one class of these workmen is more modest than another; the modesty of each is found among true artists of whom Mr. Howells is an enviable type, and whose best work seems to them still incomplete. The verse-maker has an innocent and traditional reverence for his "ideal," but a little ideality just now will do no harm. Grace will be given us to endure it. In fact, the two kinds of poiëtæ can be of mutual service. The poet can wisely borrow the novelist's lamp of truth, and put more reason in his rhymes, while the novelist emulates the color and passion of the poet, so that verse will be something more than word-music, and the novel gain in feeling, movement, Life. For life is not insured by a refined adjustment of materials, even though they display the exact joinery and fitness of the American coat which a New York lawyer, of mellow wit and learning, proffered as a model to his Bond Street tailor. "There," said he, "can you, Shears, make anything like that in London?" "Upon my word, Mr. M——, I think we should hardly care to, if we could." "But why not, man? Does it not fit perfectly, is it not cut and sewed perfectly, and are not all the lines graceful and trim? What does it want? in what can you excel it? what does it lack?” “ "Quite so," mused the tailor, without a trace of assent in his face; "it does seem to lack something, you know." "Well, what?" "I beg your pardon, sir; 'tis very neat work,—a world of pains to it,—but we might say it lacks—Life!”

But as for our prime question of the reality of genius, and the legitimate force of a word common to so many literatures, I think that, if the general recognition of these be indeed the effect of an illusion, the Power which shapes human destiny is not yet ready to remove the film from our eyes. Should the world's faith be an ignorant one, I still am so content with this inspiring dream left us in a day of disenchantment as to esteem it folly to be wise. It seems that Mr. Courthope and Mr. Gosse also "talk from time to time" of this phantasmal "something." Do these writers, do I, asks our friendly reviewer, really believe in it? Can they, can I, severally lay hands upon our waistcoats and swear that we think there is any such thing? It would be taking an unfair advantage to interpret this seriously-to assume that he would expect these English gentlemen and scholars perforce to recant, "when upon oath," a declaration made out of court; and for myself, I hope to have grace to confess a change of opinion, and I have no fear that the omission

of an oath would greatly lessen his belief in my honesty of statement. But when asked, " is a 'genius' at all different from other men of like gifts, except in degree?" I reply that this is begging the question. At present, I believe that the other men have not the "like gift," that the difference is one of quality, not of quantity or degree." The unique gift, the individuality of the faculty or faculties, constitutes the genius.

Mr. Howells rightly lays stress upon the well-known danger, even to a candid mind, of nursing a pet theory. It is just as unwise for an inventive author, even in a mood of self-analysis, to toy with a theoretical paradox, for literary methods grow by what they feed on. It is not for this, as I have said, that his admirers (and none more than the present writer) are grateful to him; it is for the pleasure derived from very original works, the product of something more creative than even his indomitable labor, and conscientious study of the novelist's craft and properties. One is apt to set too little value upon the gift which is his alone-the faculty that makes so light to him that portion of his work which his fellows cannot master by praying or fasting. He is just as prone, moreover, to regard that as most essential which is hardest for himself, yet necessary to the perfect work, thus setting the labor, wherewith he procures and mixes components, above the one drop of an elixir solely his own, that adds the transmuting spirit to their mass. Our deft student and painter of New England life still has his fairy spectacles— they are not lost, but on his own forehead. Finally, it is a trait of genius, in its method of expression, to discover and avail itself of the spirit of its time. My avowal that Mr. Howells had done this betrayed no savor of the charge of time-serving. It seemed to me, on the contrary, that consciously or unconsciously he had obeyed the ancient oracle, and that the admonition Follow thy Genius had left its impress upon his whole career.

EDMUND C. STEDMAN.

THE AGNOSTIC DILEMMA.

TWENTY-FIVE years ago the prospects of religion seemed to be much less hopeful than they are at present. The minds of men had just experienced one of those shocks which occur in the spiritual world like storms and earthquakes in the natural. The cause was the appearance of evolution on the field of religion and philosophy. Darwin had familiarized the world with the application of this theory to nature. But man had fondly imagined that it could have no practical bearing on humanity; that however potent a factor evolution might be in geology and biology, moral, spiritual, and social phenomena were clearly beyond its reach. But in 1860 Herbert Spencer began publishing his First Principles, in which he boldly assumed that man as well as nature must bow before the omnipotent sceptre of evolution. Acting on this assumption, he laid down the data of the new philosophy, defined and demonstrated the principle and laws of evolution, and collated a mass of illustrations from all the sciences in support of the thesis that their scope is universal. It is not likely, however, that the setting forth of evolution as the first principle of philosophy, revolutionary as it was, could have given rise to so instantaneous and wide-spread disturbance, had not the new apostle deemed it needful in the interests of his theory to attack the foundations of the current religious and philosophical convictions of the times. When Spencer came forward as a champion, the field was preoccupied by a class of theologians and religious philosophers who were agreed in the opinion that man can know something of God and the realities of the unseen world. Spencer, in his chapters on The Unknowable, attempts to subvert the doctrine of these thinkers by laying the foundations of what he conceives to be a sounder theory of knowledge.

