CHAPTER X

ART AND LIFE

“Like a living thing, one and whole.”—Aristotle.[163]

The third chapter of Tolstoy’s book, What is Art? contains a summary of the opinions of some sixty modern writers (taken chiefly from Schasler’s Kritische Geschichte der Aesthetik) on the essential meaning of the terms Art and Beauty. All these opinions, after having been duly paraded across the stage, are dismissed by Tolstoy as a mass of “enchanted confusion and contradictoriness,” and he then proceeds to build up his own theory of art. As the latest critical treatment of the subject on a large scale by a thinker and an artist who has made a deep impression on the minds of men, his conclusions deserve careful attention on the part of any later writer who desires to deal with the perennially attractive but very obscure problems of æsthetics. Let me begin by quoting the passage with which Tolstoy closes the fourth chapter of his work:—

“To the question What is this Art, to which is offered up the labour of millions, the very lives of men, and even morality itself? we have extracted replies from the existing æsthetics which amount to this—that the aim of art is beauty, that beauty is recognized by the enjoyment it gives, and that artistic enjoyment is a good and important thing because it _is_ enjoyment. In a word, that enjoyment is good because it is enjoyment. Thus, what is considered the definition of art is no definition at all, but only a shuffle to justify existing art. Therefore, however strange it may seem to say so, in spite of the mountains of books written about art, no exact definition of art has been constructed. And the reason of this is that the conception of art has been based on the conception of beauty.”[164]

Now in one point at least, that which is embodied in the last sentence, these words of Tolstoy’s appear to me to go straight to the mark. Art can no more be founded on beauty than morality can be founded on pleasure. A greater than Tolstoy has spoken the same truth in a couple of his mighty lines. The great masters, says Whitman,

... do not seek beauty, they are sought, Forever touching them or close upon them follows beauty, longing, fain, love-sick.

But let us see what Tolstoy would set up in place of what he throws down. Art, he tells us, is “one of the means of intercourse between man and man.” “By words a man transmits his thoughts to another, by means of art he transmits his feelings.” But the transmission must, if it is art, be intentional, premeditated. “Art begins when one person with the object of joining another or others to himself in one and the same feeling expresses that feeling by certain external indications.” The “indications” may, of course, be a certain kind of language, or gesture, or plastic representation, or sound. If, by such means, a man has succeeded in making his own feeling _infectious_, and affecting others by it, he has, to that extent achieved art. Art is therefore “a means of union among men, joining them together in the same feelings, and is indispensable for the life and progress towards well-being of individuals and of humanity.”[165]

Certainly one cannot but admire the strong clear-headedness and common sense with which Tolstoy blows away the mists into which he had plunged us in his third chapter, and brings us into a region of daylight realities, with firm earth under our feet. Undoubtedly if man does want to get into real contact with his fellow-men he must not merely tell them what he feels, he must make them feel the same thing. And art, produced with “individuality, clearness and sincerity” has this property, to use Tolstoy’s own term, of infectiousness. Moreover it is of enormous antiquity and has exceedingly primitive forms. There may have been art before there was speech—there was certainly art before there was writing, before there was anything remotely resembling intellectual culture or religion. The metaphysical definitions of Hegel, “The Idea shining through Matter,” or of Knight, “The union of object and subject, the drawing forth from nature of that which is cognate to man,” and of the rest of the sixty and odd philosophers, do, I think, look a little irrelevant when we think of the cave-man scratching his bit of mammoth ivory. But Tolstoy’s account of the matter glows with reality. The cave-artist was struck with something in nature—the reindeer drinking at a pool, the mammoth swinging through the jungle—he longed to express it, to make others see. It can hardly be doubted that this was the origin of art _as art_.[166] I think it is its fundamental quality even now, though we must include among the objects rendered things not in external nature but in the artist’s own imagination.

The questions then arise, What is it that the artist is trying to infect other people with? Is art quite indifferent to the nature of the feeling communicated? Is there any common feeling expressed by things apparently so diverse as a strain of music, a piece of pottery, a cathedral, a lyric, a statue, and a landscape painting?

Tolstoy does not overlook these questions; he has, in fact, a great deal to say about them. But here, in his analysis of the æsthetic faculty, the obsession with the exclusively ethical view of things which has so much impaired his own art seems to have led him on a false track. Having decided that infectiousness is the common quality of all art, he is struck with the fact that this quality varies very much in different works, and he uses it to obtain a scale of merit:—

“Not only,” he writes, “is infection a sure sign of art, but the degree of infectiousness is also the sole measure of excellence in art. The stronger the infection the better is the art, as art, speaking now apart from its subject matter, _i.e._ not considering the quality of the feelings it transmits.”[167]

This statement is obviously meaningless unless you define the nature of the person who is to be infected. Infection is as much a matter of the mind infected as of the agent which infects. “The stronger the infection for such and such an audience ...” is what we shall have to read. The audience must be a constant element if the definition is to convey any distinct meaning. Perceiving this, as so acute a mind could not fail to do, Tolstoy falls back on exactly the same criterion as that of Bishop Butler when he endeavoured to get a universal standard of right and wrong. Butler set up as final judge in these matters the “plain honest man.”[168] You were to appeal to the unsophisticated conscience of this ideal being, and that ended the matter. So, with Tolstoy, you are to get the “unperverted” man who, like an animal, “unerringly finds what he needs.”[169] Most people in our society, says Tolstoy, “are quite unable to distinguish a work of art from the grossest counterfeit.” They like, or pretend to like, Beethoven better than a peasant folk-song! But the peasant’s, _i.e._ the untaught, appreciation, which is merely bewildered by Beethoven, is right.[170] This, we ultimately find, simply means that the “plain honest man,” as conceived by Tolstoy, is one who appreciates the _moral_ contents of a work of art, provided that it has any, and that it has infection enough to get them into his mind. And Tolstoy (the art-critic) does not care about anything except these moral contents.

This is clear when he comes to deal with the element which he mentions above as having been omitted from his consideration of the comparative value of art-work, namely the quality of the feeling transmitted by the medium of art. Here he lays it down that the object of all art is to unite mankind, and to make them feel at one with God and with each other.[171] This may pass very well if by uniting is meant enabling us to enter with sympathy into the life of man, and even of things that are not man. Even so a drawing by Nettleship can make us feel at one with a python or a tigress. But Tolstoy does not mean that. His uniting is a moral and practical idea based on the doctrine that combat, and everything that could lead to combat, is wrong. Ancient religious perceptions, he argues, confined the sense of unity to the tribe or nation, and art had to glorify solely the might or greatness of the people who produced it. Modern religion, on the contrary, takes account of all humanity without exception. “And therefore the feelings transmitted by the art of our time not only cannot coincide with the feelings transmitted by former art, but must run counter to them.”[172] Only two kinds of art, according to Tolstoy, “can be considered good art in our time.” These are first, “art transmitting feelings flowing from a religious perception of man’s position in the world in relation to God and to his neighbours,” and secondly, “art transmitting the simplest feelings of common life, but such, always, as are accessible to all men in the whole world—the art of common life—the art of a people—universal art.”[173] As instances of these types of good modern art, Tolstoy gives his amazing list—Schiller’s Robbers, Les Misérables, Dickens’s and Dostoievsky’s novels, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and Adam Bede. In painting we are to take as types of excellence “the drawing by Kramskoy (worth many of his finished pictures), showing a drawing-room with a balcony past which troops are marching in triumph on their return from the war. On the balcony stands a wet-nurse holding a baby and a boy. They are admiring the procession of the troops, but the mother, covering her face with a handkerchief, has fallen back on the sofa, sobbing.” Or one may turn to “a picture by the French artist, Morlon, depicting a lifeboat hastening in a heavy storm to the relief of a steamer that is being wrecked.”[174]

It is easy to make fun of this headlong descent to the level of the parish magazine, but it is not so easy to challenge the position from which Tolstoy deduces his criticisms of individual works, or to deny that he has again and again struck home with incomparable force against the factitious art so current in the present day. His book is a piece of genuine thinking, and in this it has few rivals among contemporary works of æsthetic criticism, especially in English. Most of these works are either pæans of praise for what the critic finds attractive and stimulating to his own temperament, or attacks conducted with every resource of satire and ridicule on what he does not understand or care for. But a serious attempt like that of Tolstoy to discover and to apply a true principle of art criticism is very much to seek; and I venture to think that many critics who are horrified at the notion of putting Uncle Tom’s Cabin above King Lear would find it by no means so easy as they suppose to give a rational account of the faith that is in them. Tolstoy’s conclusions, like those of Plato in The Republic (which they very much resemble), are wrong-headed, but his manner of thinking is that of a massive and nobly ordered intellect, and is well worthy of respectful imitation at whatever distance lesser powers can contrive to follow it.

I know nothing whatever (I regret to say) about the art of Kramskoy or of Morlon, but one imagines, from Tolstoy’s way of talking about the works referred to, that they are attempts to capture admiration for a work of art by the aid of something which is not art, but sentiment. At any rate, that is just what Tolstoy desires them to do. Is art, then, entirely indifferent to subject, as some of the philosophers of the Impressionist school contend? Not at all—so long as the subject is something _in the picture_, and capable of being expressed in the medium of that branch of art. A crew of men pulling a boat through a heavy sea may be a good subject for a painting, but to the artist it does not matter a pin’s point whether they are going to rescue life or to board an enemy or to catch lobsters. Under the circumstances they will all look just the same. The wreck in the offing has its value in the design of the picture, no more and no less. And those who are always on the look out for false values, sentimental values, will never learn what art really has to teach them, what art alone can teach. What is this?

The master key with which we have tried to open certain doors in biology and in ethics will, I hope, serve us also in discovering the principles of art. I accept fully Tolstoy’s postulate of infectiousness as a primary quality of art. There can be no art which does not communicate to others the feeling of the artist. This implies that the artist must have a distinct and sincere feeling to communicate. But it does not at all imply that the finest art is that which is most widely or powerfully communicable at its first appearance or at any given period in history. To say that infectiousness is an essential characteristic of art is not the same thing as to say that the more it infects, either extensively or intensively, the better art it is. One might as well say that if, as has been done, you define man as ‘a political animal,’ it would follow that the more strenuously political he was the more he fulfilled the purpose of his being as a man. But politics and art are both of them simply ways in which man endeavours to remould his universe “nearer to the heart’s desire.” How does he make use of political methods _for his true purpose_? How does he make use of art and its infectiousness _for his true purpose_? These are the real, the decisive questions.

What is the essential thing communicated in art? The question is answered at once if we reflect that as life can have no ulterior object beyond life, and is satisfied when the maximum of living is attained,[175] so life must be the ultimate object of art also. It is the _quality_ of art to communicate feeling; it is the _object_ of art to communicate a feeling for life. _Art is man’s expression of life_; and he delights in art precisely because and in so far as he delights in life. But if this be all, it may be objected, why, with life in full glow and activity all around him, should man turn to this reflection or rendering of it which he calls art? What place does the reality leave for the enjoyment of the shadow? This was substantially Plato’s indictment of art in the last book of The Republic. All things exist, according to his well-known doctrine of ideas, in an ideal or archetypal form, a “pattern laid up in heaven.” There is such a pattern, let us say, of a Bed, and this is the real, the archetypal Bed. Copying some reflection of this in his own mind, the carpenter makes a material, individual bed.

Then comes in the painter, who copies the bed of the carpenter, and who is thus at two removes from Reality; art, in Plato’s view, being simply imitation, and therefore somewhat despicable.[176]

There are some minor, yet by no means trivial, reasons which might be given in answer to this objection; as, for instance, that art enables one to assemble together in small compass the expressions of a great variety of life not to be directly enjoyed, save at wide intervals of time and place. But the primary and fundamental reasons are our main concern here.

In the first place, the material world around us, or such portion of it as we are able to perceive, is not, as it stands, a pure expression of life. Holding as we do with Cleanthes in his majestic Hymn to Zeus that all things redundant have their place in the Whole, and that in it all things ugly have their beauty and all things hateful their share of love,[177] it is still true that the world as we see it presents us with a pell-mell of varied forms—some mature and beautiful, some in process of transition, some in decay, some stationary, unchanging, dead. The inner harmony which holds them together is rarely perceptible in any one fragment of actual life. But the artist adds this harmony, this completeness; his work, within its own limits, is a whole. He gives us something which nature cannot give. Taking some aspect of life which he wishes to convey by means of line, colour, or tone, he suppresses, alters, composes, emphasizes, till he has expressed his feeling in its purity, with everything immaterial left out and with the things essential to his conception lifted clearly into view. His work is therefore greater and more vital than nature, that is to say than any fragment of nature, for he is looking at the part he renders _sub specie aeternitatis_, in the light of the Whole. And living in the conception of a great work of art, we live in the Whole; the individual has sunk from view.

