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 In that pose, he was interrupted. Said, silently opening the door behind him, muttered:

“Ta’ala wayyaya!”

Soames whirled around in a sudden panic, his heart leaping madly. The immobile brown face peered in at the door.

“Ta’ala wayyaya!” repeated Said, his face expressionless as a mask. He pointed along the corridor. “Ho-Pin Effendi!” he explained.

Soames, raising his hands to his collarless neck, made a swallowing noise, and would have spoken; but:

“Ta’ala wayyaya!” reiterated the Oriental.

Soames hesitated no more. Reentering the corridor, with its straw-matting walls, he made a curious discovery. Away to the left it terminated in a blank, matting-covered wall. There was no indication of the door by which he had entered it. Glancing hurriedly to the right, he failed also to perceive any door there. The bespectacled Ho-Pin stood halfway along the passage, awaiting him. Following Said in that direction, Soames was greeted with the announcement:

“Mr. King will see you.”

The words taught Soames that his capacity for emotion was by no means exhausted. His endless conjectures respecting the mysterious Mr. King were at last to be replaced by facts; he was to see him, to speak with him. He knew now that it was a fearful privilege which gladly he would have denied himself.

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 Ho-Pin opened a door almost immediately behind him, a door the existence of which had not hitherto been evident to Soames. Beyond, was a dark passage.

“You will follow me, closely,” said Ho-Pin with one of his piercing glances.

Soames, finding his legs none too steady, entered the passage behind Ho-Pin. As he did so, the door was closed by Said, and he found himself in absolute darkness.

“Keep close behind me,” directed the metallic voice.

Soames could not see the speaker, since no ray of light penetrated into the passage. He stretched out a groping hand, and, although he was conscious of an odd revulsion, touched the shoulder of the man in front of him and maintained that unpleasant contact whilst they walked on and on through apparently endless passages, extensive as a catacomb. Many corners they turned; they turned to the right, they turned to the left. Soames was hopelessly bewildered. Then, suddenly, Ho-Pin stopped.

“Stand still,” he said.

Soames became vaguely aware that a door was being closed somewhere near to him. A lamp lighted up directly over his head…he found himself in a small library!

Its four walls were covered with book-shelves from floor to ceiling, and the shelves were packed to overflowing with books in most unusual and

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

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 bizarre bindings. A red carpet was on the floor and a red-shaded lamp hung from the ceiling, which was conventionally white-washed. Although there was no fireplace, the room was immoderately hot, and heavy with the perfume of roses. On three little tables were great bowls filled with roses, and there were other bowls containing roses in gaps between the books on the open shelves.

A tall screen of beautifully carved sandalwood masked one corner of the room, but beyond it protruded the end of a heavy writing-table upon which lay some loose papers, and, standing amid them, an enormous silver rose-bowl, brimming with sulphur-colored blooms.

Soames, obeying a primary instinct, turned, as the light leaped into being, to seek the door by which he had entered. As he did so, the former doubts of his own sanity returned with renewed vigor.

The book-lined wall behind him was unbroken by any opening.

Slowly, as a man awaking from a stupor, Soames gazed around the library.

It contained no door.

He rested his hand upon one of the shelves and closed his eyes. Beyond doubt he was going mad! The tragic events of that night had proved too much for him; he had never disguised from himself the fact that his mental capacity was not of the greatest. He was assured, now, that his brain had lost its balance shortly after his flight from Palace

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, and that the events of the past two hours had been phantasmal. He would presently return to sanity (or, blasphemously, he dared to petition heaven that he would) and find himself…? Perhaps in the hands of the police!

“Oh, God!” he groaned—“Oh, God!”

He opened his eyes…

A woman stood before the sandalwood screen! She had the pallidly dusky skin of a Eurasian, but, by virtue of nature or artifice, her cheeks wore a peachlike bloom. Her features were flawless in their chiseling, save for the slightly distended nostrils, and her black eyes were magnificent.

She was divinely petite, slender and girlish; but there was that in the lines of her figure, so seductively defined by her clinging Chinese dress, in the poise of her small head, with the blush rose nestling amid the black hair—above all in the smile of her full red lips—which discounted the youth of her body; which whispered “Mine is a soul old in strange sins—a soul for whom dead Alexandria had no secrets, that learnt nothing of Athenean Thais and might have tutored Messalina”…

In her fanciful robe of old gold, with her tiny feet shod in ridiculously small, gilt slippers, she stood by the screen watching the stupefied man—an exquisite, fragrantly youthful casket of ancient, unnameable evils.

