has brought about the purification of the moral world from the sensualism into which the imaginative theology of the Greeks so naturally declined. This, of course, was quite necessary; the good being the element, the very atmosphere rather, which society must breathe in order to maintain itself in any degree of health and comfort. Nevertheless, the world is beautiful, nay flowing and overflooded with superfluous beauty in all directions; and the aboriginal savage, with whose germing æsthetics we started these remarks, whether he reasoned or not on the subject, would unquestionably be possessed by a healthy instinct that the same sort of law for decoration, which had compelled him to adorn his hut, was at work in the well-ordered garniture of flowers and fruits and stars, with which he found himself surrounded. He would feel, if he could not formulate, the identity of the plastic design which marshalled the stars, and diapered the fields, with the imitative and secondary art with which he had studied to clothe the bareness of his original place of shelter. Savages are in some respects better off than the devotees of special sciences in the advanced stages of social culture. That systematic divorce of the beautiful from the holy and the good, which has marked some modern Christian sects, could not have occurred to a healthy-minded human animal in the Homeric or pre-Homeric stage. In carrying out this unnatural divorce, the Scotch, as we stated at the outset, have been the most systematic offenders; an extreme section of them, even at the present day, having handed over the fine arts wholesale to the Devil, or at least, with a rigid repulsion, insisted on keeping them out of the Church. The evil of this narrow policy is double; for, while on the one hand it renders the baldness of the Church service unpalatable to a considerable section of the middle and upper classes, who are thereby inclined to pass over to Episcopacy; on the other hand it deprives the fine arts of their highest aims, which they can attain only by consecration to the service of God. In this view, it is pleasant to observe how the resumption of the realm of the beautiful into the domain of a reasonable theology has recently come, as was to have been expected, from the bosom of the Anglican Church; the well-known sermon on Nature, by Dr. Mozley,* and the excellent little volume on the Natural Theology of Beauty, by Tyrwhitt, being authoritative voices on this text that will not fail to find an echo in the public mind.† "Sermons preached before the University of Oxford," by J. B. Mozley, D.D. 2nd edition, London. 1876. "The Natural Theology of Natural Beauty," by the Rev. St. John Tyrwhitt. London. 1882. Mr. Tyrwhitt sums up the conclusion of his book shortly thus: 1. "That visible Nature represents the design, or a small part of it, of a living soul; and that that design includes our welfare.' And 2. "That Nature does this by enabling man to observe in the world exterior to himself, and in himself, (a) structure, through scientific analysis, and (8) beauty as in immediate form or colour, or through Art"-words than which I could not desire any One observation we feel bound to make in concluding, that, so far as the history of æsthetical philosophy in this country is concerned, it would be altogether a mistake to confound the negative ideas on the philosophy of taste which we have noted in the English, and more particularly in the Scottish people, with the doctrine taught by the few writers that we can boast of on æsthetical science. The wide reception which the shallow association theory obtained for a season among the wits of the modern Athens was no doubt a striking proof of how little the atmosphere which Jeffrey and Alison breathed partook of that element which gave elevation to the work of Phidias and the philosophy of Plato. Greek, as Sydney Smith said, never marched in great force to the north of the Tweed, certainly never leapt over the outer cincture of the soul of any thorough-bred Scotch Calvinist; but the special form of æsthetical scepticism preached by the association sophists, so far from being an expression of the general character of Scottish aesthetical science, runs directly in the teeth of the best utterances on the subject, both before the bewilderment produced by the sophistical glory and after it. Even Dugald Stewart, who takes off his hat to Alison in a style with difficulty to be distinguished from absolute submission, in the first paragraph of his discussion of the principle of association, cuts off the ground from this theory as a foundation on which any really scientific account of our æsthetic sentiments can be raised :—" It is," says he," the province of association to impart to one thing the agreeable or disagreeable effects of another; but association can never account for the origin of a class of pleasures different in kind from all the others we know. If there was nothing originally and intrinsically beautiful, the associating principle would have no materials on which it could operate." This is sense, a peculiarly Scottish virtue, over which in that climate metaphysical subtleties and twinkling sophistrics never obtain anything but a very partial and fleeting triumph. To Hamilton we have already referred; and Dr. Reid, the most authoritative spokesman of the Caledonian philosophy, in his " Essay on Beauty," stands stoutly up against the tendency then beginning to manifest itself as an outgrowth of some of Locke's loose propositions-viz., the tendency to deprive a large class of our noblest sentiments and most elevating ideas of all objective value, by fixing the attention exclusively on one of the two factors employed in their production. He also distinctly emphasizes an essential excellence or perfection possessed by all objects admired as beautiful, and along with this admiration he willingly pays homage to the divine source from which all excellence more succinctly and more effectively to summarize the doctrine of which I have endeavoured to sketch the outline in the present paper. * "Works of Dugald Stewart." Edinburgh, 1855. Vol. v. p. 243. On the Beautiful, ch. vi. proceeds. And before Reid, Hutcheson, Professor of Mental Philosophy in Glasgow, had given prominence in his "Essay on Beauty" to the great principle of uniformity in variety, which, as the dominant principle in the framework, so to speak, of all aesthetical science, we have in this paper stated as a necessary expression of the unity which belongs to mind.