Zola has finely said, “Art is a bit of Nature seen through the medium of a temperament.” This temperament means the artist’s personal way of seeing life; it means all that makes his art different from a mere record. And the audience who see or hear his work become acquainted with this temperament—there is no other way in which the artist can express it so well. The artist, then, is giving us himself along with his subject, and this is the greatest thing he can give. Whether the wars of Troy ever happened is of very little consequence compared with Homer’s way of imagining them. And when we have learned Homer’s way we can and do apply it for ourselves, for has he not ‘infected’ us with it? The artist opens our eyes, and leaves us in a world infinitely more significant and beautiful than without his aid we should ever have known it to be. His function is thus the liberation within us of faculties, of powers of living, which otherwise might never have risen into consciousness. We commonly call this ‘idealizing the facts of life.’ It would be nearer the mark to say that it makes them real. Art turns our formal, sensible, external perceptions of things into real and vital perceptions, and thus enormously increases the range and volume of life of which those who apprehend it are capable. The glory of light, the music of winds and waters, the dignity of man’s common occupations, the wonder and sweetness of the love of men and women, all these have been revealed to us by the artist, “a man speaking to men ... pleased with his own passions and volitions, who rejoices more than other men in the spirit of life that is within him.”[178]

The essential purpose of any art-work, then, is to be _expressive of life_—more expressive than the raw facts of life ever can be. The practical problem for every artist in every kind of material is how to make his work expressive; only thus can it be what Tolstoy calls “infectious.” To do this, besides the acquirement of technique, he must clearly have something to express. Let us not imagine, however, as the “plain honest man” is apt to do, that this must necessarily be something capable of being put into terms of the intellect—a fact, a story, a “criticism of life.” Art is rather an exploration than a criticism of life.[179] And life is very great and manifold. Primarily the painter is a man who likes to apprehend life in colour, the sculptor one who apprehends it in the form of masses, the musician in sound, the poet in actions, emotions, ideas. Each may, and probably must, have some of the gifts and faculties of the others, but as painter, musician, or whatever he may be, he thinks and feels in the material of his own art, and he uses that material to express its own virtues, not to imitate those of another.

The question of the relation of art to beauty, and the meaning of beauty itself, may now be considered. What is this mysterious element about the nature of which such a torrent of opinion has been poured out since man first began to reflect on his own states of mind? Between the view which holds it to be an absolute and ultimate principle, recognized in, rather than arising from, experience, and that which denies it any right to be called a principle at all, referring it simply to the effect of habit, and refusing to see any essential difference between the Hottentot conception of beauty and the Greek, we can find, I think, a position in strict accordance both with the historical facts of the evolution of the conception and with the claims of the Idealists.

Let us look back a moment to the analysis of moral action which we made in the preceding chapters. We found then that while all healthy action tends to maintain and promote life, there are circumstances under which this life-promoting quality comes more saliently into view than is usual. This happens in general when mere personal desires are subjected to the larger life of the Whole, or when a lower form of living is subjected to a higher. This heightening and intensification of life-promoting action we called moral action. And we drew no sharp and distinct line between it and ordinary healthy action, for nature knows no such distinctions, and the philosophy which tries to establish them is stamped with unreality.

In regard to Beauty we have only to take up the same point of view as we did in regard to Ethics, and the mystery lies clear before us at once. All nature is in some sense expressive of life, even when it seems most desolate or most degraded; for life as we know it means change, variety, contrast, and, under the conditions of space and time, one can no more have life without death and decay than one can have height without depth. But all nature does not equally express life, and much of it, as we have seen, does not express it at all to our perceptions. Beauty arises, then, when we find a certain heightening, a saliency, an intensity in the expression or vitality, whether by external nature or, in art, by man. Thus Life, not Beauty, is the mark of art, but beauty is the signal that the mark has been hit.

As with the moral, so with the æsthetic sense—we find it in all stages of development. A man or a race whose range of life is contracted to a few physical enjoyments and pains will set the idea of beauty in whatever expresses or is associated with these enjoyments. A wider, loftier, subtler conception of life will bring forth a nobler beauty. We are not, on this theory, abandoned to a mere subjective and arbitrary preference, according as we are trained and accustomed to this type or to that. There is a perfectly valid and objective criterion in the question, Which represents the fullest and strongest life? The Greek ideal surpasses the Hottentot—to take two extremes—because the Greek is capable of all that the Hottentot can do or feel—he takes it all up into his larger life; but the Hottentot can only live in a small sector of the sphere occupied by the Greek. Instead, therefore, of the two opposing battlecries of ‘Art for Morals’ and ‘Art for Art,’ let us set that of ‘Art for Life.’ For Life is greater than either art or morals; it includes and justifies them both.

The characteristics of Beauty will be further discussed in connexion with some of the individual arts, which we have now to range under our general principle.

The more deeply life is studied and felt, the more strongly do two great and cardinal principles of it come into view. These are opposed to each other, but complementary; and thus life in general appears to exhibit that singular quality of polarity which seems so intimately to pervade all its separate manifestations; everything which lives and moves appearing to do so by virtue of the action of two opposing forces. These two poles of the axis of life are, on the one hand, what we call Order, Continuity, Rhythm; and on the other, Change, Variety, Contrast. If Order were not, Change would become chaos. If Change were not, Order would become death. In neither case would growth and development be possible.

An art, therefore, however abstract, like Music or like the decorative pattern in a Celtic MS., which expressed the union of these two principles might be profoundly expressive of life. It need not set before us any definite living thing provided it expresses the cardinal principles of all life. It will do this the better the more intimately these principles are blended, as in nature, into a vital unity.

On the other hand, art does, of course, frequently represent individual objects, and probably had its first distinguishable beginnings in so doing.[180] We may, then, get a broad classification of the arts by placing on one side those which deal with objects of sense, and on the other those which convey life under forms devised by the artist himself, and not found in the external world. One is tempted to call these respectively Imitative and Creative. But, after all, what is essentially artistic in the first category is just the fact that it is _not_ purely imitative, for, as Mr.

Whistler observed, to suppose that you can get art by copying nature is equivalent to thinking that you can get music by sitting on the piano. On the other hand, it does not seem fitting to use so exalted a word as creation with reference to the pattern which a Zuñi Indian draws on a piece of pottery, while denying it to a painting by Titian. Instead, therefore, of using the words Creative and Imitative—now that we know what we mean by them—we shall contrast those arts which are directly Presentative with those which are Representative. In the one case the artist presents us with the whole artistic product, form and substance, as devised by himself. In the other, he represents to us forms already presented by nature, but re-composed, re-presented, and harmonized by him for an æsthetic purpose.

The Presentative arts fall into two classes. In one of these Music stands alone. Here the artistic purpose is not only dominant but (I speak, of course, of music in its highest and most characteristic development) there is no other purpose whatever. The forms elaborated by combinations and sequences of sound have no object except that of art and mean nothing apart from that. Hence Music has been called ‘pure style.’ We shall recur to this subject when we have dealt with the other class, that of the Decorative arts, the essence of which it is to add an expression of rhythm, of world-harmony, to objects whose primary purpose is something different—a building, a vase, a piece of furniture, or a hanging. This class, again, can be subdivided into arts which attain this effect by the structure of the object, and those which do so by the application of ornament to its surface; both being, of course, often combined in the same object.

In structure the expression of life is gained by so arranging the lines and masses as to give an impression that power is at work—that something is being done—done triumphantly yet not without strain and effort. Every object of utility does something—art shows it to us in the act. An example may help to make clear what I mean, and may show how the principle can be applied to any kind of object which may be the subject of artistic treatment.

A Greek temple in its simplest external aspect consists of a quadrilateral group of columns surrounding a walled shrine and supporting a low-pitched roof. Nothing could well be simpler than the structural conditions thus expressed. But the artistic expression of them is not so simple. This depends in the main upon the proportion observed between the pillars and the weight, or apparent weight, above them. If the pillars are too massive or too numerous there will be no sense of strain, and if they are too slender or too few there will be no sense of security. In either case the expression of vital energy in the structure will be imperfect, and beauty, which waits on the golden moment of the perfect adaptation of means to ends, will not dwell in that structure. There is nothing more inartistic than superfluity; and there is no lesson more emphatically taught by nature than this. The avoidance of insufficiency is generally enforced in practice on utilitarian grounds, but its artistic justification is equally evident. The golden mean is what we call Just Proportion.

The kind of vitality expressed in Greek architecture is quite different from that expressed in Gothic, but the æsthetic basis of both styles is the same; the principle we have in view will justify any art in which there is the spirit of life. A Greek temple shows us power, braced and conscious, but in repose. There is nothing daring or sensational in its construction. Stress and thrust answer each other directly, simply, massively. The stately calm of such a structure might easily become dull and monotonous were it not for the delicate sense of proportion governing the relations of the parts, for the introduction of slight deviations from strict rectangularity and symmetry,[181] and for the beautiful decoration in form and colour on frieze, pediment, and capital.

The principle of the arch was known in very early times to Pelasgians in Greece and to Etruscans in Italy, both of whom, no doubt, derived it from the East. But it was valued more for its utility in certain constructions than for its artistic quality, and Greek classical architecture knows nothing of it. It was freely used in Rome, and here its extraordinary effect of vital energy as a supporter of weight first began to be perceived. When Romanesque and Gothic architecture seized on this principle, the strength of stonework, heretofore essentially placid, leapt into vehement life and action. A Gothic cathedral is the expression of a war of mighty forces held in equilibrium by their own antagonism. Every part seems to threaten destruction to some other. There is, of course, a war of forces in a Greek temple also, but there the weight and thrust answer each other, as we have said, directly; a vertical column supports a horizontal architrave, and _must_ support it, for nothing can give way without crumbling to pieces. In Gothic building the counter-stresses meet indirectly, a dead weight or a thrust is met by the springing curve of an arch; the whole structure would fall to ruin were it not for something in the stone which is not mere solidity, which arises from something vital and energetic in the scheme of the structure. The expression of conflict, therefore, as compared with Greek architecture, is greatly intensified; the serenity of power has given place to the play of forces rushing into eager and often tempestuous action, and saved from being mutually destructive by the control of a far-seeing design.[182]

To treat fully the various ways in which structure may be made expressive of life would need a volume rather than a chapter. Enough has however been said to indicate the principle and to suggest a criterion by which good and bad structure may be judged. Let us turn to the question of ornament. In European art it is very common for ornament to be used as a kind of adjunct to structure; it follows the lines of structure and accentuates them. In Japanese art, however, the contours of an object often appear to determine the ornament applied to it as little as a window-frame determines the landscape we see through it. The apparent insouciance of Japanese ornament is, however, carefully calculated in relation to the field which is to be covered. In either case ornament as such—that is to say, apart from whatever charm of colour and rhythm its individual forms may have—is to be interpreted as an attempt to give life by introducing what is so characteristic of life—the element of change and variety. Popular language has hit the mark when it talks of a ‘dead’ wall, meaning thereby a wall whose surface is unbroken by openings or ornament. Ruskin has somewhere spoken of the magnificent work of Ghiberti on the bronze doors of the Baptistery in Florence as having been primarily designed to produce “a pleasant bossiness of surface.” The breaking up of the surface will not, however, be pleasant unless the forms of the decoration are in themselves good and instinct with life.

The beauty which so often arises from the effects of use and exposure may perhaps seem in some cases hard to reconcile with the principle which it is here sought to establish. If aptness for use, it may be asked, is an element in the beauty of an object of use, how are we to account for the strong appeal which the ruin of a noble building certainly makes to the sense of beauty? For my own part I am inclined to think that the taste for ruins is often a sign of a want of taste for art. A beautiful thing is better whole and sound than in decay. Yet the spectacle of the silent struggle of strength and grace with destructive forces has in it a sense of action, of drama, to which beauty cannot be denied. Apart from the question of actual decay, every one feels the æsthetic gain which has been made when a thing ceases to be blankly new. A natural adornment has then been added to it. A room that has been lived in, a piece of silver that has been rubbed and handled for a lifetime, the steps of an ancient building worn by thousands of passing feet, a wall whose angles are softened and whose surface is stained by having fronted the sun and rain for many years—all these have the natural and inimitable charm produced by the touch of life—they no longer stand in crude isolation, they are related to the goings-on of the world.

Of all the arts there is none which seems to evade analysis so much as Music; none whose power is at once so mighty and so mysterious. Saying nothing it seems to mean everything. We can think of nothing in the world so lofty, so sweet, so profound as to be the fit embodiment of what Music conveys to us. Closely analogous in its outward form to what in line and colour is called Pattern, we are yet evidently far short of expressing the whole character of Music when we say, what in itself is quite true, that it is beautiful pattern in sound. It has more of humanity about it than pattern can have. It neither gives us representations of objects of sense, nor even definite emotions, but it has a unique power over the moods of the soul. This power seems to arise first from its complete control over the resources of movement and rhythm, secondly from the fact that by virtue of certain acoustic laws it can excite the sense of fulfilment, of suspense, of unexpected sweetness, unexpected failure and depression, in a way open to no other art which appeals directly to the senses. But rhythm and movement are the main things in Music, and the nature of the power which it exercises by means of them must now be considered.