“Good evening, Soames!” she said, stumbling quaintly with her English, but speaking in a voice

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 musical as a silver bell. “You will here be known as Lucas. Mr. King he wishing me to say that you to receive two pounds, at each week.”…

Soames, glassy-eyed, stood watching her. A horror, the horror of insanity, had descended upon him—a clammy, rose-scented mantle. The room, the incredible, book-lined room, was a red blur, surrounding the black, taunting eyes of the Eurasian. Everything was out of focus; past, present, and future were merged into a red, rose-haunted nothingness…

“You will attend to Block A,” resumed the girl, pointing at him with a little fan. “You will also attend to the gentlemen.”…

She laughed softly, revealing tiny white teeth; then paused, head tilted coquettishly, and appeared to be listening to someone’s conversation—to the words of some person seated behind the screen. This fact broke in upon Soames’ disordered mind and confirmed him in his opinion that he was a man demented. For only one slight sound broke the silence of the room. The red carpet below the little tables was littered with rose petals, and, in the super-heated atmosphere, other petals kept falling—softly, with a gentle rustling. Just that sound there was…and no other. Then:

“Mr. King he wishing to point out to you,” said the girl, “that he hold receipts of you, which bind you to him. So you will be free man, and have liberty to go out sometimes for your own business.

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 Mr. King he wishing to hear you say you thinking to agree with the conditions and be satisfied.”

She ceased speaking, but continued to smile; and so complete was the stillness, that Soames, whose sense of hearing had become nervously stimulated, heard a solitary rose petal fall upon the corner of the writing-table.

“I…agree,” he whispered huskily; “and…I am…satisfied.”

He looked at the carven screen as a lost soul might look at the gate of Hades; he felt now that if a sound should come from beyond it he would shriek out, he would stop up his ears; that if the figure of the Unseen should become visible, he must die at the first glimpse of it.

The little brown girl was repeating the uncanny business of listening to that voice of silence; and Soames knew that he could not sustain his part in this eerie comedy for another half-minute without breaking out into hysterical laughter. Then:

“Mr. King he releasing you for to-night,” announced the silver bell voice.

The light went out.

Soames uttered a groan of terror, followed by a short, bubbling laugh, but was seized firmly by the arm and led on into the blackness—on through the solid, book-laden walls, presumably; and on—on—on, along those interminable passages by which he had come. Here the air was cooler, and the odor of roses no longer perceptible, no longer stifling

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 him, no longer assailing his nostrils, not as an odor of sweetness, but as a perfume utterly damnable and unholy.

With his knees trembling at every step, he marched on, firmly supported by his unseen companion.

“Stop!” directed a metallic, guttural voice.

Soames pulled up, and leaned weakly against the wall. He heard the clap of hands close behind him; and a door opened within twelve inches of the spot whereat he stood.

He tottered out into the matting-lined corridor from which he had started upon that nightmare journey; Ho-Pin appeared at his elbow, but no door appeared behind Ho-Pin!

“This is your wroom,” said the Chinaman, revealing his yellow teeth in a mirthless smile.

He walked across the corridor, threw open a door—a real, palpable door…and there was Soames’ little white room!

Soames staggered across, for it seemed a veritable haven of refuge—entered, and dropped upon the bed. He seemed to see the rose-petals fall—fall—falling in that red room in the labyrinth—the room that had no door; he seemed to see the laughing eyes of the beautiful Eurasian.

“Good night!” came the metallic voice of Ho-Pin.

The light in the corridor went out.

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HE newly-created Mr. Lucas entered upon a sort of cave-man existence in this fantastic abode where night was day and day was night; where the sun never shone.

He was awakened on the first morning of his sojourn in the establishment of Ho-Pin by the loud ringing of an electric bell immediately beside his bed. He sprang upright with a catching of the breath, peering about him at the unfamiliar surroundings and wondering, in the hazy manner of a sleeper newly awakened, where he was, and how come there. He was fully dressed, and his strapped-up grip lay beside him on the floor; for he had not dared to remove his clothes, had not dared to seek slumber after that terrifying interview with Mr. King. But outraged nature had prevailed, and sleep had come unbeckoned, unbidden.

The electric light was still burning in the room, as he had left it, and as he sat up, looking about him, a purring whistle drew his attention to a speaking-tube which protruded below the bell.

Soames rolled from the bed, head throbbing, and an acrid taste in his mouth, and spoke into the tube:

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 “Hullo!”