Agnosticism, as Mr. Spencer's theory has been named, is not without historical antecedents. It can boast of two distinguished philosophical ancestors, David Hume and Emanuel Kant, both of whom have powerfully influenced the traditions of British thought. David Hume was the true father of modern British empiricism. Locke had traced all our ideas to experience as their source; but

Hume carried the theory to its logical goal, and referred, not our ideas alone, but also our faculties to an empirical origin. The mental life of the individual begins, he taught, with simple sensations, which generate experience and knowledge without the interposition of any agencies higher than association and custom. Hume's successors, the Mills and the English Positivists-who psychologically belong to the same line-simply proceed from his position, developing his principles in various directions, and applying a more rigid analysis to mental phenomena, but never once dreaming of disputing his fundamental doctrine that human experience is the outcome of sensation and association. In his theory of the genesis of man's ideas and powers, Mr. Spencer belongs to the school of Hume. He is an empiricist digging for the roots of reason in the soil of sense, and seeking the antecedents of man's higher powers in association and instinct.

From pure empiricism Hume drew the logical conclusions. The empiricist can take no cognizance of anything that transcends experience. If there be anything beyond or outside of the confines of perception it must remain forever unknown to us. The consistent empiricist will, therefore, have nothing to do with theology or metaphysics; and religion, if it is to command his serious attention, must give up its supernatural object and enthrone humanity or some other knowable object in its place.

Mr. Spencer, however, declines to go this length. His dissent arises from the fact that he has a stand-point which is outside of and independent of empiricism. Although a disciple of Hume in his psychology, he is indebted to Kant for his metaphysics. The philosophy of Kant, or rather a perversion of it, was first introduced into English metaphysics by Sir William Hamilton, in order to prevent his countrymen from falling under the spell of Hegel and the German idealists. Kant had endeavored to check the pretensions of reason in his own country by showing that when it goes outside of experience and attempts to deal with the problems of the infinite it falls into irreconcilable contradictions. Hamilton espoused this Kantian doctrine and turned it against the rationalists of the German school, in order to refute their pretensions that man is capable of sitting in judgment on revelation. The idea of God, he contends, involves such attributes as First Cause, Absolute and Infinite, but these are wholly beyond our powers of conception. The moment we attempt to represent them in thought we involve ourselves in

hopeless confusion. The Deity, therefore, transcends the reason of man and cannot be judged by its standards. Mansel elaborated this doctrine in his Bampton Lectures,* and read a perhaps not wholly uncalled-for lesson in humility to both rationalists and dogmatists. But Hamilton and Mansel brought out only the negative side of Kant's doctrine. Kant, partially agreeing with Hume, teaches that experience begins with impressions of sense, which are, however, formed into objects of perception by means of certain independent functions of reason. But he rejects Hume's opinion that the impressions are ultimate, so far as we are concerned, and strenuously insists on it as a fundamental truth that the impressions of sense do imply the existence of some cause outside of our consciousness. This cause Kant styles the thing per se, which is the absolute reality of which the perceived thing is only a manifestation. Distinguishing between the objects of perception and their underlying cause, Kant holds that while the dependence of the objects of perception on this cause renders its existence necessary, yet its nature is wholly unknowable. He thus propounded, a century ago, the great dilemma from which German philosophy has ever since been trying to escape.

Whether conscious of his historical obligations or not, Spencer espouses this Kantian dilemma and lays it at the foundation of his own metaphysics. Rejecting the purely negative doctrine of the Hamiltonians, he recognizes the validity of the Kantian distinction between the phenomenal world and its ultimate cause, and of the latter asserts, in the same breath, that it necessarily exists and that it is unknowable. But this theory, which stands with one foot on his empirical psychology and the other on his transcendental metaphysics, has proved very distasteful to most contemporary thinkers. The empiricist resents it on account of its disposition to flirt with metaphysics and theology, and the religious philosopher finds it even less to his liking, because its Unknowable is to him little more than a phantom.

The agnostic creed could not fail to arouse the hostility of the empiricist. He has inherited from Hume, along with his stand-point, something of his straightforward radicalism.

He is accustomed to accept the logical results of what he conceives to be facts, and finding in his psychological repertory no power that has not been produced by experience, he cannot understand why he

* Limits of Religious Thought.