been exceedingly pernicious. In these years, beneath the confident tones and the pedantic forms of a pharisaical spiritualism, how rank an atheistical element often lurks, for we miss the life of which the spirit is but the breath. Now there may be moral causes for one of the most deplorable of all the hypocrisies: but every moral disease has, amid its many moral roots, an intellectual root, and never fails to seek for and to find a speculative apology; and it is from the books of Leibnitz, from the theories of Leibnitz, that this malady of the nations has drawn intellectual nutriment and speculative justification. It is impossible to treat the relation of Leibnitz to philosophy as purely a matter of literary or scholastic interest.. From the time of Leibnitz dates the disadvantageous, the disastrous position which spiritualism occupies in the great battle which it has to fight in every age against the sophistries, the errors, and the bestialities of pyrrhonism and epicureanism. He stripped it of its armour, dried up its pith, by robbing it of its spontaneousness. It is true that the schoolmen had in some measure done the same; but their empire did not go much beyond the schools. Religion continued to trust to its own vitality, and not to the subtleties of the schoolmen. The Reformation gave increased intensity to dogmatism both of a positive and an antagonistic kind. Religion, however, still remained a free and flowing force, spurning all bondage to the mechanical. With the appearance of Leibnitz on the scene, we behold a tragical change, against the effects of which the churches of Christendom, and especially the Protestant churches, strive in vain. For a century and a half science has been smothering faith, while professedly the handmaid of faith. It is only the science that has sworn no fealty to faith from which faith has received no injury, though it is science of such a kind that the current theologies, blind alike to their own interests and to the glory of God, have alone attacked. Dishonest science is ever materialism disguised; materialism the more baneful from the mask it wears. It was the grand achievement of our philosopher's life to make science dishonest; not intentionally so, but from

his insatiate mania for compromise. The idea which dominated his entire existence was a political idea; an idea which even in the noblest minds draws its sap and substance from materialism. A statesman is one who does the work of the state with the material instruments at his disposal. A German writer of our own age, and who was also a statesman, Ancillon, was proclaimed by the Institute of France the worthy heir and successor of Leibnitz, for exhibiting in a book avowedly dedicated to the subject, and in other works, the means of reconciling extremes in opinion. Undoubtedly this is a chief art in statesmanship: but what may be an excellence and a triumph there may be a degradation in philosophy, a corruption in morality, and a curse in religion. Philosophy is absolute reason, morality absolute law, and religion absolute conviction, from which an unceasing incense of prayer goes up. The property of the absolute in each case is identical with, creates, and is created by, the spiritual. No artificial reconciliation of extremes therefore is what is wanted, but the boldest enouncement, the most fecund evolvement of extremes. So thought not Leibnitz, who was possessed by the demon of mediatorial action there most, where that action was the most pernicious, or the most impossible. We speak for the sake of convenience of Leibnitz's philosophical system, but he never had an organic system in his own mind, and we find not a trace thereof in his productions. If however he had the faint outline of a system, it might be fitly called the system of capricious analogy. He bound analogon to analogon by the vigour of his arbitrary will. He could not, from the nature of his intellect, have a system. To the conception of the infinite he was incapable of rising ; and without that conception no system can be constructed. The infinite to him was an aggregate of multitudinous finites, not the finite's directest contrary and most conquering contrast. To the shallow and the vulgar, however, this imperfect notion of the infinite is much more imposing than the sublime phantasy which ascends from the abyss of opposites, for it dazzles with the rapid rush of an immense army of objects. Hence the enormous

mistake regarding the grandeur of Leibnitz's genius, his depth, his originality. As horde after horde of wayward analogies was marshalled forth, Leibnitz seemed the victor of the utmost skies, seemed to totter under the weight of the transcendental verities he had won. But the originality, the depth, the genius, all vanish the moment we discover the tricks that can be played with analogies. There is not one of his leading doctrines which is not, according to the different manner in which we view it, either a gross absurdity, a pitiful commonplace, or a scandalous plagiarism. His monadology is plainly the old atomic theory revived. His pre-established harmony is either the mere reassertion of a fact while pretending to account for it, since a pre-established harmony is nothing more than an established harmony, which everybody admits, or it is a crotchet wholly undeserving the attention which it has received, besides being foul with that leprosy of the mechanical which makes his philosophy as a whole so odious. Each individual, from his earliest childhood, becomes conscious of unity by being conscious of life. Conscious of unity, he still feels, when prostrated by sickness, or when the ardour of some invincible enthusiasm careers in his blood, how dependent the body is on the soul, and the soul on the body. When the voice of the Holy Spirit calls him away from the earth to the serene and the beautiful, he sees the immanent deity through the loving Father, and has small sympathy for a cold order, which is made still colder by being mechanised into pre-ordination. In everything connected herewith, the sentiments, the experience, of the very commonest of our race are wiser, nobler, gladder, and incomparably more pious than Leibnitz's arid, bleak, clockmaker theology. Of the optimism contained in the "Théodicée," which he wrote in reply to Bayle, we may repeat what we have said of the pre-established harmony, that it is solely the re-statement of a fact while affecting to explain it; for, as soon as you accept theism, you accept God as the best of all possible gods, since there is and can be no other God, everything being the best of its kind when it is the only thing of its