“You will pwrepare for youwr duties,” came the metallic gutturals of Ho-Pin. “Bwreakfast will be bwrought to you in a quawrter-of-an-hour.”

He made no reply, but stood looking about him dully. It had not been a dream, then, nor was he mad. It was a horrible reality; here, in London, in modern, civilized London, he was actually buried in some incredible catacomb; somewhere near to him, very near to him, was the cave of the golden dragon, and, also adjacent—terrifying thought—was the doorless library, the rose-scented haunt where the beautiful Eurasian spoke, oracularly, the responses of Mr. King!

Soames could not understand it all; he felt that such things could not be; that there must exist an explanation of those seeming impossibilities other than that they actually existed. But the instructions were veritable enough, and would not be denied.

Rapidly he began to unpack his grip. His watch had stopped, since he had neglected to wind it, and he hurried with his toilet, fearful of incurring the anger of Ho-Pin—of Ho-Pin, the beetlesque.

He observed, with passive interest, that the operation of shaving did not appreciably lighten the stain upon his skin, and, by the time that he was shaved, he had begun to know the dark-haired, yellow-faced man grimacing in the mirror for himself; but he was far from being reconciled to his new appearance.

Said peeped in at the door. He no longer wore

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 his chauffeur’s livery, but was arrayed in a white linen robe, red-sashed, and wore loose, red slippers; a tarboosh perched upon his shaven skull.

Pushing the door widely open, he entered with a tray upon which was spread a substantial breakfast.

“Hurryup!” he muttered, as one word; wherewith he departed again.

Soames seated himself at the little table upon which the tray rested, and endeavored to eat. His usual appetite had departed with his identity; Mr. Lucas was a poor, twitching being of raw nerves and internal qualms. He emptied the coffee-pot, however, and smoked a cigarette which he found in his case.

Said reappeared.

“Ta’ala!” he directed.

Soames having learnt that that term was evidently intended as an invitation to follow Said, rose and followed, dumbly.

He was conducted along the matting-lined corridor to the left; and now, where formerly he had seen a blank wall, he saw an open door! Passing this, he discovered himself in the cave of the golden dragon. Ho-Pin, dressed in a perfectly fitting morning coat and its usual accompaniments, received him with a mirthless smile.

“Good mowrning!” he said; “I twrust your bwreakfast was satisfactowry?”

“Quite, sir,” replied Soames, mechanically, and as he might have replied to Mr. Leroux.

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 “Said will show you to a wroom,” continued Ho-Pin, “where you will find a gentleman awaiting you. You will valet him and perfowrm any other services which he may wrequire of you. When he departs, you will clean the wroom and adjoining bath-wroom, and put it into thowrough order for an incoming tenant. In short, your duties in this wrespect will be identical to those which formerly you perfowrmed at sea. There is one important diffewrence: your name is Lucas, and you will answer no questions.”

The metallic voice seemed to reach Soames’ comprehension from some place other than the room of the golden dragon—from a great distance, or as though he were fastened up in a box and were being addressed by someone outside it.

“Yes, sir,” he replied.

Said opened the yellow door upon the right of the room, and Soames followed him into another of the matting-lined corridors, this one running right and left and parallel with the wall of the apartment which he had just quitted. Six doors opened out of this corridor; four of them upon the side opposite to that by which he had entered, and one at either end.

These doors were not readily to be detected; and the wall, at first glance, presented an unbroken appearance. But from experience, he had learned that where the strips of bamboo which overlay the straw matting formed a rectangular panel, there was a door, and by the light of the electric lamp hung

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 in the center of the corridor, he counted six of these.

Said, selecting a key from a bunch which he carried, opened one of the doors, held it ajar for Soames to enter, and permitted it to reclose behind him.

Soames entered nervously. He found himself in a room identical in size with his own private apartment; a bathroom, etc., opened out of it in one corner after the same fashion. But there similarity ended.

