an analysis of Force. Force is seen to be but a symbol of the Absolute, which, by virtue of the relativity of thought, man can never hope to apprehend. In this region the last word of the Spencerian philosophy is Agnosticism. The religious sentiment, according to Mr Spencer, will not be killed by science. The sense of mystery is deepened rather than weakened by increasing knowledge; scientific explanations leave man at last in presence of the inexplicable. 'One truth must grow ever clearer-the truth that there is an Inscrutable Existence everywhere manifested, to which the man of science can neither find nor conceive either beginning or end. Amid the mysteries which become the more mysterious the more they are thought about, there will remain the one absolute certainty that he is ever in presence of an Infinite and Eternal Energy, from which all things proceed.' After forty years of toil, which resulted in several nervous collapses through overwork, Mr Spencer brought his system of philosophy to a conclusion. For twenty-four years he carried on his work at a loss. Fame came at last, and leisure was afforded him at Brighton, where he went to escape the distractions of London life, complete his system of philosophy, and round off his life-work by revising his earlier volumes, especially his Principles of Biology and Principles of Psychology, so as to bring them abreast of modern knowledge. Nearly all his works have been translated into French, German, and Russian, while several have found their into the Polish, Dutch, Danish, Swedish, way Greek, Japanese, and Chinese languages. Spencer's influence is thus world-wide, and the historian of the nineteenth century will recognise in the philosophy of evolution the dominating factor in the higher reaches of scientific and speculative thought. Evolution and Dissolution. Mr Here presents itself a final question which has probably been taking a more or less distinct shape in the minds of many. If Evolution of every kind is an increase in complexity and function that is incidental to the universal process of equilibration, and if equilibration must end in complete rest, what is the fate towards which all things tend? If the Solar System is slowly dissipating its forces-if the Sun is losing his heat at a rate which will tell in millions of years-if with diminution of the Sun's radiations there must go on a diminution in the activity of geologic and meteorologic processes as well as in the quantity of vegetal and animal existence-if Man and Society are similarly dependent on the supply of force that is gradually coming to an end; are we not manifestly progressing towards omnipresent death?' That such a state must be the outcome of the processes everywhere going on seems beyond doubt. This dissolution of the Earth, and, at intervals, of every other planet, is not, however, a dissolution of the Solar System. Viewed in their ensemble, all the changes exhibited throughout the Solar System are incidents accompanying the integration of the entire matter composing it: the local ... integration of which each planet is the scene, completing itself long before the general integration is complete. But each secondary mass having gone through its evolution and reached a state of equilibrium among its parts, thereafter continues in its extinct state, until by the still progressing general integration it is brought into the general mass. And though each such union of a secondary mass with the central mass, implying transformation of molar motion into molecular motion, causes partial diffusion of the total mass formed, and adds to the quantity of motion that has to be dispersed in the shape of light and heat; yet it does not postpone the period at which the total mass must become completely integrated, and its excess of contained motion radiated into space. Here we come to the question raised at the close of the last chapter-does Evolution as a whole, like Evolution in detail, advance towards complete quiescence? Is that motionless state called death, which ends Evolution in organic bodies, typical of the Universal Death in which Evolution at large must end? And have we thus to contemplate as the outcome of things a boundless space holding here and there extinct suns fated to remain for ever without further change? To so speculative an inquiry, none but a speculative answer is to be expected. Such answer as may be ventured must be taken less as a positive answer than as a demurrer to the conclusion that the proximate result must be the ultimate result. If, pushing to its extreme the argument that Evolution must come to a close in complete equilibrium or rest, the reader suggests that, for aught that appears to the contrary, the Universal Death thus implied will continue indefinitely, it is legitimate to point out how, on carrying the argument still further, we are led to infer a subsequent Universal Life. (From First Principles.) Science and Religion. Under one of its aspects, scientific