mune are bandits and fiends in human shape. They who think that such a story as that of the Commune of Paris is explicable on the 'miscreant' theory are unfit to discuss political questions. It has a great purpose, and it has great leaders. For every man who died on the barricades ten will spring up hereafter. The cry of Millière as he died, 'Vive l'humanité !' will not be unanswered. The bones of Delescluze may be burned in quicklime, but his spirit lives. He and his followers have a purpose. They have sworn that the 'exploitation of the workman' shall end; and end it must.

They are not so clear about a substitute, but, so far as they have a scheme, it is Communism. There is but one alternative -the answer of Positivism. In one sense Positivism is akin to Communism, for it heartily accepts its belief in social reorganisation; in another it is the opposite of Communism, for it exalts instead of abolishes the exercise of property by individuals. Positivism teaches that the highest uses of society are best served by massing capital in aggregates, and by entrusting these masses to the free control of individuals. It teaches that the dignity of domestic life and of public action, that moral as well as intellectual energy, demand the existence of capitalists as a class. It shows that the highest functions of social life and the noblest powers of the character would cease to exist without the free control of capital. It insists on this freedom in no grudging or unreal spirit. It looks on capital simply as power, and the wise exercise of power as the noblest function of man, and the trustful respect of power as the most generous of human instincts.

"And if Positivism insists that Communism would dwarf and unman every side of human nature, by destroying the infinite sources of nobleness inherent in individual property, it asserts as strongly as Communism itself that individual property can no longer exist on its prevalent conditions. It insists that the use of property must again be made a religious duty-that capital arises from the combination of many efforts, and must in justice minister to the common wants. It would, by an education prolonged through life, teach the workmen of every grade to trust and aid the owner of capital, and the owner of capital to look on himself as the minister of a free community. It would train the rich to rely on their own resources, and compel them to use their full responsibility in so ordering the common industry that the fewest disasters and the least suffering befell the labouring community. Such is a picture of capital not extinguished, but moralised; not cut in pieces, but raised to new functions; not harassed by the fetters of law, but strong in the noble consciousness of public office. Let capital, shrinking from the fires and shambles

COMMUNISM AND POSITIVISM.

of Paris, choose which of these two it will have.

303

Communism is a

not impossible future. Positivism is a not impossible future. The status quo is impossible. The alternative is Communism or Positivism."

Positivism is thus a benevolent and enlightened despotism, and it is probably more possible in the transition state that the few men could be found qualified so to govern, than that the many could be yet found capable of governing themselves. Otherwise, without the right men Positivism would appear only to present all the worst features of the present society in an exaggerated form, viz., a greater despotism based on larger fortunes; not but that the despotism of the many when in power has always hitherto exceeded that of the individual.

If we want an admirable illustration of what the Capitalist may do for the Workmen, when enlightened and so disposed, we must consult "Solutions Sociales." Par Godin. (Paris: A. le Chevalier, Rue Richelieu). M. Godin built a palace for his work people, giving them all the refinements and conveniences of modern civilisation, and the rents, with the profit on the Stores, paid him 6 per cent. for his outlay.

CHAPTER VII.

SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION.

Geological periods mark only epochs, not times.

Life has probably existed on this earth 100 millions of years; Man about 100 thousand.

The faculties, bodily and mental, which man possesses, have been gradually perfecting in every form which life has taken since its first appearance in the world.

So far as the history of Creation is written in the geological records, it would appear that God's mode of working is by evolution and development, by which all things are made to make themselves, and not by special creation. The whole world is one complete and living organism. "The tendency on the part of matter to organise itself, to grow into shape, to assume definite forms in obedience to the definite action of force, is, as I have said, all-pervading. It is in the ground on which you tread, in the water you drink, in the air you breathe. Incipient life, as it were, manifests itself throughout the whole of what we call inorganic nature."* Every atom has its likes and dislikes, and moves with instant precision to its place appointed, and the presence of mind alone, as Sir John Herschel says, explains the whole difficulty. Mind has its laws as well as what we call Matter, and when we exercise the highest powers of our intellect we act in accordance with certain laws of thought. In the action of the Supreme mind we may expect the same to hold, and God's action therefore is not an interference with law. He acts as necessarily in accordance with the laws of his own

*"Fragments of Science," p. 115, by Prof. Tyndall.

THE WHOLE WORLD ALIVE.

305

being as we do in accordance with ours.* The artificial distinctions and divisions that have been set up between inorganic and organic are becoming daily less and less visible in the light of science. There is no necessity to bring the torch of life from other worlds, in meteoric stones or otherwise the whole world is alive. The conditions were evolved and individual life was born, although it may not be in man's power to beget such conditions, and Life now proceeds only from Life.

*The Rev. Prof. Caird, in a Sermon preached before the members of the British Association, at Edinburgh, August 6th, 1871, says: "For the more men advanced in intelligence, the more clearly did they begin to see that it was only a vulgar necessity of thought which identified personality with changefulness, and arbitrariness with paroxysmal acts and special interferences." What, then," he asked. "to a thoughtful observer would be the kind of phenomena, the aspect of things and events, which would look most like the signs of personal thought and will in nature? Surely those phenomena and that aspect from which the indications of anomaly were most completely banished, and throughout which, from beginning to end, reigned calm and changeless order, unbroken sequence and continuity, the majestic presence of power and law."

Mr. C. Staniland Wake, in a paper read before the Department for Anthropology, August 8th, said: "It was simply impossible to understand or to reason with any person who entertained a notion of a creation of something out of nothing. If they could not have something out of nothing, they must have evolution of some kind. It had been said that he had taken Pantheistic ground. Well, he believed that nature was God, a personal God, and that all nature had been evolved."

"Dr. Cairns: Does the gentleman hold that nature is a personal God?

"Mr. Wake; Yes.

"Dr. Cairns: Thank you."

There seems a considerable gulf to fill up between the Rev. Drs. Caird and Cairns. The latter appears to agree with Mr. James Hinton ("Man and His Dwelling Place"), "that all our conceptions are based on the implied postulate that the world is as it appears," but he does not equally agree with him that "the advance of knowledge consists in the substitution of accurate conceptions for natural ones."

W

Sensibility, or Mind, with animals has been always connected with the Nervous System, and has developed and improved as the Nervous System has been developed and improved in its transmission from body to body in the chain of being.

Man differs from other animals, not in kind, but in degree only.

The "plan," or object, in Creation would appear to be to produce the largest amount of enjoyment without respect to species, or individuals, or man exclusively. "Freedom" is only one of the means towards this end, enabling all the faculties upon which happiness depends to be brought into activity.

Man knows only his own consciousness, or rather his consciousness comprises all his knowledge. External force, acting upon a portion of the structure of the brain and nervous system, creates within him the "World" as he conceives it in his intellectual consciousness, with the ego, or sense of personal identity; passing through other portions of the brain, it creates those likes and antipathies upon which the moral world is based.

Each creature has thus created within it a world of its own, according to its susceptibility to impressions from without, which susceptibility depends upon the specific nature of its nervous organisation.

These "modes of action" of force without give us no real knowledge of things without. We know only how we are affected by them-that is, we know only the consciousness they create within us. All is illusion: colour, on which the beauty of the world so much depends, is a feeling or idea, a nervous sensibility; and so are the forms which we believe to be around us mere ideas. Nervous force only is transmitted to the brain, and the brain forms the image. Without us is we know not what, except that it has the