Rhythm and movement are closely related to each other, but they are not quite the same thing. The term rhythm is given to any kind of movement which is marked by the regular recurrence of stresses, undulations, beats. This is the essential character of the movement of life. Action and reaction, systole and diastole, the vibrations of the atom, the breaking of sea-waves, the changes of day and night, the alternations of the seasons—wherever we look, into things great or small, we find the same principle of rhythmic movement pervading all. Man has found out how to turn this principle to account in his mechanical contrivances, indeed in all ways in which he endeavours to exercise force on matter. Once get your force to work rhythmically, and it will do ten times the work it is capable of when evenly continuous. Our own bodies and nervous systems are attuned to the same law. Under the spell of rhythm the mind is capable of moods and emotions which without it could never have been evoked into consciousness. And that makes the difference between telling a thing in verse and in prose. Verse arouses the mood in which the subject has emotional value and significance. Even prose always becomes more or less rhythmic when impassioned.

Now Music has a control unrivalled among the arts over this element of rhythm. Other arts can suggest rhythm, Music actually _is_ rhythm—it is the very pulse of life. It can produce rhythm, moreover, in a great variety of ways. The mere succession of sounds is rhythm, but music also has at command the varying stresses or accents of notes, alternations in volume of sound, alternations in pitch and quality of sound. And since a sequence of notes will cling to the memory, Music can put into rhythmical relations, not only single notes, but groups of notes, _i.e._ musical phrases, and chords, which are musical phrases played all at once. Music can therefore not only thunder upon the brain with mighty shocks of sound, but can enchant it with the most delicate complexities. The range of its power over rhythm is incomparably greater and subtler than that of the only two other arts in which rhythm works directly on the senses—dancing and metrical verse.

The element of beauty in a rhythmical phrase seems to depend mainly on the kind of mood it awakens. There are moods of meditation, moods of tenderness, moods of ardour, moods of yearning, moods of gaiety—all these and many more are under the control of rhythmic phrases. And there are common-place, self-assertive, bouncing rhythms which produce corresponding moods, and which may therefore be called ugly. The precise connexion of certain phrases with certain moods depending, as it does, on a world of dim associations stretching far beyond our personal, conscious life, is probably incapable of scientific statement. In the last result I think we should find that the characters of different rhythms are associated with bodily movements, attitudes, gestures, in short with dancing; but a host of other associations, branching out from this in many directions, have introduced a complexity of meaning which defies analysis.

To turn to the consideration of Movement in art, we find that the power of rendering this characteristic of life is shared by Music only with Dancing and with Literature. By movement in an art-work I mean movement whose sequences have proportion and design, progressing by stages linked to each other through natural and organic associations towards a significant conclusion. In nature, movement can be immensely varied in character. It can be slow or swift, rough and laboured or smooth and fluent, massive and voluminous or arrowy and intense; it can leap or undulate, march or dance, soar or swoop, and each of these kinds of movement means something to the spirit of man. All these Music controls, and can order and harmonize at will. It can represent that in the movement of nature which goes beyond and overmasters Rhythm; for Rhythm in itself does not involve Progression; in fact, a perfect rhythm would forbid it. If Action and Reaction were always precisely equal, we should have a universe as stationary as a spinning top—it might be in vehement action, but it would never develop into something new.[183] Music by its complete command of the phases of movement can illustrate the progressive force, the life-impulse in nature, and this not merely by symbols and intellectual forms, but by playing directly on the nervous system as a harp-player on the strings of his instrument.

No art is more sensuous than Music, and none more abstract, more removed from what are called realities, in the substance of what it conveys. Its entire independence of objects of sense as given in experience, combined with its mastery of the inner law, the spiritual significance, of life has led to its being ranked by some as the highest of the arts. I doubt if such comparisons are profitable, but it is easy to recognize a sense in which Schopenhauer speaks truth when he says that the other arts deal with the shadows of life, Music, however, with its essence.[184]

Let us now consider the Representative Arts in the light of the principle which we are trying to establish. Since they depend on the portrayal of objects actually found in nature and not created by the artist, their relation to life is obvious. There are, however, some minor problems of great interest and intricacy connected with them, and these we must briefly touch on.

A great school of artists and art critics has in recent times maintained that Painting is concerned with nothing except harmonies of light and colour, and that subject is therefore completely indifferent to it save in so far as it affords opportunity for the rendering of surfaces variously illuminated and composed. The sun falling on a heap of refuse is on this theory as much to the artist as when it lights up the features of Cordelia under her tragic fate. A champion of this, as it is called, Impressionist school has explained its particular point of view by suggesting the manner in which two painters, one of the older type and one an Impressionist, would treat such a subject as the death of Agamemnon. The former would think of the magnitude of the event and the greatness of the characters of those concerned in it—the Impressionist would probably try to fix the attention of the spectator on some note of colour such as the red robe which a character in the scene might be wearing.[185] Can we judge between these rival conceptions of the function of the representative arts?

Let us revert to our formula—Art is the expression of Life. In the Representative Arts it is the expression of visible life. If one wishes to paint the death of Agamemnon it will not do to rely for one’s effect upon the spectator’s knowledge of that bit of Greek history and to make one’s art impressive simply because its allusions are freely recognizable. So far undoubtedly the Impressionists are right. But on the other hand, the assassination of a great man is a bit of life and a very notable and memorable one. The visible world is, after all, not entirely summed up in the texture of surfaces under light. Character and spirit have also their visible manifestations, and the painter who can render them, as well as the aspects of physical life by which they are accompanied, is surely cutting a wider swathe of life than he who thinks only of the red robe of the actor in a tragic scene. Goethe satirized a whole false theory of art when he remarked in a well-known epigram that “pictures which work miracles are mostly very poor paintings.” Yet one is reminded of his own feeling before the painting of St. Agatha, by Raphael, which he saw on his first Italian journey at Bologna. “I have marked this figure well,” he writes. “I shall one day read my Iphigenia before her in spirit, and shall put no words in the mouth of my heroine which might not have been spoken by this saint.” Was there not something here for Goethe, for all of us, beyond painting for the sake of light and colour?

In considering the plastic arts in relation to subject, the large question of their function as illustration comes into view. An immense range of art, from that which deals with religion and history down to the drawings in our comic journals, evidently presupposes in the spectator’s mind a background of information with which the work of art itself does not and cannot furnish him. A work of this kind must certainly be said to rely for part of its interest upon something which is not in the picture. It is therefore not a pure art product; it is a complex of artistic with historical or religious or critical interest; but so long as we do not confuse the different elements it would be absurd to say that they may not be legitimately united. Still, the subject of a picture, as a picture, remains always something which is in the picture. It would therefore be a contradiction in terms to speak of a poor picture on a great subject. If the painting be poor, the subject is poor—the painter’s intention may have been great, but he has not expressed it. A reference to portraiture may help to make the matter clear. An indifferent portrait of a person held in special love or veneration by me would, if it were not so bad as to belie him, have an interest and value for me which it would entirely lack in the case of one who knew or cared nothing for the person represented. This superadded interest, the interest which travels through the painting to some concrete person or thing behind it, must be thought away before a work of art can be judged as a work of art. The application to religious or historical art is obvious. Here is a painting in which an uninformed observer sees a woman and an angel. What is he to make of it? The painter is evidently representing a moment of great exaltation and significance. The woman is receiving a message; and the painter can tell us, within the limits of his art, not what the message is, but of what kind it is—sad, or solemn, or joyful, or tragic. He can make all the accessories of the theme, the lighting, colour, etc., reinforce his conception, and the observer can discern, if he has intelligence in such things, that the painter is putting before us his conception of the way in which a soul conceives a mighty destiny. _That is the subject_; the universal idea, although the label on the frame be ‘The Annunciation.’

I hope it will not be thought that I am in any degree seeking to disparage the beautiful art of the Impressionists in maintaining that the highest art is that in which there is most of life. Life is so abundant and rich that one can find it almost anywhere in sufficient measure to delight and to enchant. Moreover, the great laws by which life acts and endures, the laws of rhythm, contrast, harmony, can be amply suggested in the plastic arts even when dealing with the most familiar things of earth, and these exalt and glorify any theme.

I remember to have heard once of a visitor to an exhibition of paintings by—I need not name him—a certain well-known purveyor of sensuous religiosities, a kind of nineteenth-century Carlo Dolci. On entering he met two ladies passing out through the ante-room, which happened to be hung with landscapes by an artist whom I need not hesitate to name, Mr. Mark Fisher. One of them wished to pause over these. The other, who walked with wet eyes and flushed cheek, cried, “Trees, trees! Do you want me to look at trees after having had my soul uplifted?” This little anecdote will bear some thinking over. Can we call an art bad which has power to uplift the soul? But we have to ask, Was it really the art which did so, or the allusions in the art? And again, as in the case of Tolstoy and his canon of infectiousness, we must ask, What soul? It is difficult to imagine that the soul capable of being uplifted by the art of the painter in question would be very quick to recognize the signs of nobility and heroic passion in real life. To recognize that the trees of Mr. Mark Fisher might be worth many Martyrdoms would be at least a sound beginning of an artistic education.

Dancing, so far as it is an art, must be classed under the Representative Arts. Unlike most of these it can render movement; and its art is to display movements in a progressive and a rhythmic sequence. It is sculpture in motion. Unless when combined with Music, however, its range of artistic expression is not great, beautiful effects are not under strict control, and in their rapid change the eye cannot properly take them in. The impression left by a succession of attitudes seems more confused and more transitory than that of a musical phrase.

The question of the place of Literature in the scheme is one of some difficulty. Unlike all the other arts, its subject matter is not brought directly before the senses, but evoked by conventional symbols which have in themselves no æsthetic value whatever. Thus in one sense it may be called the only strictly national art in existence. The most beautiful poem in the world, though it were graven in Egyptian basalt, would be a collection of meaningless scratches if the language in which it was written were lost. If, however, the language be known, Literature has not only the power of evoking the conceptions desired by the maker, but also that of working directly on the senses by means of the rhythmic qualities of speech. Still the range of rhythmic expression in language is so limited that in itself (_i.e._ as we might feel it if spoken in an unknown tongue) it may be regarded as quite subordinate to the matter conveyed. Strictly, therefore, we ought perhaps to call Literature neither a Presentative nor a Representative, but an Evocative art. Within its own circle, however, it falls naturally into classes corresponding to those of the other arts, for narrative literature and drama, which deal with actions and images taken from external life, are clearly Representative in character, while lyrical and meditative poetry, which place the maker’s mind, mood, or passion directly before us, are Presentative.

Literature has one great superiority over the plastic arts. Like Music, it can render the movement of life. In the dramatic form this movement can be brought to bear directly upon the senses. It resembles Painting and Sculpture in being able to deal with concrete objects of sense, though, as we have seen, its method of dealing with them is not strictly representative. It stands absolutely alone in the fact that it can render thoughts[186] as well as passions or moods. I should, then, be inclined to reckon Drama as the greatest of all the arts in its range of expression, while at the same time it cannot be claimed for it that it approaches Music in the control of moods or in the intensity of effect which audible rhythm alone seems to command. The conclusion drawn by Wagner, that the supreme art must be sought in a combination of Music and Drama, is a tempting one, but I doubt its validity. The question arises whether in this combination one or other of the united arts does not surrender much of its own special power. So at least one great poet seems to have felt. “C’est defendu,” announced Victor Hugo about his dramas, “de mettre des notes de musique le long de ces vers.” The poetic use of language has its own conventions and laws, and these, when used by a master, are so subtle and so powerful that to set his words to music is often to produce an effect of distortion. What is most truly poetic in the language is turned into an empty mask by withdrawing the underlying substance to place it under the control of another convention, another law. One can, no doubt, as in the case of a Greek chorus, set great poetry to the measure of a simple chant, or one can unite rhythmic diction of a broad and simple character with great music, but the highest poetry and the highest music do not seem to combine to good purpose.

In this rapid survey of the arts there are, of course, large and attractive fields of exploration which have not been even glanced at. It has been sought on the present occasion merely to give the clue by which the arts may be related to the main thesis of this book. Ethics and Art constitute the two great fields of what we may call the disinterested activity of man. They engage his highest powers, they set him on fire with ardour and sympathy, yet they do nothing, directly at least, towards satisfying the primary and personal needs of his nature. Our problem has been to relate them to life, and to give them a place in a scheme of organic unity. Both have been seen to have that place only by reference to something which in one sense is immanent in nature, and clearly perceptible there, but which in another aspect is outside “the realm of clock-time and measuring rod,” the transcendent Whole. All spiritual ethics, all art which is not of the nature of a mere record, must in the last resort rely on this wholeness of things for their justification. But in the earlier parts of this study we have tried to show that even the physical organization of nature must rely on it too; for the driving force of evolution, as well as the framework of law in which it works, have been both interpreted as a manifestation of the Will to live, to act; of the impulse towards the richest and fullest development of the material, animal, and spiritual life. It is in this life-impulse that God reveals Himself in the world of time and space. This is the visible aspect of His all-embracing unity; this is His essential relation to earthly things; and this is the clue to their rational interpretation as parts of a divine cosmic Order. To learn to apprehend the vast Purpose with conscious intelligence, to further it with conscious will and with deliberate faith, is the sweet and wholesome gospel which Nature preaches to all who have ears to hear.

APPENDIX A

SUM ERGO COGITO

Not to encumber the text with too much abstruse metaphysics, I place here what seem to me some important corollaries of the position stated at the close of Chapter I.