All

kind; and, if you accept God as the best of all possible gods, you accept creation as the best of all possible creations, seeing that the action of God must be always equal to his being, and we cannot allow that, having it in his power to make the best of all possible worlds, he would from sheer wilfulness make the worst, otherwise he would cease to be the best of all possible gods, and, that ceasing, theism would also disappear. On these plain and obvious truths Leibnitz has nothing new to tell us; but, instead of the new, we have abundance of sophistry, self-adulation, and what we cannot call by any other name than blasphemy-a harsh and cruel word, and not to be lightly used; yet we know not what other word to employ to convey our meaning, to express the horror and disgust with which we are penetrated every time we behold the shameless face of Leibnitz's optimism. What could a man who had neither humility nor reverence teach us of God which was not a wound to our tenderest feelings, and an offence to our most sacred associations? the dexterities of Leibnitz suffice not to picture a living God; but we might have stood with awe and a profound and holy silence gazing on the countenance of his dead God, if the features had been divine. Alas! however, we discern nothing except an enormous shapeless mummy, ever and anon galvanised into hideous jerkings to do the work of a machine. Woe for us, travelling on in toil and in trouble, and treading at every step the brink of wondrous and adorable mysteries, if compelled to exchange the Deity so mighty yet so merciful, so far off and yet so near, alike the hearer of our prayers and the monarch of the universe, speaking to us in stars and in flowers, in our own heart and in our mother's tears, and in blessed Gospels, for a ghastly phantom like this! Leibnitz pleads with subtlest logic for the freedom of God's will; but what is will without force? and what is force without fecundity? God is eternal genesis, -necessary growth. Clothed with harmonies and bounties, he is the ineffable type and exhaustless fountain of material and spiritual generation and regeneration. Even in the symbols repulsive to the untaught eye, which have been used in so many religions to

represent nature's prodigal fertilities, there was a poetical beauty and a philosophical truth which wither when overshadowed by the dismal cobwebs of Leibnitz's audacious but barren brain. If, as we believe, the being of Deity irresistibly overflows in germs, and births, and developments, rushes forth ever in creative exuberances and spermatic potencies, why pedantically place him as a planner at some remote point in the past? Those belonging to the same school as Leibntiz, who believe that God was first in a state of quiescence, then in a state of design, then in a state of preordination, and that he has since returned to a state of quiescence, having once for all set the immense machinery of the world going, deny his eternity, while making unwittingly the strange confession that he can add to the number of his attributes. Thus we should have a God born of chaos, and not perfect, but evermore going on toward perfection; or rather we should have a God in a dormant condition equivalent to nonexistence, then gradually awaking to consciousness, then gradually acquiring the force to plan and to will,then, after having planned, performing an act of self-annihilation by returning once more into his dormant condition. We would speak in a tone worthy the highest of all themes. But we are dragged down from the supernal glories by men who, in the name of religion and philosophy, do such deadly harm to philosophy and religion. And who are those men, and with what pretences do they arm them selves? They are not heretics, whom popular bigotry anathematises. The claim which they wave as a banner above them is to be more orthodox than the mass of unpretending, unquestioning orthodox believers. At the portal of Leibnitz's "Théodicée" stands a discourse on the conformity of faith with reason, and all his followers are stung with the ambition of establishing that conformity. Unless faith and reason can be proved to harmonise, they think, or affect to think, the character of God in great danger. Now the attempt to unite faith and reason in the bonds of peace evidences either a defective philosophical comprehension or a defective religious sentiment. Faith and reason are both self-sufficing-each is strong