progress is a gradual transfiguration of nature. Where ordinary perception saw perfect simplicity it reveals great complexity; where there seemed absolute inertness it discloses intense activity; and in what appears mere vacancy it finds a marvellous play of forces. Each generation of physicists discovers in so-called 'brute matter' powers which but a few years before the most instructed physicists would have thought incredible; as instance the ability of a mere iron plate to take up the complicated aerial vibrations produced by articulate speech, which, translated into multitudinous and varied electric pulses, are retranslated a thousand miles off by another iron plate and again heard as articulate speech when the explorer of nature sees that, quiescent as they appear, surrounding bodies are thus sensitive to forces which are infinitesimal in their amounts-when the spectroscope proves to him that molecules on the earth pulsate in harmony with molecules in the stars - when there is forced on him the inference that every point in space thrills with an infinity of vibrations passing through it in all directions; the conception to which he tends is much less that of a Universe of dead matter than that of a Universe everywhere alive; alive if not in the restricted sense, still in a general sense. . Science under its concrete forms enlarges the sphere for religious sentiment. From the very beginning the progress of knowledge has been accompanied by an increasing capacity for wonder. Among savages, the lowest are the least surprised when shown remarkable products of civilised art: astonishing the traveller by their indifference. And so little of the marvellous do they perceive in the grandest phenomena of nature that any inquiries concerning them they regard as childish trifling. It is not the rustic, nor the artisan, nor the trader who sees something more than a mere matter of course in the hatching of a chick; but it is the biologist, who, pushing to the uttermost his analysis of vital phenomena, reaches his greatest perplexity when a speck of protoplasm under the microscope shows him life in its simplest form, and makes him feel that, however he formulates its processes, the actual play of forces remains unimaginable. Neither in the ordinary tourist nor in the deer - stalker climbing the mountains above him does a Highland glen rouse ideas beyond those of sport and of the picturesque; but it may, and often does, in the geologist. He, observing that the glacier-bound rock he sits on has lost by weathering but half an inch of its surface since a time far more remote than the beginnings of human civilisation, and then trying to conceive the slow denudation which has cut out the whole valley, has thoughts of time and of power to which they are strangers. Nor is it in the primitive peoples who supposed that the heavens rested on mountain-tops, any more than in the modern inheritors of their cosmogony who repeat that 'the heavens declare the glory of God,' that we find the largest conceptions of the Universe, or the greatest amount of wonder excited by contemplation of it. Rather, it is in the astronomer, who sees in the Sun a mass so vast that even into one of his spots our Earth might be plunged without touching its edges, and who by every finer telescope is shown an increased multitude of such suns, many of them far larger. Hereafter as heretofore, higher faculty and deeper insight will raise rather than lower this sentiment. At present the most powerful and most instructed mind has neither the knowledge nor the capacity required for symbolising in thought the totality of things. Occupied with one or other division of Nature, the man of science usually does not know enough of the other division, even rudely, to conceive the extent and complexity of their phenomena; and supposing him to have adequate knowledge of each, yet he is unable to think of them as a whole. Wider and stronger intellect may hereafter help him to form a vague consciousness of them in their totality. By future more evolved intelligence the course of things now apprehensible only in parts may be apprehensible altogether, with an accompanying feeling as much beyond that of the present cultured man as his feeling is beyond that of the savage. And this feeling is not likely to be decreased but to be increased by that analysis of Knowledge which, while forcing him to agnosticism, yet continually prompts him to imagine some solution of the great enigma which he knows cannot be solved. Especially must this be so when he remembers that the very notions, origin, cause, and purpose are relative notions belonging to human thought, which are probably irrelevant to the Ultimate Reality transcending human thought; and when, though suspecting that explanation is a word without meaning when applied to this Ultimate Reality, he yet feels compelled to think there must be an explanation. But one truth must grow ever clearer-the truth that there is an Inscrutable