If the Universe is not a mere aggregate but a coherent Whole, then it follows of necessity that the units which compose it will have relations not only with each other but also with the Whole. When any of these units reaches the stage of consciousness it may be expected that it will become conscious of these relations, and that this consciousness will, like other things, develop in time to greater and greater fulness.

But here, from the analytic side of the Kantian philosophy, comes the warning which tells us that all we can really know is the stream of sensation which passes through our mind and which derives the order and coherence it seems to possess from the laws of that mind. How can we transcend this apprehension of fleeting appearances, and attain knowledge of the One, the Real, and of our relations with It?

To answer this question we must look a little deeper into the basis of this doctrine of the subjectivity of human knowledge.

This subjectivity, when we examine it closely, does not (as it is often, I think, supposed) appear to be a special and inexplicable condition imposed in some external way on human consciousness. It is a condition absolutely bound up with the state of existence implied in being a Person, an ‘I.’ The moment the mind is able to turn inward upon itself and to separate the thing known or felt from that which knows and feels, in that moment the Thing stands a whole infinity away from the ‘I’; they are separated by the analytic faculty of the Ego and they can never _by that faculty_ be reunited. The state of being an ‘I’ is essentially a state of analytic consciousness. The intuitions of space and time are simply the instruments by which the analytic faculty works, for it is only by their relations in space and time that things in the world can be divided and distinguished by the intellect. This analytic faculty has, it must be noted, an unbounded power of disintegration. It does not spare even the Ego itself, which it reduces to a mere flux of sensations. There is no answer to its destructive logic except the sufficient one, that this boundless power of analysis in both directions, inward and outward, is simply a function inevitably bound up with being an ‘I’ at all—it is because of that function that I am an ‘I.’ Every being possessing ‘I’-hood must, _eo ipso_, be capable of reducing all external things to its own sensations, and of externalizing its own self. One cannot be an ‘I’ on any other terms.

Now let us suppose that this analytic faculty did not exist, and that consciousness went on, as perhaps it does in beasts, by acts of pure intuition, without ever turning inward to regard itself, without ever making distinctions between external objects, save as a matter of unreasoned sense-responsiveness; what would the consequences be then?

Clearly in that case object and subject would be one, and knowledge, _so far as it went_, would be absolute knowledge. But it would neither be true nor false, since without analysis and comparison there could be no criterion of truth and falsity. Nor, similarly, could the actions springing from this state of what may be called Impersonal Consciousness be either ethically good or bad in relation to the creature which performed them. In this state, things in space and time would be seen simply as they really are—as moments in the life of the Spirit.

Our relations with the Whole, then, must be sought in this region of pure impersonal consciousness, which implies entire forgetfulness of Self, entire surrender to the life-movement of the universe. We can understand now why man has always had yearnings for this state, and has so often sought to attain it by false means, by the trance or ecstasy produced through self-hypnotism, drugs, etc.; means ultimately and necessarily destructive of their object since a self-regarding motive lies at the root of them.

If there are illegitimate ways of attaining this state what, it may be asked, are the legitimate ones? The difficulty of this question lies in the fact that the state of impersonal consciousness disappears the moment we begin to think about it. We live in it, in fact, a great deal more than, in our states of analytic self-consciousness, we have any idea of. But as a rule we only live in it with a part of our nature—the instinctive, animal part. To enter it with our whole nature, to live in it as Man, two ways have been found and these we call the way of Religion and the way of Art; or, if we describe them by the faculties respectively dominant in each, as the way of Love and the way of Beauty. Through these essentially harmonizing and synthesizing powers Man can for a while merge himself in the vast ocean of Being, and return from it, renewed and purified, to the narrow confines of his selfhood.

But return he must; for selfhood is not an accident or a deformity, not a thing to be despised and shuffled off the moment we can get rid of it. It, also, is a power of life, and through it we are enabled to harvest an immense store of experiences. Through the Ego, no doubt, with its rapacious egotisms, come sin and wrong into the world; but, as Heracleitus finely says, “Men would not have known the name of Justice if these things had not been.” Moreover, man has to act as well as to be and to feel. For all complex action, regarding distant ends and involving choice and discrimination, the faculty of analysis, with which selfhood is bound up, is absolutely essential. Man is not to be raised in the scale of being by cutting away any part of his nature, but by developing the whole harmoniously; and the analytic self-consciousness is harmonized with the impersonal consciousness when the one is used to translate into its own sphere the experiences of the other—to fashion in the visible and material life some counterpart of the realities known in the spirit.

APPENDIX B

CO-OPERATION AND COMPETITION

In Kropotkin’s Mutual Aid: A Factor in Evolution, it seems to me (for all that it finds little favour with some men of science) that real light has been thrown on certain principles of cardinal importance which had been obscured in the too exclusive contemplation of the Darwinian principle of the survival of the fittest in the struggle for life. Ample proof is given by Kropotkin of the truth of the following passage:—

“As soon as we study animals—not in laboratories and museums only, but in the forest and the prairie, in the steppe and the mountains—we at once perceive that though there is an immense amount of warfare and extermination going on amidst various species, and especially among various classes of animals, there is, at the same time, as much, or perhaps even more, of mutual support, mutual aid, and mutual defence amidst animals belonging to the same species, or, at least, to the same society. Sociability is as much a law of nature as mutual struggle. Of course it would be extremely difficult to estimate, however roughly, the relative numerical importance of both these series of facts. But if we resort to an indirect test, and ask Nature: ‘Who are the fittest: those who are continually at war with each other, or those who support one another?’ we at once see that those animals which acquire habits of mutual aid are undoubtedly the fittest. They have more chances to survive, and they attain, in their respective classes, the highest development of intelligence and bodily organization. If the numberless facts which can be brought forward to support this view are taken into account, we may safely say that mutual aid is as much a law of animal life as mutual struggle, but that, as a factor of evolution, it most probably has a far greater importance, inasmuch as it favours the development of such habits and characters as ensure the maintenance and further development of the species, together with the greatest amount of welfare and enjoyment of life for the individual, with the least waste of energy” (pp. 5, 6. 1903).

From the mass of facts which Kropotkin has adduced in support of the above-quoted view, I cannot forbear quoting one, an observation of his own, relating to a creature of by no means high organization:—

“As to the big Molucca crab (_Limulus_), I was struck (in 1882, at the Brighton Aquarium) with the extent of mutual assistance which these clumsy animals are capable of bestowing upon a comrade in case of need. One of them had fallen upon its back in a corner of the tank, and its heavy, saucepan-like carapace prevented it from returning to its natural position, the more so as there was in the corner an iron bar which rendered the task still more difficult. Its comrades came to the rescue, and for one hour’s time I watched how they endeavoured to help their fellow-prisoner. They came two at once, pushed their friend from beneath, and after strenuous efforts succeeded in lifting it upright; but then the iron bar would prevent them from achieving the work of rescue, and the crab would again fall heavily upon its back. After many attempts, one of the helpers would go in the depth of the tank and bring two other crabs, which would begin with fresh forces the same pushing and lifting of their helpless comrade. We stayed in the Aquarium for more than two hours, and, when leaving, we again came to cast a glance upon the tank: the work of rescue still continued! Since I saw that, I cannot refuse credit to the observation quoted by Dr. Erasmus Darwin, namely, that ‘the common crab during the moulting season stations as sentinel an unmoulted or hard-shelled individual to prevent marine enemies from injuring moulted individuals in their unprotected state’” (pp. 10, 12). #/

APPENDIX C

IS LIFE WORTH LIVING?

This grave question is, according to Mr. Herbert Spencer, one which must be “definitely raised and answered before entering on any ethical discussion” (Data of Ethics, § 9). He goes on to restate it in the form: Does life yield “a surplus of pleasurable feeling over painful feeling?” and he argues that “goodness or badness can be ascribed to acts which subserve life or hinder life only on this supposition” (§ 10). But can one really strike a balance between pleasures and pains in human life? Mr. Spencer himself admits, later on, that pleasures and pains, “unlike in their kinds, intensities and times of occurrence, are incommensurable” (§ 57). Moreover, the maintenance of life in the present day means passing it on for countless generations ahead, and how can we feel satisfied that the conditions then existing will make more for pleasure than for pain, even assuming that they do so now? The question, then, whether it is good to maintain life does not seem capable of philosophic decision on this ground.

Mr. Spencer’s sense of logic, however, seems to me to be here at fault as well as his fundamental conception of ethics. The question which he begins by asking is not the question which he ends by answering. In the original question, Is life worth living? a comparison is set up between living and not-living. But we find this merging, in Mr. Spencer’s mind, into the quite different comparison of one _kind_ of living with another kind of living—the pleasurable and the painful. Let us translate the original question into the language of Mr. Spencer’s ethical system. In that system “the good is universally the pleasurable” (§ 10). The word ‘worth,’ then, connotes pleasure, and the question resolves itself simply into this, Is it more pleasurable to live than not to live? Seeing that in not-living there is no pleasure at all, the only possible answer is an affirmative—the question answers itself. And in fact this must always be the case whatever connotation we attach to the word ‘worth,’ for life has at any rate possibilities, whereas not-living has none. The question, then, “of late so much agitated,” is really a nonsense question, and the reason why it is necessarily devoid of meaning will appear at once when we analyze the terms. For ‘worth,’ ‘goodness,’ ‘blessedness,’ ‘pleasure,’ and so forth, are simply _terms of life_ and have no significance whatever apart from it. So the question, Is it better to live than not to live? is merely the same thing as to ask, Is there more life in living than in not living? Instead, therefore, of the unverifiable assumption on which Spencer bases his system of ethics, that life yields on the whole a surplus of pleasure over pain, we merely affirm the indubitable proposition that it yields a surplus of life.

From another side than that of the Spencerian ethics, however, it may be argued, against the conception which we are trying to substitute for it, that, if Life is something more than the physical phenomena attending it on earth, if, in fact, it is what we call ‘immortal,’ we need be at no pains to preserve it for ourselves or others in the form in which we find it going on here, since death can merely have the effect of translating it into another form.

True; but suppose us to hold as lightly by _that_ form as we are urged to do by this—suppose us to show no persistence in _any_ of the forms of being into which our life may pass, what kind of life would be realizable under such conditions of eternal volatility? Could life ever have risen above the stage of the _Amœba_ if the _Amœba_ had not the instinct to maintain itself on earth? Can Man ever hope to rise to anything higher without a strong element of continuity, of fixity, of ‘fighting it out on these lines’ in his feeling about the form of life in which he actually finds himself? It is through the thousand ties of duty and service, love and joy, which we form with the visible world around us that we realize the highest life of which we are at present capable. A light-minded readiness to snap those ties would imply an incapacity for forming them. Here, as always, we find that Nature tells us nothing to any good purpose unless we look at her as an organic whole. One cannot live by any isolated principle or factor, however great and true.

APPENDIX D

ST. FRANCIS THE POET

No one can read St. Francis’s one poem, the _Canticle of the Sun_, without feeling that had poetry claimed and won him in time, his might have been one of the greatest and sweetest of Italian voices. The story of its composition has a touching beauty. Towards the end of his life, when in the deepest dejection over the failure of his Order to live the life of joyful humility, unworldliness, and poverty to which he had pledged it, he came, blind and ill, to S. Clare’s Convent at St. Damien, on his way to Rieti, where his malady was to be treated. In this darkest hour of his life the untroubled faith and loving sympathy of his old friend brought consolation and peace to his torn spirit. She made him, it is said, a cell of reeds in the convent garden, where he could be free to come and go as he wished. “Little by little,” writes Paul Sabatier in his Vie de S. François, “the man of ancient days revived in him, and at times the Sisters heard the echo of strange chants, which mingled with the murmuring of the pines and olives, and which seemed to come from the cell of reeds.” One day, after a long conversation with Clare, he had sat down at the monastery table for refection. Scarcely had he begun to eat when he fell into a kind of trance. “Praise be to God!” he cried, on coming to himself. He had completed the _Canticle of the Sun_.

It is said that for a week afterwards he forgot his breviary, and passed his days in repeating to himself the strophes of his wonderful poem—a work in which, for all its religious ardour, the note of asceticism is little apparent; unless one sees it in his usual quaint adoption of the things of creation into a religious community! I append a literal translation, omitting two later verses composed for special occasions and not belonging to the first pure inspiration. It is written in unrhymed irregular stanzas:—

CANTICLE OF THE SUN

Most high, all-powerful, good Lord, thine are praises, glory, honour and all benediction. To Thee alone, Most high, they are due, and no man is worthy to name Thee.

Have praise, Lord, with all Thy creatures, especially Brother my Lord the Sun. He gives the day, and by him Thou showest light, and he is beautiful and radiant, with great splendour. Of Thee, Most High, he is the symbol.

Have praise, Lord, for Sister Moon and for the Stars; in the sky Thou hast formed them, bright, precious and beautiful.

Have praise, Lord, for Brother Wind, and for the Air and the Clouds, and for the clear sky, and for every kind of weather, by which Thou givest sustenance to all Thy creatures.

Have praise, Lord, for Sister Water who is so serviceable and humble and precious and chaste.

