduced to hash. What has proved good in the way of belief" in the past has never been

the most advanced truth of the time; so why should we continue to chafe in the effort to harness the "true" and the "good" together? They have never pulled well abreast; their practical relation is tandem, the "good" leading, with the "true" steadily plodding in the rear. . . The Pragmatists beg the whole question by deciding that the "good," however crooked it appeared, must have been the " true" after all,-to which sophistry one is welcome if it brings comfort. I prefer to face the music with candor and common-sense, saying, Truth is a mystery; good attains its ends by uncouth means.

"M

FRANCIS GRIERSON

A Study in Modern Mysticism

EDWIN BJÖRKMAN

EN of genius," says Francis Grierson, "are the symbols and the finger-points which nature unfolds here and there as indications of the mathematical and psychic progression of the visible and invisible world in which we live."

But that evolutionary process which we call progress presents itself to me everywhere as a pendular swinging between opposites lying now in this, now in that direction. In our efforts to determine the momentary direction of those swingings, we select, more or less arbitrarily, certain points deriving their significance from tendencies common to all life. Thus, for instance, we find it hard to indicate any kind of spiritual advance without reference to what we generally name "scepticism" and mysticism "principles back of which we discover fundamental attitudes of the human mind.

Surveyed from the antipodal position, scepticism appears little more than carping doubt, while mysticism, similarly viewed, implies blind faith and poor thinking. Regarded in this hostile spirit, both attitudes seem like pure negations of progress. Very differently they appear, indeed, if we study them from within, so to speak, and in proper coördination with life in its entirety. Then scepticism is seen to stand for a demand that nothing be accepted as real which cannot be tested and re-tested by our senses supported by such artificial aids as our growing ingenuity enables us to devise. And mysticism becomes identified with an insistence on the supreme importance of realities. so subtle that they lie beyond anything ascertainable by mere sense perception.

As far back as we have records of systematic thinking, we find the human mind swinging periodically between these antagonistic attitudes, the inference being that neither one of them represents the full truth, but only a part of the truth which needs

temporary accentuation if life's onward course along the median line is to be maintained. We may add that the sceptical view, as a rule, draws its main inspiration from the intellect, while mysticism places the greater emphasis on the emotional side of our being.

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The flowering time of classic antiquity was, on the whole, sceptical and intellectual. Christianity inaugurated an era of highly emotional mysticism that lasted up to and beyond the dawn of the Renaissance. With the beginning of what we call modern" times, the sway passed to reason, and up to the eve of the French Revolution man's spirit continued to grow more and more dryly sceptical. The nearer we come to our own day, the shorter and quicker grow the swingings of the pendulum. The emotional period named the Romantic Era lasted less than a century before it yielded to another intellectual reaction, and this, again, showed signs of waning within a few decades. The characteristic mark of this most recent period of scepticism was that it discouraged any venturing beyond that central field of obvious existence on which falls the full light of our self-consciousness. And the main reasons for feeling that our faces are once more set toward the mystical pole lie in the eagerness with which we are now shedding our former agnostic timidity, and in the growing tendency to spend at least a small part of ourselves in those marginal tracts of being upon which falls the shadow of the unknowable.

When, in 1886, Ibsen published Rosmersholm, the end of naturalism in literature and of materialism in philosophy was already in sight. Three years later a single twelvemonth encompassed three outwardly unrelated events, each one of which must be held momentous in the annals of the present spiritual phase. In 1889 Maeterlinck published his first play, Princess Maleine. In 1889 Bergson sent forth his first great philosophical work, which has only recently become familiar in this country under its English title of Time and Free Will. And in that same year a tiny volume of essays and aphorisms in French was printed privately at Paris by Francis Grierson under the name of La Révolte Idéaliste.

Within certain circles that little volume was hailed as a

revelation and a battle cry. Maeterlinck read it and expressed his admiration openly. The general public heard no more of it than of Bergson's coeval work. Of course, the early plays of Maeterlinck warned many of an impending change. And in each new drama turned out by Ibsen toward the end of his life, the mystical tendency asserted itself more strongly. But I think that the first book which made the beginning of a new period palpably evident was The Treasure of the Humble, appearing in 1896. In the same year Bergson published his second volume, named Matter and Memory. And three years later Grierson issued his first book in English-a group of essays bearing the significant title of Modern Mysticism and including much of what had already been printed in the earlier French volume.

Life has a way of making many tools work as one, while each of them thinks itself alone "on the job." This is practically what happened to the three men in whom I am inclined to see the living pillars of the thought-structure most expressive of our own day and its tendencies. Each one of them may owe something to the other two, and yet all of them were from the start impelled by a common spirit and would probably in the end have reached a clear understanding of this spirit without mutual assistance. Maeterlinck has proved himself more of an artist than Grierson, and Bergson more of a thinker. The formulations of both Maeterlinck and Bergson are more definite in outline than those of Grierson. But to Grierson belongs the honor of having first attained to prophetic vision of the common goal. For that humble volume of 1889 suggested more or less gropingly every idea which since then has become recognized as essential, not only to Maeterlinck and Bergson, but to the constantly increasing number of writers who are now engaged in making the time conscious of its own spirit. And it is as one of nature's "finger-points "-the first one of its kind to bear a fairly plain inscription-that Grierson interests me.

His position in the van of modern thought is the more remarkable because he began life as a musician, and under circumstances that, at first glance, would seem decidedly unfavorable to his later literary development. It is doubtful, however, whether he could ever have become what we now see in him