Existence everywhere manifested, to which he can neither find nor conceive either beginning or end. Amid the mysteries which become the more mysterious the more they are thought about, there will remain the one absolute certainty that he is ever in presence of an Infinite and Eternal Energy from which all things proceed. (From Ecclesiastical Institutions.) There is an Epitome of the synthetic philosophy by Collins (new ed. 1897), Outlines of Cosmic Philosophy by Fiske (1874), and books on Mr Spencer and his philosophy by Hudson (new ed. 1894), A. D. White (1897), and the present writer (1900), besides German works by Fischer (1875), Michelet (1891), Kindermann (1884), Grosse (1890). And there are criticisms by Guthrie (1882), M'Cosh (1885), Watson (1895), and Ward (1899). Mr W. H. Hudson's book contains a complete list of Mr Spencer's writings. HECTOR MACPHERSON. Francis Trevelyan Buckland (1826–80), the 'Frank Buckland' of his friends and his readers, and son of the geologist Dean Buckland, was one of the keenest and kindliest observers of animals and their ways, and had a singular gift of making his subjects popular and attractive. He was born at Christ Church College, Oxford, his father being then canon of Christ Church; was educated at Winchester and Christ Church; and · after five years' study of medicine at St George's Hospital, London, served for nine years as assistant-surgeon to the 2nd Life Guards (1854-63). From his boyhood he had manifested an enthusiastic delight in natural history. He contributed largely to the Times and Field, becoming one of the staff of the latter in 1856; in 1866 he started his own Land and Water. He was also author of Curiosities of Natural History (4 vols. 1857-72), Fish-hatching (1863), Logbook of a Fisherman and Zoologist (1876), Natural History of British Fishes (1881), and Notes and Jottings from Animal Life (1882). He was also a frequent and popular lecturer. He took a great interest in fish-culture, and at his own cost established under the Science and Art Department, South Kensington, a 'Museum of Economic Fish-culture.' In 1867 he was appointed inspector of salmon-fisheries for England and Wales, a post that suited him perfectly; in 1870 special commissioner on the salmon-fisheries of Scotland, and in 1877 on the Scotch herring-fisheries. In spite of the place of his birth, he was essentially antiacademic in mind and ways. As his geniality and unconventionality in personal habits bordered on roughness, so in his writings his plain speech and heartiness of manner tended to carelessness and looseness in style; but almost everything he wrote shows the result of fresh, sagacious, and original observation, conveyed in an entertaining manner. On the other hand, it should be noted that he was not a man of science in the modern sense; he rather despised pedantic precision; he was capable of disregarding or defying the experts, and not seldom either made mistakes or used terms so loosely as to mislead. Thus he would call a narwhal's teeth its horns, and speak of a marsupial carrying its young in a pocket of its stomach; and he was to the end a steady and unyielding antiDarwinian. See his Life by G. C. Bompas (1885). Matthew Arnold,* whose distinction as a poet was equalled by his distinction as a critic, was the eldest son of Dr Thomas Arnold, headmaster (1827-42) of Rugby School. He was born on 24th December 1822 at Laleham on the Thames. From his fifteenth to his nineteenth year he was under his father's care at Rugby, where in June 1840 was recited his schoolboy poem 'Alaric in Rome,' a composition somewhat Byronic in manner, which gave no certain promise of his future powers. In that year he obtained a scholarship at Balliol College, and in 1841 was in residence at Oxford. A year later his father died, but the memory and the influence of Dr Arnold remained always with his son to prompt and cheer him in the path of duty, to deepen and control his character, possibly also to expose him to certain trials which attend intellectual veracity in a time of intellectual transitions. He was unaffected by the Oxford High Church movement, but felt the personal charm of J. H. Newman; and the charm of the old collegiate city and the surrounding country refined and nourished his imagination. Among his friends were Clough and Stanley, J. D. Coleridge and J. C. Shairp. His Newdigate verses on 'Cromwell' are of no higher merit than that which a creditable prize-poem commonly exhibits. In 1844 he took a second-class at his final examination in classics, and in the following year was elected to an Oriel fellowship. For a short time Matthew Arnold taught at Rugby under Tait, afterwards Archbishop of Canterbury. In 1847 he became private secretary to Lord Lansdowne, President of the Council, and in 1851 entered on that career of inspector of schools to which a great part of his life was intelligently and conscientiously devoted. He believed, perhaps rightly, that the school-inspector did much