† No less decided is this early writer in his assertion of the divine source to which the cunningly marshalled array of lovely objects in Nature is ultimately to be referred. Coming to more recent times, Fergusson, whose name is a symbol for catholicity and comprehensiveness in architectural art, complains how "not only architecture but all the arts have been cursed by that lowest and most unreasoning source of beauty, association-a principle which teaches men to throw a veil of beauty over some objects in the mind of particular persons, which to others appear commonplace or even ugly." In the year 1835 Dr. MacVicar, of Moffat, gave to the world his extremely ingenious and finely discriminating book on the " Philosophy of the Beautiful,"§ in which he announced the very principle for which we have made stout contention in this paper-viz., "that the elements of beauty by which the eye is flattered or the ear regaled are as determinate as any propositions in mathematics." And with regard to the right which æsthetical science has to take place with the sublimest verities of a reasonable theology, he says: "If there be, as it appears there is, a responsiveness and agreement between Nature and the soul, this only proves the unity or sameness of the Creator of both. But if we refuse to grant a Creator, then all remains an incomprehensible mystery; and, indeed, there is an end of all philosophy. The idea of beauty, the beautiful in essence, must be in the creative mind." And in perfect harmony with this, we find Principal Shairp, in his work on "The Poetic Interpretation of Nature," writing as follows:-" Poetry has three objects-man, nature, and God. The presence of this last pervades all great poetry, whether it lifts an eye of reverence directly towards Himself, or the presence be only indirectly felt, as the centre to which all deep thoughts about man and Nature ultimately tend. Regarded in this view, the field over which poctry ranges becomes co-extensive with the domain of philosophy, indeed of theology." In these words we find the better nature of the Scottish mind blossoming out, unhampered by the sharp fence of scholastic dogma in which it has so long been imprisoned; and in Principal Shairp's book altogether there is an aroma of fine æsthetic instinct, which can be found in a treatise on poetry only when the writer is himself a poet. *Reid's "Essays on the Intellectual Powers," Essay VIII. "An Inquiry into the Original of Beauty and Virtue." London, 1759. 3rd edition. "A Historical Inquiry into the Principles of Beauty in Art." London, 1849. § Edinburgh: Edmonston & Douglas. 1855. No man can write well on any subject of which he has not had a living experience; and it must always be regarded as a misfortune when persons of a prosaic and utilitarian habit of mind feel themselves called upon to put forth judicial utterances on a matter which they can only know at second-haud, or, more properly speaking, labour under a natural capacity of comprehending. When prosaic and matter-of-fact persons meddle with the ideal, they either write nonsense, or very inadequate, very frigid, and altogether soulless sense. In contrast with Mac Vicar and Shairp, in whose pages the Three Graces, the true, the good, and the beautiful, in native sisterhood twine their sacred dance together before the divine source of all good, 'tis sad to see the Scottish philosophy in one of its latest phases reverting to the mere tabulation of uninspired groups, without any reference to the one great source, which alone is able to impart to these groups the unity and the significance which they undoubtedly possess. When such a writer as Professor Bain in his work "On the Emotions and the Will," discourses on ideal beauty, admirable as is the talent of various kinds which the book displays, one always feels as in a church where the walls are curiously decorated with sacred paintings, but where, in turning round, the spectator finds the pedestal in the centre of the shrine without the goddess. Always and everywhere, and in all matters, as Aratus says in the prefatory lines to his book on astronomy, we mortals are in need of Jove—πάντα δὲ Διὸς κεχρήμεθα πάντες—but specially in the contemplation of the beauty and grandeur of the universe, which, if it is not felt indeed to be a temple to worship in, must dwindle down into a toyshop to amuse children, or a farce for fools to laugh at. JOHN STUART BLACKIE. NATURE AND THOUGHT. Nature and Thought: An Introduction to a Natural A BOOK from Mr. Mivart, which gives his latest views on all the more important philosophical problems of the time, cannot fail to be of interest, not only on account of the intellectual attainments and dialectic subtlety of the author himself, but also because we feel that his utterances represent the collective wisdom of the school of theological thinking to which he belongs. Mr. Mivart, as is well known, is an evolutionist to the extent of believing in the transmutation of species, but agrees with Wallace and disagrees with Darwin in holding that an exception to the otherwise general law of evolution must be made in the case of the human species; at any rate, so far as the human mind is concerned. His present work is mainly devoted to a repetition and extension of his previously published arguments on this topic. So far as mere style is concerned, we are doubtful whether theauthor has chosen a good model. He has thrown the work into the form of a dialogue between two friends, whom he names Maxwell and Frankland, the former holding the views which are held by Mr. Mivart himself, and the latter being represented as in a state of mental perplexity due to his study of agnostic teaching, from which perplexity, however, he is eventually redeemed by the course of instruction which he receives in his conversation with Maxwell. We say that we are doubtful whether the dialogue form was a good one for Mr. Mivart to choose; for nowadays, at all events, when artistic ability has developed so largely in the direction of novelwriting, this form ought not to be chosen as the vehicle of philosophical discussion, unless the writer happens to possess some measure of dramatic power; otherwise his dialogue is sure to sound unnatural, even if it does not, as in the present instance, unintentionally tres |