The bed in this apartment was constructed more on the lines of a modern steamer bunk; that is, it was surrounded by a rail, and was raised no more than a foot from the floor. The latter was covered with a rich carpet, worked in many colors, and the wall was hung with such paper as Soames had never seen hitherto in his life. The scheme of this mural decoration was distinctly Chinese, and consisted in an intricate design of human and animal figures, bewilderingly mingled; its coloring was brilliant, and the scheme extended, unbroken, over the entire ceiling. Cushions, most fancifully embroidered, were strewn about the floor, and the bed coverlet was a piece of heavy Chinese tapestry. A lamp, shaded with silk of a dull purple, swung in the center of the apartment, and an ebony table, inlaid with ivory, stood on one side of the bed; on the other was a cushioned armchair figured with the eternal, chaotic Chinese design, and being littered, at the moment,

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 with the garments of the man in the bed. The air of the room was disgusting, unbreathable; it caught Soames by the throat and sickened him. It was laden with some kind of fumes, entirely unfamiliar to his nostrils. A dainty Chinese tea-service stood upon the ebony table.

For fully thirty seconds Soames, with his back to the door, gazed at the man in the bed, and fought down the nausea which the air of the place had induced in him.

This sleeper was a man of middle age, thin to emaciation and having lank, dark hair. His face was ghastly white, and he lay with his head thrown back and with his arms hanging out upon either side of the bunk, so that his listless hands rested upon the carpet. It was a tragic face; a high, intellectual brow and finely chiseled features; but it presented an indescribable aspect of decay; it was as the face of some classic statue which has long lain buried in humid ruins.

Soames shook himself into activity, and ventured to approach the bed. He moistened his dry lips and spoke:

“Good morning, sir”—the words sounded wildly, fantastically out of place. “Shall I prepare your bath?”

The sleeper showed no signs of awakening.

Soames forced himself to touch one of the thrown-back shoulders. He shook it gently.

The man on the bed raised his arms and dropped

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 them back again into their original position, without opening his eyes.

“They…are hiding,” he murmured thickly…“in the…orange grove.…If the felucca sails…closer…they will”…

Soames, finding something very horrifying in the broken words, shook the sleeper more urgently.

“Wake up, sir!” he cried; “I am going to prepare your bath.”

“Don’t let them…escape,” murmured the man, slowly opening his eyes— “I have not”…

He struggled upright, glaring madly at the intruder. His light gray eyes had a glassiness as of long sickness, and his pupils, which were unnaturally dilated, began rapidly to contract; became almost invisible. Then they expanded again—and again contracted.

“Who—the deuce are you?” he murmured, passing his hand across his unshaven face.

“My name is—Lucas, sir,” said Soames, conscious that if he remained much longer in the place he should be physically sick. “At your service—shall I prepare the bath?”

“The bath?” said the man, sitting up more straightly— “certainly, yes—of course”…

He looked at Soames, with a light of growing sanity creeping into his eyes; a faint flush tinged the pallid face, and his loose mouth twitched sensitively.

“Then, Said,” he began, looking Soames up and

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 down…“let me see, whom did you say you were?”

“Lucas, sir—at your service.”

“Ah,” muttered the man, lowering his eyes in unmistakable shame—“yes, yes, of course. You are new here?”

“Yes, sir. Shall I prepare your bath?”

“Yes, please. This is Wednesday morning?”

“Wednesday morning, sir; yes.”

“Of course—it is Wednesday. You said your name was?”

“Lucas, sir,” reiterated Soames, and, crossing the fantastic apartment, he entered the bath-room beyond.

This contained the most modern appointments and was on an altogether more luxurious scale than that attached to his own quarters. He noted, without drawing any deduction from the circumstance, that the fittings were of American manufacture. Here, as in the outer room, there was no window; an electric light hung from the center of the ceiling. Soames busied himself in filling the bath, and laying out the towels upon the rack.

“Fairly warm, sir?” he asked.

“Not too warm, thank you,” replied the other, now stumbling out of bed and falling into the armchair—“not too warm.”

“If you will take your bath, sir,” said Soames, returning to the outer room, “I will brush your clothes and be ready to shave you.”

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 “Yes, yes,” said the man, rubbing his hands over his face wearily. “You are new here?”

Soames, who was becoming used to answering this question, answered it once more without irritation.

“Yes, sir, will you take your bath now? It is nearly full, I think.”

The man stood up unsteadily and passed into the bath-room, closing the door behind him. Soames, seeking to forget his surroundings, took out from a small hand-bag which he found beneath the bed, a razor-case and a shaving stick. The clothes-brush he had discovered in the bathroom; and now he set to work to brush the creased garments stacked in the armchair. He noted that they were of excellent make, and that the linen was of the highest quality. He was thus employed when the outer door silently opened and the face of Said looked in.

“Gazm,” said the Oriental; and he placed inside, upon the carpet, a pair of highly polished boots.

The door was reclosed.