to wear down and wear out the poet that was within him. In the year of his appointment to these new duties he married the daughter of Mr Justice Wightman. It was an eminently happy marriage. Two years previously had appeared The Strayed Reveller, and other Poems, by 'A.'; it attracted little attention, and was speedily withdrawn by the author from circulation. Yet the volume contained much that is beautiful and characteristic of Arnold at his best. The poem which gives its name to the slender collection is a dialogue between a youth who has drunk of Circe's cup, the enchantress, and that 'spare, dark-featured, quick-eyed stranger,' Ulysses; it is touched with melancholy in the contrast between the happy vision of all things which the gods possess and the vision of men, into which pain and trouble enter. The verse is unrhymed and irregular, a form much affected-perhaps under the influence of Goethe-by Arnold, and produced with an uncertainty of ear which, surprising the reader with metrical beauty succeeded by strange failures, often leaves the impression of something hazardous and experimental. The sonnets of this volume, seldom regular in form, are distinguished by originality of idea and a fine poise of feeling. But the most admirable poems are 'Mycerinus,' which tells of the just Egyptian king, doomed to death, who would fain seek a refuge from reflection in revelry, and yet below his revelry consults with his own soul and is wise; that pathetic idyl of the sea-sands and the sea, a kind of domestic tragedy under the waves, 'The Forsaken Merman,' a poem now familiar to all readers of modern literature; and 'Resignation,' a piece of meditation, characterised by that 'sad lucidity of soul' of which it speaks, and lacking only that higher lucidity which is joyous. Empedocles on Etna, and other Poems, by 'A,' followed in 1852, and, before fifty copies had been sold, this also was withdrawn from circulation. It seemed to the author, as a critic of his own work, that the painful emotion of his Empedocles, unrelieved by action, was no suitable material for a poem. Happily the rigour of his theory yielded in 1867 to the expressed desire of Robert Browning, and the poem was then republished. The versified philosophy of Empedocles, as he moves upward to fling himself into the crater of Etna, includes noble stanzas, but a critical Polonius might justly assert that 'This is too long.' The songs of the young harp-player, Callicles, have magical beauty and sometimes the finest music; yet even here the music of Arnold's verse is uncertain. The volume contained Tristram and Iseult,' a poem in three parts, which fails where there is a demand for ardour of passion, but becomes gracious and delicate in the third part where Iseult of Brittany, resigned rather than happy, sits by the seaside and beguiles her children with the tale of Merlin and Vivian. Some lyrics of elaborated beauty-and Matthew Arnold often attained simplicity through elaboration-accompanied the longer poems, among which appeared ‘A Summer Night' and certain love-poems of foiled affection, real or imaginary, with Switzerland for their scene. The admirable 'Memorial Verses' and ‘Stanzas in Memory of the Author of "Obermann" do honour to some of the chief literary masters of Arnold's mind-Goethe, Wordsworth, Sénancour-and raise criticism to veritable poetry. A year later-1853-appeared a volume of Poems, partly republished, partly new, and the public was now for the first time attentive and duly impressed. A Preface in prose took the withdrawal from circulation of Empedocles on Etna as the occasion for setting forth some central principle of the poetic art, and for insisting on the supreme importance of unity in a work of art as contrasted with scattered brilliancies and beauties. The most remarkable new poems were the epic episode 'Sohrab and Rustum,' derived from Ferdusi's 'Shah-Nameh,' and the beautiful 'Scholar-Gipsy,' suggested by Glanvill's story of an Oxford student who quitted his studies to join himself to the crew of outlandish wanderers. The landscape of Oxfordshire and of * Copyright 1903 by J. B. Lippincott Company to the selection "To a Friend," page 395. the Thames valley is rendered in the latter of these poems with exquisite feeling. 