Have praise, Lord, for Brother Fire, by whom Thou dost illuminate the night. He is handsome and gay, bold and strong.

Have praise, Lord, for Sister our Mother, the Earth, who nourishes and takes care of us, and brings forth divers fruits with coloured flowers, and the grass.

Praise ye and bless the Lord and render thanks to Him, and serve Him with great humility!

APPENDIX E

ISABELLA AND CLAUDIO

The ethics of sex-relations has always formed a crucial question in ethical systems. Let me recall a remarkable debate upon it which took place recently between a champion of the Spencerian system, Dr. Saleeby, and Mr. W. S. Lilly, who represented, of course, the view of Catholic orthodoxy.

Mr. Lilly, in an article on Shakespere’s Religion contributed to the _Fortnightly Review_ for June, 1904, was led to dwell on “the strikingly Catholic ethos of the play Measure for Measure, informed as it is by the idea, quite alien from the Protestant mind, of the surpassing excellence and sacrosanct character of virginal chastity.” Hazlitt, whom Mr. Lilly takes to represent the typical Protestant view, had declared himself “not greatly enamoured” of Isabella’s inflexible purity, and had expressed his want of “confidence in the virtue that is sublimely good at another’s expense.” Mr. Lilly added that Spencer’s teaching would have countenanced Hazlitt’s judgment and enjoined upon Isabella compliance with Angelo’s desire. Dr. Saleeby having denounced this as an “outrageous” perversion of Spencer’s meaning, Mr. Lilly vindicates himself in a letter to the _Fortnightly_ as follows:—

“I pointed, in a letter appearing in your July number, to Mr. Spencer’s express declaration, in the _Data of Ethics_, that the elements out of which the conceptions of right and wrong are framed are pleasures and pains, and that ‘conduct is considered by us as good or bad, according as its aggregate results to self or others, or both, are pleasurable or painful.’ I concluded, therefore, that if we are to go by Mr. Spencer’s ‘scientific ethics,’ Isabella ought to have been willing to make the sacrifice of her virginity in order to prevent the disagreeable feeling which would be caused to herself through the loss of a beloved brother, to Claudio through the process of decapitation, and to Angelo through disappointed desire, and thus to have procured, as ‘aggregate results,’ a great balance of pleasure over pain to all concerned” (_Fortnightly Review_, September, 1906).

Dr. Saleeby’s answer to this is the obvious one that the Spencerian ethics do not contemplate immediate personal pleasures and pains, but rather ultimate utility to the race at large, and that “Isabella’s virtue, if merely by example alone, would make for the strengthening of the society in which she found herself.” Mr. Lilly then practically surrenders his first position—he admits that Spencer’s “scientific ethics” are intended to have little or no concern with the immediate sensations of Isabella, Claudio, and Angelo, but he turns to confront Dr. Saleeby and Spencer from a new and much stronger position. What claim, he asks, have “scientific ethics” on the individual? Ultimate utility for the race might (if one could estimate it correctly) be taken as giving us the _what_ of moral action, but can it ever give us the _why_? Isabella was not thinking of “ultimate utility” in her refusal, but of the laws that Sophocles wrote of so memorably, “unwritten and invincible laws which ever live, and no man knows their birthplace.” She was not thinking of the effect of her example—her action would have been, and ought to have been, just the same though she had had the most complete assurance that none but Angelo and herself would ever know the reason for Claudio’s pardon. The motive which constrained her was derived from the system of ethics which Spencer’s was constructed to replace. This new system has never succeeded in supplying an answer to the demand of the individual man or woman, ‘What is the advantage of the race to me that I should sacrifice the least of my inclinations for its sake?’ But till that piercing question is answered, all hedonistic systems, however elaborate and perfect their fabric, are building on “wood, hay, stubble.” Touch their foundations with the pitiless edge of that question, and in a moment they are in the dust. So far, in effect, Mr. Lilly.

Before we go on to deal with these conflicting views of the ethical problem in Measure for Measure, let us take a parallel presentation in literature of the same problem, in which the implied judgment of the dramatist appears entirely different. Maeterlinck, in his Monna Vanna, shows us a beautiful and high-souled woman, the loving and faithful wife of the commandant of the city of Pisa. The city is beleaguered by foes, its power of defence is at an end, an assault is imminent, and the inhabitants will be exposed to all the havoc and outrage which attended warfare in the days when the conceptions so much prized by Mr. Lilly held undisputed sway. The captain of the besieging Florentine forces, a great soldier of fortune named Prinzivalle, had been an ancient playmate of Monna Vanna, and, unknown to her, had been her ardent lover. Being entreated for mercy, he sends an ultimatum. Let Monna Vanna spend a night in his tent, and he will provision the city and withdraw his army next day. Amid the indignation and distraction which the cruel dilemma causes in the household of the prince, Monna Vanna’s resolve shapes and hardens itself. She decides to sacrifice herself for the city. But Prinzivalle finds her a woman of marble. Her soul is so high-strung with heroic devotion that she regards her body as little as a cast-off rag—she is become as incapable of fear or shrinking as she is of base desire. His passion is chilled by the icy completeness of her self-surrender, while all that is noble in him responds to her nobility, and the city is saved without the terrible sacrifice which she was ready to perform.

Such is the tale of Monna Vanna, so far as it concerns our present discussion. In reading it, it is impossible not to feel that she was right, just as in reading Measure for Measure it is impossible not to feel that Isabella was right. What has a system of natural ethics, a system based on the conception of life and nature put forward in this book, to say upon the searching ethical question involved in these two great dramas? It is not an easy nor a pleasant question to subject to philosophic analysis, but it is a very important and critical one.

In the first place neither science nor sense will, I think, agree with Mr. Lilly’s estimate of “the surpassing excellence and sacrosanct character of virginal chastity.” Virginity, _in itself_ and apart from all qualifying circumstances, is the reverse of excellent and admirable. It means death, not life; it violates nature. What is really sound doctrine in this connexion is not the sanctity and excellence of virginity, but the deep degradation of making sexual relations a subject of barter. Wherever this prevails, whatever the church and the law may or may not have had to do with the transaction, the beauty and romance of life is blighted and destroyed. There is no conquest of culture which should be guarded more devotedly than the dignity and sweetness which are brought into the relations of man and woman by love, as the great poets have understood that word, love moving in its guarded circle of mutual trust and intimacy. A life is well lost in defence of this most sacred treasure of the spirit.

Isabella and Monna Vanna both felt this truth in the depths of their nature as all good women do. Yet absolute laws of action can rarely, if ever, be laid down to cover every individual case. One can conceive either of them deciding as Monna Vanna actually did. But in the realm of high tragedy which we are now dealing with, where principles and actions have a simplicity and integrity rarely found in common life, it must be felt that neither of them could have taken up life again as if nothing had happened. Had they recognized that there were higher reasons stringent enough to compel them to tread the way to that sacrifice, they would, I think, like the Roman Lucretia, have solemnly marked it with their life-blood as an expiation, and as a warning, were it only to Prinzivalle or Angelo, that such a thing must not be done save at the most terrible cost that man can pay. For Isabella, then, the problem would practically resolve itself into the question whether she should surrender her own life for that of a single worthless relative. There was no moral obligation on her to do that. Had she loved him so intensely as to go willingly to her doom for his sake, no one could have blamed her; no one could blame her if she refused, and bade him summon up his manhood to die for his own sin.

But in Monna Vanna’s case it was not a single life that was at stake, but the life and honour of a multitude of men and women with whose protection, moreover, she was, in part, charged by the high position she held in their midst. If right and wrong are to be interpreted as Mr. Lilly would interpret them, solely with regard to the arbitrary commands of a supernatural Power, then the _extent_ to which a given action may influence life can hardly be a matter of any moment. On the other hand, in Spencer’s scheme, with its criterion of the greatest ultimate pleasure of the greatest number, hardly anything else can matter except precisely this question of the extent or area affected by our action. In the scheme of natural ethics which I am trying to commend, and which, if I am right, grows logically out of the conception of a living universe, the element of _extent_ has its due place in determining action, but none in fixing the character of the action. And this, it may be observed, is just what the good sense of humanity has practically arrived at in its daily judgments and doings. No ordinary man would be required by any ethical law to lay down his life as a substitute for another who had no claim on him. But for a community, or a man such as a sovran, who for the time represents a community and embodies its interests, it would be thought base not to die if occasion demanded it. And so Monna Vanna might rightly feel herself constrained to do for her city what Isabella was in no way required to do for a brother, but the quality of the action would remain in each case the same, and the tragedy could have ended nobly only in the one stern way.

On the general question of the ordering of sex-relations, it needs no argument to show that the conditions fixed by nature forbid them, in the interests of life, to be casual and fleeting. On the other hand to require that, when these relations have once been entered into, no vices, no cruelty, no variance of any kind on either side would justify the dissolution of the connexion and the formation of a new one, is surely a superstitious exaggeration of a principle in itself right and sound. Probably the law and practice in England at the present day are as good a rough approximation to a sound marriage system as man has yet devised; with, however, this large qualification, that cases of divorce when they come before the law should be heard _in camera_. The Anglo-Saxon has not yet got rid of all his superstitions, and his belief in salvation by publicity is distinctly one of them.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Metabolism: see p. 27.

[2] J. Reinke. Die Welt als Tat, p. 173. The term ‘development’ (_Entwicklung_) includes both what we commonly understand by that term (as, the transformation of an embryo into a complete animal) and also what we call Evolution, the development of one species into another.

[3] See p. 24.

[4] Sylva Sylvarum, Century VI.

[5] Zoonomia, Vol. II, p. 247, third edition, 1801. Darwin is here adopting David Hume’s conjecture, which is worked out in some detail in the Zoonomia, the conclusion being that probably “one and the same kind of living filaments is and has been the cause of all organic life” (p. 244). He attributed evolution to internal forces impressed on living matter by the Creator.

[6] He taught that nature had produced a multitude of disconnected parts which afterwards combined and recombined at random until the appropriate parts had come together and remained stable.

[7] Αἰὼν πάντα φέρει. δολιχὸς χρόνος οἶδεν ἀμείβειν Οὔνομα καὶ μορφὴν καὶ φύσιν ἠδὲ τύχην. Jac. Anth., II, 20.

[8] “It has lately become the fashion, at least among the younger school of biologists, to attach small value to natural selection, if not, indeed, to regard it as a superseded formula.” (A. Weismann, The Evolution Theory, Engl. trans., II, 391.)

[9] Text Book of Botany, p. 3. English translation by Dr. H. C. Porter, 1898. In the fifth German edition, which served as the basis of a revised English translation (1903), another passage (taking note of De Vries’ Mutations Theory) is substituted for the above quoted, but the essential meaning is the same.

[10] Leitfaden in das Studium der experimentellen Biologie der Wassertiere, p. 67. The subject is ably treated by Keyserling, Das Gefüge der Welt, p. 190.

[11] For instance, the development of an embryo in the womb takes place in strict accordance with physico-chemical laws. But withdraw the element which we call _life_ and how different a set of processes would at once supervene! Yet the physical energies in the embryo would remain in amount exactly what they were before.

[12] See Weismann, The Evolution Theory, II, 358.

[13] For my own part, I may say I have a difficulty in conceiving the Divine under the human and limited category of intelligent personality.

[14] Das Gefüge der Welt, Hermann Graf v. Keyserling, 1906.

[15] See Appendix A.

[16] See Jagadis Chunder Bose, Response in the Living and the Non-Living, _passim_. The following passage sums up the results of many delicate experiments in the response to electrical stimulus. “We have seen,” writes the Indian physicist, “that the criterion by which vital response is differentiated is its abolition by the action of certain reagents—the so-called poisons. We find, however, that ‘poisons’ also abolish the response in plants and metals. Just as animal tissues pass from a state of responsiveness while living to a state of irresponsiveness when killed by poisons, so also we find metals transformed from a responsive to an irresponsive condition by the action of similar poisonous reagents” (p. 188).

[17] At a meeting of the British Association in 1905, Professor H. A. Miers, in a lecture on ‘The Growth of a Crystal,’ is reported to have said, The most wonderful feature of crystals was the manner in which they grew, just as though they were living things. Two features deserved special attention. The first was the remarkable power crystals possessed of healing themselves when mutilated. If a growing crystal were removed from a solution, broken at one of its corners, and re-immersed in the solution, it would continue to grow, and as it grew would restore the missing part, and become once more a completely symmetrical figure. This power of continuing to grow was possessed by a crystal even after countless ages, so soon as it was immersed into the appropriate solution. In this sense the crystal was immortal, for it never lost its vitality, or power of growing. The other remarkable feature was the growth of crystals in over-saturated solutions. In solutions only slightly over-saturated, no spontaneous generation of crystals was possible. It was true that a solution only slightly over-saturated would often begin to crystallize, apparently spontaneously, when exposed to the air, but this was because there were minute crystal fragments of the dissolved substance floating about in the air which got into the solution with the dust and so inoculated the solution with crystal germs, just as the human body might be inoculated with disease by a disease germ. If these germs were kept out, the solution would not crystallize until it was very strongly over-saturated, and then, at a certain strength, it would suddenly begin to crystallize spontaneously and with great rapidity.—_Times_, August 5, 1907.