Soames had all the garments in readiness by the time that the man emerged from the bathroom, looking slightly less ill, and not quite so pallid. He wore a yellow silk kimono; and, with greater composure than he had yet revealed, he seated himself in the armchair that Soames might shave him.

This operation Soames accomplished, and the subject, having partially dressed, returned to the bathroom to brush his hair. When his toilet was practically completed:

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 “Shall I pack the rest of the things in the bag, sir?” asked Soames.

The man nodded affirmatively.

Five minutes later he was ready to depart, and stood before the ex-butler a well-dressed, intellectual, but very debauched-looking gentleman. Being evidently well acquainted with the regime of the establishment, he pressed an electric bell beside the door, presented Soames with half-a-sovereign, and, as Said reappeared, took his departure, leaving Soames more reconciled to his lot than he could ever have supposed possible.

The task of cleaning the room was now commenced by Soames. Said returned, bringing him the necessary utensils; and for fifteen minutes or so he busied himself between the outer apartment and the bathroom. During this time he found leisure to study the extraordinary mural decorations; and, as he looked at them, he learned that they possessed a singular property.

If one gazed continuously at any portion of the wall, the intertwined figures thereon took shape—nay, took life; the intricate, elaborate design ceased to be a design, and became a procession, a saturnalia; became a sinister comedy, which, when first visualized, shocked Soames immoderately. The horrors presented by these devices of evil cunning, crowding the walls, appalled the narrow mind of the beholder, revolted him in an even greater degree than they must have revolted a man of broader and

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 cleaner mind. He became conscious of a quality of evil which pervaded the room; the entire place seemed to lie beneath a spell, beneath the spell of an invisible, immeasurably wicked intelligence.

His reflections began to terrify him, and he hastened to complete his duties. The stench of the place was sickening him anew, and when at last Said opened the door, Soames came out as a man escaping from some imminent harm.

“Di,” muttered Said.

He pointed to the opened door of a second room, identical in every respect with the first; and Soames started back with a smothered groan. Had his education been classical he might have likened himself to Hercules laboring for Augeus; but his mind tending scripturally, he wondered if he had sold his soul to Satan in the person of the invisible Mr. King!

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OAMES’ character was of a pliable sort, and ere many days had passed he had grown accustomed to this unnatural existence among the living corpses in the catacombs of Ho-Pin.

He rarely saw Ho-Pin, and desired not to see him at all; as for Mr. King, he even endeavored to banish from his memory the name of that shadowy being. The memory of the Eurasian he could not banish, and was ever listening for the silvery voice, but in vain. He had no particular duties, apart from the care of the six rooms known as Block A, and situated in the corridor to the left of the cave of the golden dragon; this, and the valeting of departing occupants. But the hours at which he was called upon to perform these duties varied very greatly. Sometimes he would attend to four human wrecks in the same morning; whilst, perhaps on the following day, he would not be called upon to officiate until late in the evening. One fact early became evident to him. There was a ceaseless stream of these living dead men pouring into the catacombs of Ho-Pin, coming he knew not whence, and issuing forth again, he knew not whither.

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text:
Author:Larry Hannigan

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Page:The History of Ballarat.djvu/37

 Lal Lal was taken up in the year 1840 by Messrs. Blakeney and George Airey, the latter a brother of the Crimean officer so often and so flatteringly mentioned in Kinglake's "History of the Crimean War." In the same year, Messrs. Le Vet (or Levitt) and another took up Warrenheip as a pig-growing station, but the venture failed, and some of the pigs ran wild in the forest there for years, and preyed on each other. After Messrs. Le Vet and Co. had been there awhile, the run was taken up on behalf of Messrs. Verner, Welsh, and Holloway, of the Gingellac run, on the Hume, by Mr. Haverfield (at present the editor of the Bendigo Advertiser), Le Vet and partner selling their improvements for about £30. Shortly after Mr. Haverfield came to Warrenheip, Bullarook Forest was occupied by Mr. John Peerman, for Mr. Lyon Campbell. The Mr. Verner mentioned above was the first Commissioner of the Melbourne Insolvency Court. He was related to Sir William Verner, a member in the House of Commons for Armagh. Mr. Verner took part, as chairman, at a Separation meeting held in Melbourne on the 30th December, 1840, and soon after that he left the colony. Mr. Welsh was the late Mr. Patricius Welsh, of Ballarat; and Mr. Holloway became a gold-broker, and died at the Camp at Bendigo. In the year 1843, Mr. Peter Inglis, who had a station at Ballan, took up the Warrenheip run, and shortly after that purchased the Lal Lal station, and throwing them both together, grazed on the united runs one of the largest herds in the colony. The western boundary of Mr. Inglis' Warrenheip run marched with the eastern boundary of Mr. Yuille's run, the line being struck by marked trees running from Mount Buninyong across Brown Hill to Slaty Creek. Mr. Donald Stewart, now of Buninyong, was stock-rider for Mr. Inglis, on the Warrenheip and Lal Lal stations, and superintendent during the minority of the present owner of Lal Lal. In 1839 Mr. W. H. Bacchus brought cattle from Melbourne and grazed them on his run of Burrumbeetup, the centre of which run is now occupied by the Ballan pound. There is a waterfall on the Moorabool there, which, for its picturesque beauty, is well worth visiting. The run extended on the Ballarat side of the