'Sohrab and Rustum,' the story of a great chieftain who slays his son in single combat, each unknown to the other until the fatal wound has been given, is written in blank verse of sustained dignity, and is inspired by a passionate pathos, rare in this passionate quality among the poems of Arnold. In a second series of Poems, published in 1855, was included an epic treatment of a fragment of Norse mythology, 'Balder Dead.' Balder, beloved of the gods, has been undesignedly slain by the blind Hoder; the adventurous efforts to recover Balder from the realm of the dead make up the main MATTHEW ARNOLD. From the Portrait by G. F. Watts, R.A (Fred Hollyer, Photo.) part of the narrative. It was impossible to give the subject, which strains the power of imaginative belief without always supporting it, an interest equal to that of 'Sohrab and Rustum.' After his thirty-third year Arnold's stream of poetry, from the first pure rather than affluent, dwindled; but in Merope (1858) he made a sustained and deliberate effort, which in its design was admirable. His purpose, as he tells his reader in an interesting preface, was to try how much of the effectiveness of the poetical forms of the Greek tragedy he could retain in an English poem constructed under the conditions of those forms. The story of Merope was not ill chosen; it had been handled in drama by Maffei and by Alfieri in Italy, by Voltaire in France. Epytus, the son of Merope, avenges, after many years have passed, the murder of his royal father upon the tyrant Polyphontes ; the situations are impressive; the characters, in the hands of a true dramatic poet, might be of deep and tragic interest. But Matthew Arnold's poem is constructed, not inspired; it lacks life; it is a death-mask, not without a certain dignity, taken from the face of Greek tragedy. The rhymeless choruses are often equally devoid of spirit and of tone. In 1867 appeared New Poems, Arnold's last considerable gift to the admirers of his poetry. And the contents of the volume were not all 'new,' for it reprinted the early 'Empedocles on Etna' and other pieces from among those of 1852. Yet of the new poems some were unsurpassed by any earlier work of their author. 'Thyrsis,' a monody to commemorate Arthur Hugh Clough, is perfect in its classical grace and its association of personal feeling with the loveliness of English landscape. If we receive no impression of Clough's character from it, neither do we learn much respecting Edward King from Milton's Lycidas. 'A Southern Night' laments the loss of the writer's brother, who died on his way home from India. 'Rugby Chapel' is a noble characterisation of the poet's father, and of his special services to the world. 'Heine's Grave' is the poetry of criticism, but the image of England as the 'Weary Titan' rises to something higher than this. The deep-thoughted and pathetic 'Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse' had appeared in Fraser's Magazine as early as 1855. With this volume Matthew Arnold's period of poetical creation may be said to have closed; but at rare intervals in later years some piece of verse appeared which proved that he still possessed the inspiration and the accomplishment of song. In 1882 his 'Westminster Abbey,' to write which he was moved by the burial of Dean Stanley in the Abbey, showed that his power as a poet, at least in moments of deep feeling, was not abated. As a poet, Matthew Arnold's chief masters were the Greek epic, dramatic, and elegiac writersGoethe, Wordsworth. But Goethe had a higher spirit of wisdom and Wordsworth had a higher spirit of joy than he. Arnold himself described poetry as a criticism of life; assuredly from his own poetry a body of such criticism can be derived, and it is sometimes criticism which may be questioned or gainsaid. Through many of his more intimate personal poems runs the contrast between the life whose springs are inward, of the soul, and the life of division and distraction, of fever and unrest, which is drawn hither and thither by the influences of the world, its pleasures and passions, its business, greeds, ambitions, casual attractions, conflicting opinions, and trivial cares and strifes -drawn hither and thither by these; and not by these alone, but also by all the various objects that claim our purer sympathies from day to day, and the various intellectual lights and cross-lights that lead us or mislead us away from the true objects of the soul. Especially in these latter days of ours, when no dominant faith or doctrine of life imposes itself on the minds of men, when there is around us a chaos of creeds, and when men lie open through their finer intellectual sensitiveness to so many diverse influences, it is difficult to find one's true way. To lose one's soul means for Matthew Arnold to live a life without unity, a life of cares, hopes, fears, desires, opinions, business, passions which arise and wane with the accidents of each successive day and hour. To live too fast, to be perpetually harassed, to be dulled by toil, to be made wild with passion, to adapt ourselves to every view of truth in turn and never to see truth with lucidity and as a whole, to yield to the chance allurements of the time and place and never to possess our souls before we die-this is the condition of many of us, especially in these days of crowded and hurrying action, these days of moral trouble and spiritual doubt, and it is no better than a death in life. On the other hand, to be self-poised and harmonious, to 'see life steadily and see it whole,' to escape from the torment of conflicting desires, to gain a high serenity, a wide and luminous view -this is the rare attainment of chosen spirits and the