[18] The Nature and Origin of Life (Eng. trans.), p. 250.

[19] It is not to be assumed, however, that these substances are merely passive objects in the process. The life which is in them has doubtless as much to do with the result as the life which is in the plant. This is a side of the question which calls for further investigation.

[20] It is however suggested by Professor E. Ray Lankester, in his article, ‘Protozoa,’ in the Encyclopædia Britannica, that the most primitive forms of organic life did not possess chlorophyll but fed on albuminoids, etc., which constituted the earliest steps in their own evolution.

[21] In Beddard’s Animal Coloration note is taken of the green fur of the sloth as a most uncommon if not unique phenomenon. It has been ascertained that the sloth has grooved or fluted hairs, which form the habitat of a minute green fungus to which the colour is due.

[22] Or starch, which easily decomposes into sugar, and which is composed of the same elements.

[23] Ray Lankester, _op. cit._

[24] Verworn, General Physiology, pp. 102, 478: “Physiological chemistry has shown that between the two kinds of substance very essential chemical differences exist, which prove that living substance experiences in dying pronounced chemical changes. A widespread difference between the two consists in their reaction. The reaction of living substance is almost without exception alkaline or neutral, and with death changes usually to acid.... Physiological chemistry has shown similar changes in death in great number. All these facts prove that in the death of living cell-substance certain chemical compounds undergo transformations; hence substances exist in it which are not to be found in dead cell-substance.”

[25] In 1892. An English translation of Bütschli’s work on Microscopic Foams and Protoplasm, by E. A. Minchin, appeared in 1894. The nucleus is really a form of protoplasm, chiefly differentiated from the ‘cytoplasm,’ or protoplasm of the cell, by containing a large amount of phosphorus.

[26] The Cell in Development and Inheritance, 2nd edition, p. 9.

[27] By J. A. and M. R. Thomson, 1904.

[28] The Evolution Theory, II, p. 391.

[29] _Ibid._, I, p. 368.

[30] _Ibid._, I, p. 404.

[31] The Evolution Theory, I, p. 353.

[32] _Ibid._, II, p. 52.

[33] But note the transition stage exemplified in the natural history of crystals (_vide_ p. 22).

[34] “It has been Weismann’s great service to place the keystone between the work of the evolutionists and that of the cytologists, and thus to bring the cell-theory and the evolution-theory into organic connexion” (E. B. Wilson, The Cell, p. 13).

[35] Prof. Wilson’s work on the cell (see note on p. 33) may be referred to for a comprehensive and detailed statement of all that is known at present on this subject.

[36] According to Wilson (_op. cit._) this was guessed by Haeckel in 1866, and confirmed in 1884-5 by the almost simultaneous discoveries of O. Hertwig, Strasburger, Kölliker, and Weismann.

[37] Sixteen have been counted in the human cell. A grasshopper has twelve, a lily twenty-four. The number is almost always an even one, but as with everything in Nature there are exceptions to the rule.

[38] The process briefly described above is that of ‘mitotic’ division (μίτος, a thread, from the appearance of the chromosomes). Amitotic division, in which the cell and nucleus simply divide in two without the formation of chromosomes, also occurs under certain conditions, but is usually an abnormal or degenerative process (cf. Wilson, The Cell, pp. 116-119).

[39] “Every animal appears as a sum of vital entities, each of which bears within itself the complete character of life” (Virchow, Cellular-pathologie, p. 12, 1858).

[40] Weismann, The Evolution Theory, I, 251.

[41] It is cast out into the cytoplasm—the substance surrounding the nucleus—where it degenerates (see Wilson, The Cell, p. 147).

[42] _Amœbæ._ See p. 30.

[43] The Evolution Theory, I, 265.

[44] The Cell, p. 178.

[45] Scientific Papers and Addresses, II, pp. 862-3.

[46] English trans., 2nd edition (1903), p. 159.

[47] The Cell, p. 434.

[48] Against this view might be quoted the fact that the unfertilized eggs sometimes laid by the workers (imperfect females) of bee and ant communities always develop into drones.

[49] Pp. 262-3. The bird was examined by Prof. Max Weber, of Amsterdam, and Mr. Beddard refers to the _Zoologischer Anzeiger_ for 1890, p. 508, for Weber’s account of the case.

[50] The now famous Mendelian Law of Inheritance, first discovered in 1865 by Mendel, an Augustinian monk and Abbott of Brünn, and completely ignored till the year 1900, when it was rediscovered by De Vries and others, is also strongly confirmatory of Weismann’s analysis of the principle of heredity. According to this law it is possible, as it were, to isolate any particular characteristic of a species or even (if heritable) of an individual, and by a definite system of crossing to attach this characteristic _alone_ to any other variety capable of crossing with the first. This means that inheritance is governed by separable units of formative energy. These units are Weismann’s determinants. The discovery of the methods of turning this principle to practical account is obviously of great importance for agriculture and stockbreeding. The law has some inexplicable limitations which are now closely engaging the attention of biologists. It is impossible to enter upon the subject more fully here, but a good account of it will be found in Lock’s Recent Progress in the Study of Variation, and in a brochure, An Address on Mendelian Heredity, by W. Bateson, reprinted from _Brain_, pt. cxiv, 1906.

[51] The actual stimulus which prompts the division is probably to be found in the disturbance of equilibrium which arises when the cell is taking in more nutriment than its digestive system can deal with. This, of course, does not explain why it should divide instead of dying of indigestion.

[52] See Strasburger, _loc. cit._

[53] The Evolution Theory, I, 402-3.

[54] The subject of degenerated and lost organs is very fully treated by M. Edmond Perrier in his Traité de Zoologie, pp. 325 _sqq._ It may be noted that animals which are _fixed_ usually lack eyes, even in light. In the depths of the sea, where total darkness reigns except for the phosphorescence emitted by certain animals, it is found that some creatures have completely lost their organs of sight, while others have them extraordinarily developed. Those which have lost them are the walkers (_Crustaceæ_); those which show an exceptional development are the swimmers. This goes to show that the needs of the animal, rather than the external conditions, are the determining cause.

Cave fishes are all extremely sensitive to light, which affects them disagreeably, even when the optic nerve is wholly destroyed. See Armand Viré, La Faune Actuelle des Cavernes, _Revue des Idées_, March 15, 1905, and La Faune Souterraine de France, 1900.

[55] A. R. Wallace, Darwinism, chapters III. and XV.

[56] Origin of Species, chapter II.

[57] Sexual selection—the competition of males and females for their mates—is merely a form of natural selection, and need not be specially dealt with here.

[58] Origin of Species, chapter V.

[59] See Eimer, Organic Evolution (Eng. trans.), pp. 173-184, for a full discussion of the question from the Lamarckian standpoint.

[60] ‘Right-handedness and Left-brainedness’ by D. J. Cunningham: the Huxley Lecture for 1902. Printed in the _Journal of the Anthropological Institute_, Vol. XXXII, pp. 273-95. I may refer also to a brochure by Dr. Geo. Sigerson, F.R.U.I., Consideration of the Structural and Acquisitional Elements in Dextral Pre-eminence, Dublin, 1884. Dr. Sigerson believes that primitive man was ambidextrous, and that ‘dexterity’ is a case of specialization of function, and has supported this view by a novel and interesting line of pathological observation.

[61] _Op. cit._, p. 285.

[62] _Ibid._, pp. 284-5.

[63] _Journal of Anatomy and Physiology_, Vol. XXXVI, p. 401. ‘On the relative weights of the right and left sides of the body in the foetus.’

[64] Origin of Species, chap. VI.

[65] ‘The Inadequacy of Natural Selection,’ Herbert Spencer. _Contemporary Review_, February and March, 1893.

‘Prof. Weismann’s Theories,’ Herbert Spencer. _Contemporary Review_, May, 1893.

‘The All-Sufficiency of Natural Selection,’ Aug. Weismann. _Contemporary Review_, September, 1893.

‘A Rejoinder to Prof. Weismann,’ Herbert Spencer. _Contemporary Review_, December, 1893.

The Romanes Lecture for 1894, by Aug. Weismann (Frowde).

[66] ‘Lamarck et le Transformisme actuel’: Muséum d’Histoire Naturelle, Centenaire; Vol. Commemoratif, 1903, p. 508. M. Perrier adds that the metaphysical alternative “est, en effet, à quoi le professeur A. Weismann, de Fribourg, a été conduit.” This, I think, can only be M. Perrier’s way of saying that he finds Weismann unintelligible, for Weismann’s ostensible object is certainly to steer between the Scylla of Lamarckism and the Charybdis of ‘metaphysics.’ With what success he attempts this feat we shall see.

[67] The Evolution Theory, II, p. 78.

[68] II, p. 330 _sqq._

[69] The Evolution Theory, II., 346.

[70] See p. 83.

[71] The Evolution Theory, II, 264.

[72] I take this from J. T. Cunningham’s Sexual Dimorphism, p. 16.

[73] Useless structures and organs are regarded by Weismann, and I think with justice, as in some degree unfavourable. They make demands on the organism for nourishment, and are thus in the position of non-productive members of a working family.

[74] _Op. cit._, p. 73. See Appendix B.

[75] Wallace, Darwinism, p. 24.

[76] Animal Coloration, p. 252.

[77] Poulton, The Colours of Animals, p. 238.

[78] _Ibid._, p. 237.

[79] See p. 7, note 2.

[80] Eng. trans. revised from fifth German edition, 1903, p. 3.

[81] Mechanisch-physiologische Theorie der Abstammungslehre. 1884.

[82] See especially Organic Evolution, pp. 52, 3.

[83] Organic Evolution, pp. 225, 433. Eimer is a believer in the inheritance of acquired characteristics; hence Oken’s conception, _taken literally_, offers him a ready method of disposing of the ant-problem dealt with on p. 85, _sqq._

[84] Organic Evolution, p. 268.

[85] See Eimer, Organic Evolution, p. 135 _sqq._

[86] p. 62.

[87] “It is,” writes Wilson, “becoming more and more clearly apparent ... that Schwann went too far in denying the influence of the totality of the organism upon the local activities of the cells. It would of course be absurd to maintain that the whole can consist of more than the sum of its parts. Yet, as far as growth and development are concerned, it has now been clearly demonstrated that only in a limited sense can the cells be regarded as co-operating units. They are rather local centres of a formative power pervading the growing mass as a whole” (The Cell, pp. 58, 9).

What Prof. Wilson, absorbed like most scientists in the consideration of ponderable and visible masses, assumes to be “absurd” is of course the very thing which he is proving to be a fact The whole can be not merely the “sum” but the synthesis of its parts.

[88] Die Welt als That., chap. XXIV.

[89] _Loc. cit._

[90] Kräfte zweiter Hand. The primary forces are the chemical and mechanical forces, the secondary are those which control and guide these for certain ends.

[91] Pp. 9, 10. The italics are Prof. Henslow’s.

[92] This statement taken literally is, of course, quite too sweeping. Professor Henslow clearly means here by “variations” those alone which are important enough to have selection-value, favourable or otherwise. Insignificant variations are always occurring.

[93] Henslow, Origin, etc., p. 102.

[94] _Ibid._, p. 80.

[95] _Ibid._, p. 40.

[96] A. R. Wallace, Darwinism (1890), p. 427.

[97] Marie v. Chauvin, ‘Ueber die Verwandlungsfähigkeit des mexikanischen Axolotl.’ _Zeitschrift für wissenschaftliche Zoologie_, XLI, p. 385. See also The Cambridge Natural History, _sub voce_.

[98] Haeckel, History of Creation (English trans.), I, p. 150.

[99] See also pp. 15, 16.

[100] J. H. Newman.

[101] See Principles of Sociology, Part II.

[102] See Curtius, Griechische Etymologie, s.v., φημή, νέος.

[103] _Deus_ descends from a root meaning ‘to shine,’ hence the Day, the Sun, God; θεός is referred by Curtius to a root θες, to desire, pray—God is “der Angeflehte.”

[104] Are there many Englishmen who would understand the following sentence which I lately came across in a St. Louis paper? “This graft was one of the scrap-head variety, and it was hard therefore to get the boodlers good.”

[105] The ‘wheel’ is really a spiral—the line of all natural growth.

[106] See p. 111.

[107] Origin of Species, chapter VI.

[108] Mechanisch-Physiologische Theorie der Abstammungslehre, p. 150.

[109] Weismann, The Evolution Theory, I, p. 162.

[110] _Ibid._, I, p. 177.

[111] So the cogwheels of a machine designed for some useful purpose will lacerate the hand of a man who gets in their way.

[112] See p. 85.

[113] Darwinism and the Problems of Life, 1904. Eng. transl. by J. McCabe, 1905, pp. 354 _sqq._

[114] Orthogenesis der Schmetterlinge (1897). The passage will be found in Kellogg’s Darwinism To-day, p. 285. Instances of ‘regression,’ etc., are given by Kellogg, _op. cit._, p. 227.

[115] When Heracleitus wrote “The One arises from the All and the All from the One” (Frag. LIX. Bywater) he was stating with his usual pregnant brevity a position of deep significance for modern scientific thought.