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 Moorabool to about midway to the Lal Lal Creek. Mr. Bacchus still resides in the same locality, his present station being known as Perewur, or Peerewurr, a native name, meaning waterfall and opossums. It was originally held by Messrs. Fairbairn and Gardner. Buninyong was a village, or township, long before Ballarat had any existence as a settlement. The first huts were built at Buninyong in the year 1841, by sawyers, splitters, and others, Mr. George Innes being then called the "King of the Splitters." George Gab, George Coleman, and others, were the pioneers in the Buninyong settlement. Gab had a wife who used to ride Amazonian fashion on a fine horse called Petrel, and both husband and wife were energetic people. Gab opened a house of accommodation for travellers on the spot where Jamison's hotel was afterwards built. The first store in the neighborhood was opened at the Round Water Holes, near Bonshaw, by Messrs. D. S. Campbell and Woolley, of Melbourne, who almost immediately afterwards removed to a site next Gab's, at Buninyong, whose place they took for a kitchen. Gab then removed and built another hut opposite to the present police-court, and he opened his new hut also as a hotel. A blacksmith named M‘Lachlan, with a partner, opened a smithy opposite to Campbell and Wooley's store. This was the nucleus of the principal inland town then in the colony. In the year 1844 Dr. Power settled there, and built a hut behind what was afterwards the Buninyong hotel. He was the first medical man in the locality, and for years the settlers had no other doctor nearer than Geelong. The young township became a favorite place with bullock teamsters, who were glad to build huts there where they could leave their wives and children in some degree safe from aboriginal or other marauders. In the year 1847, the Rev. Thomas Hastie, the first clergyman in the district, came to Buninyong. His house, and the church in which he performed service, were built entirely by the residents in Buninyong, both pecuniary gifts and manual labor being contributed. Then, as afterwards, the Messrs. Learmonth were among the foremost movers in the promotion of the mental and moral, as well as material welfare of the people about them. Mr. Hastie, in a letter to us, says:—

Before I came in 1847, the Messrs. Learmonth had made several efforts

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 to procure the settlement of a clergyman at Buninyong, but had failed, partly from want of support, but chiefly from their inability to procure one likely to be suitable. Overtures had been made to Mr. Beazely, a Congregational minister then in Tasmania, and afterwards in New South Wales, but he declined them. The Messrs. Learmonth were willing to take a minister from any denomination, and the circumstance that a Presbyterian clergyman was settled here arose from the fact that no other was available. Until after the gold discovery there was no minister in the interior, that is out of Melbourne, Geelong, Belfast, and Portland, but Mr. Hamilton of Mortlake, Mr. Gow of Campbellfield, and myself. For many years my diocese, as it may be called, extended from Batesford, on the Barwon, to Glenlogie, in the Pyrenees, and included all the country for miles on either side, my duties taking me, from home more than half my time. Before I came the Messrs. Learmonth had contemplated the establishment of a cheap boarding-school for the children of shepherds and others in the bush, but for prudential reasons they deferred the matter till the settlement of a minister offered the means of supervision. Immediately after I came the project was carried out, and subscriptions were received from most of the settlers in the Western district. The school was opened in 1848 by Mr. Bed well, £10 a year being charged for board and education.

The gold discovery carried away the teachers, raised the prices of everything, and Mr. Hastie had to see to the school and its 60 boarders himself; but through all the difficulties the school was maintained with varying fortunes, until at length it became the Common-school near the Presbyterian Manse, with an average attendance of some 180 children.