very life of life. How may the evil be avoided? -how may the good be reached and held fast? Not by any external aids, replies Matthew Arnold, not by any outward machinery of life, not by creeds that fail and philosophies that fade and pass away; not thus, but by insight and by moral vigour, by rallying the good in the depths of ourselves The aids to noble life are all within. Such is Arnold's stoical moral teaching; and the experience of mankind in all ages declares that through action, through passion, are we educated, and that the aids to noble life are not all, are not chiefly, within. But the 'criticism of life' in his poems served his generation by presenting with a sad fidelity certain of its moral and spiritual troubles, and by suggesting some palliatives of its pain. His touch cannot heal, but in some degree it fortifies and it consoles. Matthew Arnold's melancholy and his resistance to that melancholy appear only in his verse. As a prose writer, while he is at heart serious, his temper is buoyant, his spirit is high, his intellectual confidence is entire; he has charming airs of authority or condescension, and can employ with a grave purpose mockery, banter, irony. But setting aside the remarkable prefaces to two volumes of poetry, as a prose-writer he was unknown until 1859, when his pamphlet, England and the Italian Question, appeared. In 1857 he was elected to the professorship of Poetry, Oxford, and was re-elected for a term of five years in 1862. Towards the close of his first term of office was published a slender volume, three lectures On Translating Homer, to which a fourth lecture, On Translating Homer: Last Words (1862), formed a kind of appendix. This is an admirable piece of criticism, for Matthew Arnold knew Homer well, felt the special qualities of Homer's genius, and had an adequate acquaintance with the English translations with which he deals. The test of a good translation will be found in the answer to the question, 'Is it acceptable to scholars?' And scholars will before all else require that a translation should be penetrated by certain Homeric qualities-Homer is eminently rapid; he is eminently plain and direct, both in the substance of his thought and its expression; he is eminently noble. Homer's style is indeed 'the grand style,' which arises in poetry 'when a noble nature, poetically gifted, treats with simplicity or with severity a serious subject.' The application of these principles to the translations of Chapman, Pope, Cowper, and more recent writers is full of detailed instruction; but Arnold arrives in the close at the strange conclusion that the happiest medium for Homeric translation is the English hexameter, a conclusion which is by no means reinforced by ineffective examples from his own hand. The lectures On the Study of Celtic Literature, delivered in 1866, and, after publication in the Cornhill Magazine, collected into a volume in 1867, form a work which is full of interesting views and stimulating thought; but it is not, and could not be, a work of authority. Here Arnold wrote as an ingenious amateur, but without more than a superficial acquaintance with his subject. The book illustrates in a striking way the weaker side of its author's criticism of literature. He censured the English criticism of the early part of the nineteenth century because it did not know enough, but this was precisely his own defect. His own ideas are always interesting and are often valuable, and he plays with these, hovering above his subject; but he does not always possess his subject. It is not merely that his scholarship is insufficient; he lacks that patient receptivity which is the condition of adequate criticism. He wrote on Celtic literature, and knew too little to write as a master. He attempted Biblical criticism, and his scholarship was painfully inadequate. He wrote essays on French literature which are full of charm; but he does not seem to have known French literature sufficiently, or to have had a feeling for what is best and most characteristic in it, and his good fortune was that he relied much upon so painstaking a guide as Sainte-Beuve. all that he possessed he animated with his own delightful intellectual vitality. In each province of criticism he contributed illuminating ideas. If he had not adequate knowledge, he had fine instincts, and a vivida vis which in itself is of high worth. And this volume on Celtic literature is not only written in the happiest temper, but lights up his subject with inspiring thoughts which do not always accompany a more thorough scholarship than his. It pleads for a sympathetic spirit and a spirit of sanity in the study of things Celtic; endeavours to determine the character of the Celtic genius-'sentiment, with love of beauty, charm, and spirituality for its excellence, ineffectualness and self-will for its defect;' and makes interesting conjectures as to the elements contributed by the Celtic genius to the literature of England. But |