seems to be attached to two particular conditions, which nature has only realized by degrees, and one after the other.

It is necessary, then, in the beginning that force and motion, instead of dispersing themselves in time and in space, should assemble themselves into a certain number of systems; and it is necessary afterwards that the individuals of these systems should gather themselves together in reflecting themselves in a small number of foci, where consciousness exalts itself by a sort of accumulation and condensation. Will it be said that even when each of these forces which compose a nervous centre shall be endowed with consciousness, it is impossible to understand how all these isolated consciousnesses can confound themselves in a single one? That will be to forget that force is not a thing in itself, and that, if we can say that there are many forces there, where there are many movements, it is equally just to say there is but one there where there is but one system and but one idea of nature. We are then at perfect liberty to admit that consciousness resides in a single force, and to give to this force even the name of soul; but we should not forget that this name designates only the dynamic unity of the perceptive provision (appareil) in the same manner as life, properly so called, is only the dynamic unity of the whole organism. Thus, soul is not less, even in inferior animals, profoundly distinct from the body; for not only it concentrates in its unity all the details of their organic movements, but, in mixing with the obscure consciousness of their present condition, a consciousness still more obscure of their past conditions, it gives it to them like a second life which gathers up and conserves all that has run through to it from the first. But in proportion as the perceptive preparation (appareil) becomes firmer and more delicate, the soul extends with the sphere of its action that of its existence. The distinct images of external objects combine themselves in an always increasing or growing proportion with the confused impressions which proceed from the members, in such a manner that we may say of the more perfect animals that they exist at once in themselves and in all that surrounds them. In man nature has gone one step farther, in substituting for a play of images too limited and too much subjected to the organic influences of signs, always to be disposed of, and which suffice to represent all beings, because they only represent them by general characters, and thus finishes by disengaging the mind from the body in order to spread it in some

fashion over the whole nniverse. Doubtless, this soul, identical with the things it represents, and which is only, according to the thought of Aristotle, the form of forms, is not that for which we hope everlasting life; but this sublime hope can only justify itself by moral considerations which are absolutely foreign to this study. It is also outside of all moral consideration that we will essay to reconcile liberty, of which each one of us has the consciousness, in the pursuit of sensible good, with the determinism, without which man would cease to be a part of nature. This conciliation is for the rest prepared for by that which we have just established between mechanism and life; because we are able to say that nature gives proof of a sort of liberty every time that she produces of herself and without a model a new organic form. There is also something free in the art which a great number of animals display in constructing their dwellings, or in surprising their prey; but we cannot say that this liberty belongs to them, because nature has formed for them, and at once for all of them, the plan after which they work. Liberty seems to consist, in fact, in the power of varying its designs and of conceiving new ideas and the law of final causes exacts absolutely that there should exist such a liberty, since the systematic unity of nature can only realize itself by a succession of original inventions and or creations, properly so called. Only, there are in nature two sorts of ideas: there are those which one calls organic, which are beings at the same time as ideas, and which produce themselves by an immediate and internal action, the form under which they are manifested. There are others, on the contrary, which are pure ideas, and which limit themselves to direct the action of a being in which they reside. Such is, for instance, the idea of a nest which exists in itself only in the imagination of the bird, and which is only the rule of movements by which the bird realizes it in foreign matter. Now, so long as man had not appeared upon the earth, nature showed herself above all prodigal of real ideas, that is to say, that she created an immense variety of species, both of plants and animals, whilst she never gave to this last more than a small number of types of action, almost invariable, which compose what we call its instinct. But the coming of humanity reverses the relation of these two sorts of ideas, because, on one side, we do not see a new species created any longer, and. upon the other, the privilege of our intelligence is to invent in its turn and to conceive an infinite number of pure ideas, that our

will forces itself later to realize outside of us. The bird constructs its nest, which is only in some sort but a prolongation of its body. Man changes the face of nature, and manufactures for his service bodies analagous to his own, which he animates with a sort of borrowed and artificial life. But what is most remarkable is that his ideas do not always relate to his own conservation. Those of his works to which he attaches the greatest value are precisely those which in some sort excel him and present to him the embellished image of his features or of his actions. The fecundity of nature re-finds itself, then, wholly and entirely, although under another form, in the liberty of man; and this transformation is a progress at the same time that it is a decadence, since it was reserved to the superficial labour of man to introduce into things a degree of harmony and of beauty which was lacking still to the living works of nature. But if nature had only to let the laws of motion act in order to vary to infinity the internal constitution of beings which she has created, why cannot man, then, without derogating from these same laws, vary his external acts and the form which he impresses upon the bodies which surround him?