[116] It must be borne in mind that strict physical continuity does not exist in nature. Sir Oliver Lodge has somewhere remarked that science is entirely at a loss to explain how it comes that when one picks up a stick by one end the rest of the stick comes up with it.

[117] General Physiology, p. 550.

[118] Published by Bell & Son, 1907.

[119] Darwinism To-day, p. 377, quoting H. F. Osborn’s The Unknown Factors of Evolution. Osborn, like the writer (see p. 90), holds Spencer and Weismann to be mutually destructive. “If acquired variations are transmitted there must be therefore some unknown principle in heredity; if they are not transmitted there must be some unknown factor in evolution.”

[120] Mechanisch-Physiologische Theorie der Abstammungslehre. See especially pp. 132, and 340 _sqq._

[121] Darwinism To-day, p. 278.

[122] p. 49.

[123] Ζεύς ἐστιν αἰθὴρ, Ζεὺς δὲ γῆ, Ζεὺς δ’ οὐρανὸς, Ζεύς τοι τὰ πάντα, χὥτι τῶνδ' ὑπέρτερον. Frag., 295.

[124] Walt Whitman, ‘The Answerer.’

[125] Data of Ethics, 29.

[126] See Appendix C.

[127] _Oxford and Cambridge Review_, June, 1907. _Sic_ also Bishop Berkeley, Alciphron, Dial. VII, 19, “A man is said to be free, so far forth as he can do what he will.” Berkeley’s analysis of this statement is substantially the same as that in the text.

[128] Herbert Spencer, translating these physical terms into their psychic equivalents, declares that the illusion of Free Will “consists in supposing that at each moment the _ego_ is something more than the aggregate of feelings and ideas, actual and nascent, which then exists” (Psychology, I, p. 500). The pivot of the doctrine is the word _aggregate_. We have seen that the most primitive living organism is something more than that. _Cf._ p. 119 _note_.

[129] Of course they are only relatively lower—there are no essentially ‘low’ motives in life at all.

[130] The Will to Believe—‘The Dilemma of Determinism,’ p. 145 _sqq._

[131] Pragmatism, pp. 287-8. Compare Bishop Berkeley. “To me it seems, that if we begin from Things particular and concrete, and thence proceed to general Notions and Conclusions, there will be no Difficulty in this Matter. But if we begin with Generalities, and lay our Foundation in abstract Ideas, we shall find ourselves entangled and lost in a Labyrinth of our own making.” Alciphron, Dial. vii. 20. Berkeley had fully apprehended the Determinist position; see vii. 16.

[132] p. 129, 5th edition, 1878. There is an evident fallacy in Mill’s position. The Deity who could make a hell and sentence men to it for not worshipping him could not also have created the conscience which would resist him. The authorship of the moral sense and of hell are not to be combined in our conception of the divine. But Mill, of course, in this flash of rhetoric, was merely taking popular religious conceptions as he found them.

[133] p. 298.

[134] Plato, in that great dialogue, the Phaedo, has a noteworthy passage on those who when once betrayed by Reason are apt to fall into unbelief or superstition, just as those who, when they have found bad faith among men, may fall into cynicism:—

“Would it not, Phaedo,” said Socrates, “be a lamentable condition, when a certain thesis is true, firm, and intelligible, if a man supporting something of the kind should find arguments which seemed true at one time to be false at another, and in the end, instead of blaming himself or his own want of skill, should, in his ill-temper, make haste to shuffle off the blame from his own shoulders to Reason itself, and spend the rest of his life in hating and slandering it, being deprived of the truth and science of things?”

“By Zeus,” said I, “it would be lamentable.”

“Let us take heed then, before all else, that we never admit into our minds the idea that there can be no soundness in reasonings, but rather believe that we ourselves are not yet sound, and study manfully and with a will how to be so” (§ xxxix).

[135] Every mental acquisition, such as the knowledge of a new language, results in a definite alteration in a certain locality of the brain. The human brain, as an instrument of thought and knowledge, is, in fact, built up by a long series of purposeful efforts beginning in early infancy. These efforts do not, of course, originate in the matter of the brain itself, nor can the different nerves, which bring it messages from the outside world, carry with them anything of the nature of conscious purpose and will. These arise from Personality. I may refer for a full and very interesting treatment of this subject to Dr. W. H. Thomson’s work, Brain and Personality (1907).

[136] In the Phaedo, xliii.

[137] Microcosmus, Bk. II, Chaps. II and V.

[138] Man, and man only Can do the impossible; He can Distinguish, Choose, and give Judgment; He to the moment lends Power to endure.

[139] This includes the nourishment and protection of its young while helpless.

[140] This word is, I believe, used by Prof. Haeckel to describe his system of philosophy. I am very imperfectly acquainted with that system, and therefore think it well to note here that the term must not be taken with any special implications which Haeckel may have attached to it.

[141] See pp. 17-20.

[142] Deontology, I, p. 32.

[143] Examination of Hamilton, pp. 586 _sqq._

[144] Data of Ethics, §20.

[145] “I conceive it to be the business of moral science to deduce, from the laws of life and the conditions of existence, what kinds of action necessarily tend to produce happiness, and what kinds to produce unhappiness” (Data of Ethics, §21). Happiness is always taken by Spencer as equivalent to pleasurable feeling.

[146] Reason in Science, p. 252.

[147] See Data of Ethics, p. 36. It has been proved by exact physiological experiment that happiness promotes healthy vital action in the living organism, and that sorrow and pain depress it. But of course human life is not conducted solely on the physiological plane.

[148] _Sic_, Fr. Slater, S.J., in the _Irish Ecclesiastical Record_, February, 1905. “If such a sum [£l] could be stolen without grave sin, its amount would prove too great a temptation for the virtue of large numbers of people who wish to save their souls, but make little of venial sins” (p. 109). But Fr. Ojetti is much more liberal to persons of the class described, and gives them up to £4 (p. 100).

[149] I may draw attention in this connexion to a striking and valuable study of the effect of American democracy on Jewish immigrants published in the _Times_ of January 4, 1908. As regards Catholicism, it appears from a comparison of the statistics of emigration from Ireland with those of Catholicism in the U.S.A. that about 50 per cent of the Irish Catholics abandon their religion in the New World. The Irish are also shown by the criminal statistics of the States as well as by the observation of students of the criminal classes like Mr. Josiah Flynt, to furnish a far greater proportion of criminals in that country than obtains in the case of any other nationality contributing to its population. Yet they also give to American life some of its very best elements, and they are notoriously the most crimeless of people at home. The degradation of character commonly produced by Christianizing the Hindu is so uniformly attested by residents in India that it cannot be discredited. See, in this reference, an article entitled ‘The Failure of Christian Missions in India,’ by Dr. Josiah Oldfield, _Hibbert Journal_, April, 1903. Of course it may be said that the original error lies in the identification of ritual and observance with religion and morality.

[150] See Appendix D.

[151] “Per l’ asprezza della penitenza e continuo piagnere, era diventato quasi cieco, e poco vedea.”—Fioretti, III. He had “wholly shattered his body,” says Thomas of Celano (Second Life of St. F., Ch. CLX.).

[152] A discussion of the subject, with special reference to the rapid decay of the Franciscan Order, will be found in Mr. G. G. Coulton’s paper ‘The Failure of the Friars,’ in the _Hibbert Journal_ for January, 1907. See also criticisms on this paper by two English Franciscans, Friar Cuthbert and Friar Stanilaus, in the same journal for April, 1907, and Mr. Coulton’s rejoinder, July, 1907.

[153] When the ascetic ideal is regarded as admirable in a saint, it naturally leads to still more lamentable perversions by being practised by persons who have never withdrawn themselves from ordinary social relations. Thus a Catholic priest has lately given as an instance of the “spiritual tendency and unworldliness of the Irish peasant” the case of a farmer’s wife, the mother of a large family, who, by a long course of secret austerities, brought herself “to an untimely grave, and, no doubt,” adds the reverend author, “a martyr’s crown.” To keep herself in health and do her duty to her husband and children would, it appears, have been “worldliness.” Such cases, we are told, are not uncommon. (Scenes and Sketches in an Irish Parish, by the Rev. J. Guinan, C.C., 4th ed., 1906, p. 87.)

[154] The Teaching of Epictetus, by T. W. Rolleston, p. 36. Dissertations, III, xxii.

[155] Suns that have set return as bright, But we, when sets our little light, Sleep on through one eternal night.—Catullus, V.

[156] The Nature and Origin of Life, by Felix Le Dantec, p. 22 (Engl. trans., 1907).

[157] The Evolution of Matter.

[158] Of course the question remains, What compressed the spring? If Matter and Motion are continually wasting, it follows that they must at some time have been originated, and that the power which originated them is not dependent on them.

[159] The Teaching of Epictetus, p. 103. Dissertations, II, v, 24, etc.

[160] See pp. 186, 187.

[161] See, _e.g._, the opening of the Phædrus.

[162] For a discussion of this subject I may refer the reader to an article by the writer in the _Hibbert Journal_ for April, 1906: ‘The Resurrection: A Layman’s Dialogue.’

[163] ὥσπερ ζῷον ἓν ὅλον. Poetics, XXIII, 1. He is speaking of the design of a narrative poem.

[164] What is Art?, by Leo Tolstoy. English translation by Aylmer Maude, pp. 44-5.

[165] What is Art?, chap. v.

[166] I do not mean to exclude the possibility that man may have first learned his _capacity_ for art by making signs intended for quite other purposes, such as identification of tribehood, etc.

[167] What is Art?, p. 153.

[168] Fifteen Sermons, III.

[169] What is Art?, p. 146.

[170] _Ibid._, p. 148.

[171] What is Art?, p. 163.

[172] _Ibid._, p. 161. How wide of the mark all this is becomes clear when we think, for instance, of the sympathetic treatment of the Trojans in Homer, or the nobility of feeling about the Moors which runs through The Cid. A great art may glorify battle, but cant and fanaticism are hateful to it.

[173] What is Art?, p. 166.

[174] _Ibid._, p. 167.

[175] As, of course, it never can be in Time.

[176] It is very hard to understand why, when Athens was producing some of the greatest art of the world and the profoundest philosophic thought, the attempt to develop a philosophy of the arts should not have succeeded better than it did. Plato felt instinctively that he had entangled himself in a chain of false logic, and he appeals to Art to vindicate its truth, if it can. He would yield himself to its “enchantment” only too gladly were it not “a sin to betray what seems to us the cause of truth.” But it never occurs to him that what the painter is really copying is not the carpenter’s bed, but the heavenly. Aristotle, on the other hand, well knew that there is something creative about art. Witness his famous saying that “Poetry is both a more philosophic and a higher thing than History, since Poetry looks at things in a universal, History only in a particular aspect” (Poetics, IX, 3). He was, however, still too much under the control of the popular view of Art as Imitation to be able to see the full scope of his own principle. Thus, he excluded Architecture from the realm of Art because it did not imitate anything in nature.

[177] ἀλλὰ Σὺ καὶ τὰ περισσὰ ἐπίστασαι ἄρτια θεῖναι, καὶ κοσμεῖς τὰ ἄκοσμα, καὶ οὐ φίλα Σοι φίλα ἐστίν.

[178] Preface to Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads.

[179] “I have not been afraid of the charge of obscurity,” says Walt Whitman, “in either of my two volumes, because human thought, poetry or melody, must leave dim escapes and outlets—must possess a certain fluid, aerial character, akin to Space itself, obscure to those of little or no imagination, but indispensable to the highest purposes. Poetic style, when address’d to the Soul, is less definite form, outline, sculpture, and becomes vista, music, half-tints, and even less than half-tints. True, it may be architecture; but again it may be the forest wild-wood, or the best effects thereof, at twilight, the waving oaks and cedars in the wind, and the impalpable odour” (Preface to Two Rivulets, p. 13).

Let me set beside this a passage from that singularly beautiful book, Kakasu Okakura’s Ideals of the East: “Shakaku in the fifth century lays down six canons of pictorial art, in which the idea of the depicting of Nature falls into a third place, subservient to two other main principles. The first of these is ‘the Life-movement of the Spirit through the Rhythm of Things.’ For art is to him the great Mood of the Universe, moving hither and thither amidst those harmonic laws of matter which are Rhythm” (p. 52).

[180] I may refer in passing to the researches of A. C. Haddon and Henry Balfour, who have made it seem at least highly probable that all decorative forms originated in the copying of natural objects.

[181] F. C. Penrose showed in 1851 that all the quasi-horizontal lines in the Parthenon are really arcs of circles, that the ‘entasis’ or swelling of every pillar is the true arc of an hyperbola, and that there is not a true right-angle nor a strictly vertical column in the building. All good Greek buildings are similarly full of “curves, leaning faces, irregular spacings, and other optical refinements” (Investig. of the Princs. of Athenian Architecture). This principle, called by Ruskin ‘life’ (Seven Lamps) and by some ‘symmetrophobia,’ was most daringly applied in mediæval building. A very striking and well illustrated series of articles on the subject was contributed by Mr. W. H. Goodyear to the _Architectural Record_, Vol. VI, 1896-7.