in its own strength, and spurns aid and alliance. Faith, leaning in general on the traditions of a supernatural revelation, welcomes with simple and yearning heart whatever those traditions communicate regarding God, creation, the origin of evil, and the means of redemption. To the eye of faith there is a curse clinging to the world, and that curse is sin. Faith loathes all théodicées as insulting to Him who inhabiteth the immensities. It is enough that he hath decreed-it bows its forehead in the dust before the decree. It everywhere beholds God's justice and God's mercy, and is too much occupied with its own salvation to think of his vindication. It is a worm, a filthy rag, a rebellious and abominable thing. How should it dare to judge Him who from His everlasting throne hurls his thunders at guilt? To this faith, weltering in the torture of its own abasement, you approach with ingenious and eloquent phrases about the best of all possible worlds, and it thrusts you from it as one of the false prophets whom it is the duty of the faithful to stone to death. No! if you, as the apostle of reason, have aught to disclose, utter it to reason, and in the name of reason: but, as it would be folly for reason to convince or to conciliate faith, it would be treachery for reason to allow faith to interfere either with its courageous, comprehensive investigations, or with the revealings which it brings to mankind from its journeyings through universal being. Now for absolute catholic reason the debate about the best of all possible worlds, the origin of evil, and matters of that sort, is too frivolous for a moment's serious attention. Absolute catholic reason sees only infinite unity divested of space and time, flowing, flowing, ever and evermore. It cannot admit the origin of evil without admitting the origin of creation, and it cannot admit the origin of creation without admitting the origin of the Creator, seeing that it cannot conceive in deity the potential and the actual separated. Evil itself it denies, since the idea of evil arises from the divorce, through abstraction, of God, the universe, and the individual from each other, while reason opens channels for them to melt into our nature as the coessential one. The idea of evil gains compactness and strength through a

further process of abstraction, which fragmentises God into attributes, the universe into elements, and the individual into qualities. God, the universe, and the individual thus come unceasingly before the morbid imagination, and the still more morbid conscience, as at war with each other and at war with themselves. Gather God, the universe, and the individual once more into essential unity, and the phantom called evil is dissipated into air. Ontology, the science of being, is the grand province of reason; and in ontology proper there are no difficulties. With what sublime simplicity the earliest Greek philosophers, far greater than the Platos and other abstractionists who succeeded them, traced rapidly, but with a pencil made of rainbows and lightnings, the divine linea ments of being! Immortally beautiful, as they are mystically deep, are their words. What enabled them to give us pictures of creation alike so radiant, so majestic, and so true? Because they saw nothing but perennial, most musical outpouring, where modern philosophy sees only antagonisms and relations. Psychology is the mortal foe of ontology: for how can the mind that gloats on the carrion of a minute selfanatomy, cast the glance of a demigod on the infinite? It is the poor, sickly, whimpering thing known as psychology, the final manisfestation of philosophy amongst us,-which, conscious of its weak and diseased condition, alone seeks an alliance with faith. And what is the faith that is willing to accept the alliance? The faith which has ceased to be faith, by entertaining doubts which it cannot altogether conceal, yet dares not confess. The alliance is therefore as hollow as the allies are false: it is a juggle and an imposture, which the first breath of a robuster faith and a robuster philosophy will scatter to the winds. History, says Schelling, is an epopee conceived in the mind of God: its two parts are the movement by which humanity proceeds from its centre to develope itself to its highest expression; and the other movement which effects the return the first part is the Iliad of history, the second its Odyssey-the first movement is centrifugal, the second centripetal. The truth of this

may not be obvious to every one regarding history in general, but it is eminently true when applied to the history of philosophy. From the depths of central being, or from ontology, which is the heroism of philosophy, the latter descends step by step to psychology, its most prosaic and most beggarly form, and then ascends step by step to the epic lustre, the colossal magnitude of ontology, again. Leibnitz has hastened the ascent by hastening the descent; but, instead of thanking him for the service, we feel inclined to take refuge from the spectacle of his aridities and mummifications in the very wildest of the Hindoo mythologies, for they, amid the most monstrous extravagances, unfold to us superabounding movement, fecundity, and life. Though however we must refuse Leibnitz all merit as a metaphysical creator, he has been surpassed by few as a metaphysical critic; and this is what makes him so dear to the modern philosophers of France, who are such admirable metaphysical critics, but quite incapable of metaphysical creation, which requires genius more vigorous, fertile, varied, and organizing, than the highest poetry. "New Essays on the Human Understanding," his "Théodicée," and his smaller philosophical productions, though written in a slovenly, slipsop, and most undignified style, whatever has been maintained to the contrary, have an undeniable value for their shrewdness of remark, their extent of information, and the independent, incisive, and discursive intellect which they display. In observations of detail Leibnitz is almost always as acute as he is substantially right. Recognizing him to be one of the greatest of metaphysical critics, we would equally admit him to be one of the greatest of metaphysical controversialists; while taking, on the whole, a candid, generous, and manly attitude toward his opponents. Simply as replies, the "Théodicée" and the "Nouveaux Essais" are triumphant: wherein they are defective is in the assertion of a positive, organic doctrine. There was, however, after all no very large or lasting glory in being victor in either of the battles. In the case of Locke, he had mainly to detect

His