What is now the boroughs of Ballarat, Ballarat East, and Sebastopol, was then a pleasantly picturesque pastoral country. Mount and range, and table land, gullies and creeks and grassy slopes, here black and dense forest, there only sprinkled with trees, and yonder showing clear reaches of grass, made up the general landscape. A pastoral quiet reigned everywhere. Over the whole expanse there was nothing of civilisation but a few pastoral settlers and their retinue—the occasional flock of nibbling sheep, or groups of cattle browsing in the broad herbage. There were three permanent waterholes in those days where the squatters used to find water for their flocks in the driest times of summer. One was at the junction of the Gong Gong and the Yarrowee, or Blakeney's Creek, as it was then

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ESSAY II.

HAMILTON AND REID.

Even in its unfinished state, Sir William Hamilton’s Edition of the Works of Reid is the most important contribution to the metaphysical literature of Great Britain that the nineteenth century has yet witnessed.

The present publication contains the entire text of Reid. Of the Preface, Notes, Dissertations, and Indices, promised in the title-page by Sir William Hamilton, only the Notes, with six of the Dissertations, and part of a seventh, have as yet appeared. The publication of the remaining dissertations, with the preface and the indices, is, we hope not indefinitely, postponed. Even of the matter included in the volume before us, however,


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 containing as it does nearly a thousand closely printed pages, at least a third part is contributed by the living philosopher,—and this proportion supplies a very inadequate idea of his share of the elaborate research, and refined and highly abstract thinking, which is comprehended in the book.

Dr. Reid’s philosophical works have long been recognised in this country as the type and standard of the Philosophy of Scotland, and they are now regarded by the most thoughtful men of Europe and America as constituting a conspicuous land-mark on the wide sea of modern speculation. Familiar to our academic youth at home, as supplying for the most part the text or outline of the discussions in intellectual and moral science in the Scottish universities, they have recently been translated into French by M. Jouffroy, and made the basis of instruction in philosophy in the schools of France.

The exposition of the doctrines of Reid, and the various ingenious applications of them to explain and amend the qualities of human character and society, which are contained in the works of Mr. Stewart—of which a slight but graceful specimen appears in this volume, in the “Account of the Life and Writings of Reid,”—if they have added little to the speculative intrepidity of the Scottish school, have at least given a diffused popularity to the more abstract speculations of the elder Scottish philosopher.

In consequence probably of his singularly high ideal of what is required in philosophical authorship, the


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 by one who was the most distinguished of his immediate disciples, all under the auspices of the foremost Scottish philosopher of the present age—a publication which thus associates the names of Reid, Stewart, and Hamilton—is a memorable event in the history of our National Philosophy. It may suggest a brief meditation concerning the new matter now connected by Sir William Hamilton with the text of Reid. Anything like a comprehensive or critical estimate of the contributions of these three Scottish philosophers to the common stock of the world’s speculative knowledge, should be adjourned until the remaining portion of this work shall have appeared. We proceed to offer in the following Essay, a few somewhat miscellaneous observations, which may tend to prepare a portion of the public for the independent study of a book that cannot fail profoundly to interest every lover of abstract speculation.

“That,” says Lord Bacon, “will indeed dignify and exalt knowledge, if contemplation and action may be more nearly and strongly conjoined together than they have been—a conjunction like unto that of the two highest planets, Saturn the planet of rest and contemplation, and Jupiter the planet of civil society and action.” This favourite doctrine and simile of Bacon, so fitting and urgent in an age whose retrospect was the centuries of scholastic speculation, is not less fitting and urgent, although in an opposite application, to the age and country in which we live. If the author of the “Advancement of Learning” proclaimed it in order to


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 revive and to associate with philosophy external activity, philosophers may proclaim it now in order to revive and associate with action elevated contemplation. Although in these Dissertations there is an apparent, there is not, we think, a real variance with the doctrine of Bacon, for there is probably all that the principle of the division of intellectual labour will permit a single mind, of exclusive tendencies, to offer towards the creation of a spirit of contemplative activity.

Perhaps the quality of a general kind that is most impressive in the aspect of Sir William Hamilton’s portion of this volume is the singular purity of its speculative character, and the exclusively speculative ends which the author seems to have aimed at in his compositions. The phenomenon here exhibited of an immense mass of wonderfully subtle logical distinctions, and profound metaphysical principles, produced and collected apparently by means of the energy of a love of thinking for its own sake, and a love of truth without regard to any of its nearer or more remote applications, is one which cannot fail to impress any intelligent observer of our British literature, were it only in virtue of its present novelty, in this age of extraordinary outward bustle, and in this island whose inhabitants are noted for the extremely palpable and concrete character of the objects that induce them to think and act. The many natural motives, distinct from the love of knowledge on its own account, that incline men to seek for truth, together with the various acquired tendencies having the same direction, which are fostered by the complicated social relations


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 of this conventional age, and its alleged narrow and utilitarian principles of action, have failed to conquer, or (we refer to this publication) even visibly to affect at least one mind, by inducing any diversion of its power from some of the loftiest regions of human speculation.