[182] I am indebted in connexion with these remarks on Gothic architecture to a very interesting paper by Mr. L. March Phillipps in the _Contemporary Review_ for September, 1907.

[183] For example, when molecules first grouped themselves (supposing that was how it came about) into the form which resulted in living protoplasm, their action was one of a chemico-physical nature, but the response is not expressible in purely chemico-physical terms. Similarly when sensation first appeared in protoplasm.

[184] Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, Drittes Buch, _Die Platonische Idee das Objekt der Kunst_.

[185] Camille Mauclair, French Impressionists. “Light,” writes M. Mauclair, “becomes the sole subject of the picture; the interest of the object upon which it plays is secondary. Painting thus conceived becomes a purely optic art” (p. 32). “The principal person in a picture,” said Manet, “is the light” (p. 42).

[186] No one who has seen “Le Penseur,” by Rodin, will doubt that plastic art can render Thought. But literature alone could tell us what he is thinking.

INDEX

_When a subject is treated on more than one consecutive page, reference is usually made to the first page only._

Action and Reaction, 264

Adaptability, 13, 63

Adaptation, in nature, how regarded by Paley, 3; argument from imperfect adaptations, 4, 14, 136, 143, 152; how conceived by evolution theory, 10, 12; Lamarck’s theory of, 68; Weismann’s theory, 93 _sqq._; Darwin’s explanation, 72; directive theory, 115 _sqq._; effects of new environment, 123 _sqq._ See Co-adaptation

Æschylus, 159

_Amblystoma_, 40 (illustration facing), 125

_Amœba_, 30, 47, 143

Amphimixis, 39, 98

_Anabæna_, 141

_Anableps_, 100, 112

Ants, 78, 85, 89, 111, 154

Apperception and Free-will, 172

Arch, effect of, in architecture, 258

Aristotle, 247 _note_

Art, 158; and Beauty, 237, 251; origin of, 239; question of subject in, 244, 268; an expression of life, 246, 250; Greek and Hottentot ideals of, 253; classification of the arts, 254; art in structure, 256; in ornament, 259; artistic effect of use and service, 260. See Music, Dancing, Literature, etc.

Asceticism, 214 _sqq._, 218 _note_

Axolotl, 125

_Azolla_ fern, 141

Bacon, F., 6

Becoming, the universe a, 20, 186; Deity conceived as ‘becoming,’ 5

Beddard, F. E., 24 _note_, 58, 106

Bentham, J., 200

Berkeley, Bp., 165 _note_, 176 _note_

Bifocal eyes in fish, 99

Bisexuality, significance of, in _Mollusca_, 101

Bose, J. C., 21 _note_

Brain-structure and Will, 178, 184

Brown-Séquard, 78

Butler, Bp., 241

Bütschli, O., 30

Butterflies, protective colouring of, 15, 83, 98, 106, 113, 127

Catullus, 222

Cave-animals, 71, 72 _note_, 78

Cell, the, 29, 38; division of, 40 _sqq._; germ and sperm cells, 45, 51; fusion of, in reproduction, 53

Chaffinch, case of hermaphrodite, 58

Chlorophyll, 24; in animals, 26

Christ, 205; martyrdom of, 232

Chromatin, 39 _sqq._

Cleanthes, 247

Co-adaptation, 70, 80, 98, 138

Competition, 58, 105

Conjugation, 47

Conscience, 211

Co-operation among animals, 104, _Appendix B_; among species, 138

Crabs, hermit, 141; Molucca, 280

Crystallization, 22 _note_, 156

Dancing, 270

Darwin, Erasmus, 6, 281

Darwin, Francis, 7, 33, 72, 87, 138

Death, significance of, for the spirit, 190, 235

Deity, the end, not beginning of nature, 5; personality of, 14, 17; immanent or transcendent? 155; defined by Æschylus, 159; an infinite, not related to phenomena, 162; how approached by man, 159, 162, _Appendix A_

Determinants, 44; competition among, 98; significance of, in evolution, 68, 96

Determinism, doctrine of, 163 _sqq._

Development contrasted with growth, 32

Dice, of nature loaded, 92, 102

Dominants. See Reinke

Drama, 272

Dualism, 195

Duty, sense of, not created by pleasures and pains, 203; effects of, compared with those of self-indulgence, 212

Ego, the, 157, 207, _Appendix A_

Eimer, G., 77 _note_, 110, 113 _note_, 137, 143, 152

Elk, the Irish, 70

Energy, how obtained by plants, 25; developed by synthesis, 27, 147; vital and mechanical, how distinguished, 144, 146, 148; supposed effects of the equal distribution of, 222

Epictetus, 218, 226

Ethics, how affected by determinism, 162-3; ethical development a condition of Free-will, 171; the problem of evil, 199, 207; utilitarian systems of, 201; goal of ethical action, 203 _sqq._; sanction of ethical action, 234; ethics epitomized, 234; ethics of sex relations, _Appendix E_

Evolution, change in point of view produced by, 7, 8, 16, 17; produced competition, 104; unknown factors in, 149; evolution and involution, 186, 228. See Adaptation, species

Fisher, M., 270

Francis of Assisi, 215, _Appendix D_

Free-will, position stated, 164 _sqq._; reason in action, 166; Spencer on, 166 _note_; conditions of, 169; moral bias of, 169 _sqq._; limitations of, 171 _sqq._; how evolved, 174; can it be reconciled with Monism? 175; will and brain, 177 _sqq._

Germinal Selection, 93, 96

Goethe, 6, 31, 185, 267

Goodyear, W. H., 258 _note_

Gravity, action of, on plants, 62, 145

Guinan, Rev. J., 218 _note_

Günther, C., 142, 152

Haeckel, E., 39 _note_, 124, 126, 196, 239

Henslow, G., 123

Heracleitus, 146 _note_, 278

Hermaphroditism, 58, 101

Hugo, V., 273

Hume, D., 6 _note_

_Hydra_, 26

Ids, 44

Immortality, 189, 225, 283

Imperfections in nature, 4, 14, 143, 152

Impressionist school, 266

Intelligence in nature, 14, 16, 130, 157

Irish, the, in the U.S.A., 212 _note_

Isabella and Claudio, problem of, _Appendix E_

James, W., on Free-will, 176

Kakasu Okakura, 250 _note_

_Kallima paralecta_, 83, 129

Kellogg, V. L., 144 _note_, 149

Keyserling, H. v., 13 _note_, 17

Knight, W., 239

Kramskoy, 243

Kropotkin, P., 104, _Appendix B_

Lamarck, J. B., 6, 68; arguments against his theory, 75, 112, 202; Lamarckism the only alternative to ‘metaphysics,’ 91

Language, evolution of, 133

Lankester, Ray, 24 _note_

Le Bon, G., 223

Le Dantec, F., 22, 222

_Lepus Huxleyi_, 126

Life, universality of, 21; characteristics of organic, 23; mechanical conception of, 35, 92, 97; continually being produced, 37; innate capabilities of, 109; final cause of, 206, 208; the individual and the cosmic, 226; the goal of nature, 114, 246; polarity of, 253

Literature, 271

Lodge, O., 147 _note_

Lotze, H., 185, 196

Maeterlinck, M., 290

Manet, E., 266 _note_

Man, the growing-point of life, 154

Martyrdoms, significance of, for ethics, 230, 233; of Socrates, 230; of Christ, 232

Matter, its nature unknown, 178; transmitter of consciousness, 188; relation with consciousness not fortuitous, 192; known only through life, 224

Mauclair, C., 266 _note_

Mendel, Abbott, 58 _note_

Metabolism, 27

Metaphysics, physics rooted in, 110

Miers, H. A., 22

Mill, J. S., 164, 177, 201

Mind, 137, 167. See Spirit, Intelligence

Mitosis, 42 _note_

Monism, 17 _sqq._; compatible with Free-will, 176; dualism and, 195

Moorhead, T. G., 83

Morlon, 243

Movement, in music, 262, 264; in literature, 272

Music, 261 _sqq._, 272

Mysticism, 150

Nägeli, C. v., 39, 110, 140, 149

Natural Selection, a ‘superseded formula,’ 7 _note_; meaning of, 72; originates nothing, 75; a pillar of Weismann’s theory, 103; effect, not cause, of evolution, 104; a real though not the main force, 105, 109; in relation to mimetic markings, 106 _sqq._; and to mutual aid among species, 138

Neuter insects. See Ants

_Noctiluca_, 47

Nucleus, of cell, 30, 39.

Ojetti, Fr., 210 _note_

Oken, L., 110, 137

Oldfield, J., 213 _note_

Osborn, H. F., 149 _note_

‘Ought,’ Bentham on the word, 201; contents of the word, 209

Oysters, bisexuality in, 101

Paley, W., his analogy of the watch, 1 _sqq._; on the annular ligament, 8; his conception of an ‘Esperanto’ universe, 136

_Pandorina_, 49, 61, 156

_Papilio meriones_, 107

Parthenogenesis, 55

Penrose, F. C., 257 _note_

Perrier, E., 72 _note_, 91

Personality, 157, 166, 207, 211, _Appendix A_

Pianola, analogy of, 183

‘Pig-philosophy,’ 221

Plato, 6, 170, 182 _note_, 185, 195, 227, 244, 246

Poetry, 158. See Literature

Porto Santo rabbit, 126

Potato, response to mutilation, 117

Poulton, E. B., 107

Proteid, 23, 28

Protoplasm, the substance of life, 27; structure of, 30; distinguished from minerals, 37; response in, 61, 112, 113, 117, 119 _note_, 144; a synthesis of molecules, 147

Reinke, J., on the _X_ factor in life, 1, 63, 117; his theory of dominants, 120, 175

Religion, 159, 212, 277

Reproduction, 39, 46; in multicellular organisms, 48; sexual, 51

Response, 61, 112, 115. See, Life, Protoplasm

Rhythm, 254, 262

Right-handedness, 81

Rolleston, Geo., 54

Ruskin, J., 258 _note_

Saleeby, C. W., 288

Sanction, ethical, 214, 220, 226 _sqq._, 234

Santayana, G., 181, 204

Schopenhauer, A., 110, 196, 265

Selection. See Natural Selection, Germinal Selection

Sex, determination of, 57; ethical problems connected with, _Appendix E_

Sigerson, G., 81 _note_

Sins, mortal and venial, 210 _note_

Slater, Fr., 210 _note_

Sloth, green fur of, 24 _note_

Snails, bisexuality in, 101

Species, fixity of, 43, 66; mutability of, 67; origin of, not modification of structure by use, ch. IV.; not chance variations, ch. V.; due to directive or psychic factor, ch. VI.; species an organic whole, 49, 138, 147. See Adaptation, Evolution

Spencer, H., controversy with Weismann, 87, 149 _note_; on social institutions, 131; on Free-will, 166 _note_; his ethical system, 202, _App. C & E_

Spinoza, B., 196

Spirit, the human, how accounted for, 151, 175; relations to Matter, 178; death not a disintegration of, 190

Socrates, 227, 230

Stoicism, ethical formula of, 194; conception of Asceticism, 217; what Stoicism lacked, 227

Strasburger, E., 11, 54, 109

Synthesis, principle of, in nature, 119 _note_, 137, 142, 146, 157

Tennyson, A., 170, 219

Thomson, W. H., 184

Tolstoy, L., on Art, 236 _sqq._

Tree, response of roots and shoots to mutilation in, 119

Uexküll, J. v., 13

Unity of nature, 17, 157

Useless structures, 103 _note_

Utilitarian school of ethics, 200, 229, _Appendices C & E_

Variations, in reproduction cells, 73, 75; do chance variations afford basis for selection? 92, 94 _sqq._

Verworn, Max, 27 _note_, 148

_Viola_, 140

Virchow, R., 45 _note_

Viré, A., 72 _note_

_Volvox_, 49

Wagner, R., 272

Wallace, A. R., 105, 125 _note_, 175

Watch, Paley’s analogy of, 1 _sqq._

Weed, in New Zealand, destroyed by willows, 105

Weismann, A., 7 _note_, 34, 48, 61, 63; controversy with Spencer, 87; his alternative to Lamarckism, 93; his determinants equivalent to Reinke’s dominants, 122

Whale, evolution of, 67

Whitman, Walt, 160, 196, 237, 250 _note_

Whole, the, its demands on the individual, 220; what it gives to the individual, 225; the universe a, 17; a whole more than the sum of its parts, 119 _note_; consciousness, etc., of the, 157

Wilson, E. B., 33, 38 _notes_, 41, 50, 55, 119 _note_

Wöhler, 24

Wordsworth, W., 249

_X_ factor in life, 1; directive character of, 63, 113, 116, 128. See Adaptation, Intelligence, Language

Zola, E., 248

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+GOD’S THOROUGHFARE+: A Way of New Dimensions. By ARTHUR BUCKLEY. Being an investigation made by a Logician, a Scientist and a Theologian in the Forest of Science and other places, resulting in a discovery of New Dimensions which form a Way of Being leading to the Spiritual. Fcp. 8vo. 2s. 6d. net.

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End of Project Gutenberg's Parallel Paths, by Thomas William Rolleston