It will be found, perhaps, that this explanation of liberty scarcely answers to the definition which is ordinarily given of it, but it is not difficult to show that that definition is false, and that in default of seeing liberty where it is, it is sought after where it is not, and where it can never be. The miracle of nature, in us as outside of us, is invention or the production of ideas; and this production is free in the most rigorous sense of the word, since each idea is in itself absolutely independent of that which precedes it, and is born of nothing, like a world. Now, it is certain that man will not find himself, in respect to the ideas which he produces, in the same situation as the animals in respect to the ideas which nature has given to them; for these latter have for every kind of action but one type from which they never depart, and which they realize, not by a reflecting will, but under the influence of a sort of fascination. Man only wishes and wills before acting, since only he can, with the aid of language, represent to himself distinctly his future action; and he does not will until after having deliberated-that is to say-compared many possible manners of acting, all equally possible, amongst which he selects that which seems to him the best. Now, it is in this choice

or in the will which is inseparable from it, that most philosophers place liberty to-day; and this will consists according to them in that the will determines the action which follows it without being itself determined by the deliberation which precedes it. We have already rejected, in the name of experience, the hypothesis of an arbitrary choice which would render deliberation useless and will unreasonable; but this psychological error, not tenable if it is considered in itself, borrows all its strength from a metaphysical error which it is much more difficult to uproot. We find that ideas are something too subtle to subsist in themselves, and to sustain by themselves the action which realizes them. We make of the will, therefore, a substance, or at least the faculty of a substance of which it is but the accident, and which produces under the name of efficient causes that which it is declared incapable of producing except under the name of final We convert thus in man, and by an irresistible analogy, in the rest of the universe, finality into mechanism; and we violate at once the fundamental law of mechanism, because we attribute to will the power of beginning a series of phenomena which attach themselves to no other. The will, such as we have defined it, is not a thing in itself, nor even a concrete and active power. It is only the reflection of a tendency upon itself, and it is by a sort of idolatry of understanding that we search in this reflection for the principle of the action which it enlightens. We are able to experience a sort of conflict between several tendencies, but we have no need of terminating it by an arbitrary decision; it is not only in us that the possible struggles in order to attain to existence, and the internal speech or discourse which distinguishes and compares these tendencies, does not pronounce between them with more certainty than the mute wisdom of nature. Invention only is free, since it depends solely upon itself, and that it decides upon all the rest; and what is called our liberty or free will is precisely the consciousness of the necessity in virtue of which an end conceived by our mind determines in the series of our actions the existence of means which ought in their turn to determine it.

Thus the empire of final causes, in penetrating without destroying into that of efficient causes, substitutes everywhere force for inertia, life for death, and liberty for fatality. The materialistic idealism by which we were an instant stopped, represents to us only the half, or rather, only the surface of things;

the veritable philosophy of nature is, on the contrary, a spiritualistic realism, in the eyes of which all is force, and all force a thought which tends to a consciousness more and more complete in itself. This second philosophy is, like the first, independent of all religion; but in subordinating mechanism to final cause, it prepares us to subordinate final cause itself to a superior principle, and thus to clear, by an act of moral faith, the limits of thought at the same time that we overleap the limits of nature.

THE RELATIVITY OF KNOWLEDGE.

[An Examination of the Doctrine as held by Mr. Herbert Spencer]. BY JOHN WATSON.

The doctrine of the Relativity of Knowledge has found in Mr. Herbert Spencer its most vigorous and most persuasive advocate. The author of First Principles cannot be justly accused of an excess of speculative subtlety, or of a criminal terseness of expression: he generally seizes upon the obtrusive aspects of the object he is contemplating, and allows the more delicate features of it to rest in unrelieved shadow; and what he sees himself he is determined that others shall also see at whatever cost of words. This wide-awake vision, and this command of language, impart to the writings of Mr. Spencer an air of declamatory dogmatism that is apt to offend men of finer but perhaps weaker fibre, who recoil from anything like intellectual arrogance or superfluity of language. To them it seems as if an attempt were made to intimidate their reason by the parade of logical puzzles, and to capture their assent by a steady pour of verbal grapeshot. But whatever estimate may be formed of his philosophical speculations, or of the way in which he presents his thoughts, at least there cannot be denied to Mr. Spencer the merit of relative consistency, as well as of great intellectual fairness and breadth of information. He may, and we believe he has, failed to profit as he might have done by the history of modern philosophy; but he has developed a fairly coherent system of thought from the pre