It would be difficult to select from the whole range of English literature, a work so distinguished in respect of these qualities. As regards the proportion of abstract speculation, and the rigorous deduction of endless syllogisms, perhaps some of the works of Hobbes, and the earlier philosophical productions of Hume, approach most nearly to the Dissertations of Sir William Hamilton. To these we may add the metaphysico-theological writings of Dr. Samuel Clarke, and those of Jonathan Edwards, the great Calvinistic metaphysician of North America. But while the thought that is presented to us in the works of these philosophers resembles that which is contained in the Notes and Dissertations in its highly abstract character, in the iron logic of its connexion, and in the pervading traces of a strongly-developed faculty for reflection, there is evidence that other motives to intellectual exertion have united with the love of science on its own account in fostering the spirit which incited them to labour. Political motives influenced Hobbes. A love of fame and probably of paradox, not to speak of sentiments of frugality, and a desire for worldly independence, seem to have been considerable incitements of intellect in the case of Hume. A moral regard for those truths which are the bulwarks of religion and duty,


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 roused the metaphysical genius of Clarke in their defence. In Edwards, the gratification of the logical faculty, by the attainment of a regularly developed, comprehensive, and exhaustive body of science, was entirely subordinate to the gratification of the religious principle, through means of a conciliation of the theory of human activity and responsibility, with the more awful and mysterious doctrines of the Christian revelation.

It is desirable, for the sake of the common good, that society should in each generation possess at least a few men in whom the habit of speculation, and the love of comprehensive thinking and speculative completeness, occupy a very predominant place among the motives which keep the mind in a state of activity. And although a desire for knowledge is a common profession, it cannot be doubted that this sort of mental development is really of extremely rare occurrence. “The abstract love of truth,” it has been well said, “is a principle with those only who have made it their study, who have applied themselves to the pursuit of some art or science in which the intellect is severely tasked, and learns by habit to take a pride in, and set a just value on its conclusions. To have a disinterested regard for truth, the mind must have contemplated it in abstract and remote questions, whereas the ignorant and vulgar are conversant only with those things in which their own interest is concerned. All their interests are local, personal, and consequently gross and selfish.” In a word, men usually attend to those


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 fragments of truth, or of mingled truth and error, which are needed to aid them in the attainment of their own ends, and these ends vary with the character or predominant inclinations to action of individual men. Their knowledge consequently is fragmentary, relative and interested rather than scientific. The disinterested love of science and philosophy is a counterpoise upon the tendency of less elevated minds, to pervert the very meaning of the word truth, and to assume that those opinions which are or which seem best adapted to gratify some other active principle of the mind, subordinate to, or at least quite distinct from, the desire for speculative activity, are to be received as a standard of belief.

As human nature and society are constituted, it is however well that instances of an exclusive development of the faculty for abstract or highly generalized science should be rare. A rigorous separation of the speculative from the practical, is apt, by causing a disruption of the complex nature of man, to infuse the spirit of scepticism into the operations of the understanding, and to occasion weakness and vacillation in the conduct of life. The Creator of the human mind has inserted into it numerous and various principles of action, which are besides usually fused together in practice. The search for speculative truth is in all common minds conducted in subordination to, and in all minds should be conducted in harmony with the law of mixed motives. The statesman is impelled by political as well as by logical necessity to know and practise the theory of civil or ecclesiastical


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 government. The devout theologian searches inspired books under the constraint of the Christian motives, and from a conscientious impulse which attracts him with special ardour to that region of knowledge. The practical man, in the common commerce of daily life, over whom a love for the scientific kind of knowledge has little if any influence, seeks only for those fragments of information which may enable him to find his way, through the complicated but very subordinate details, that are required for his worldly business or pleasure, toward those results which are fitted to gratify his love of power, or money, or fame, and to meet the emergencies of his professional pursuit. For the attainment of most of the ends of life, utilitarian rather than scientific knowledge is necessary, and no individual is more likely to be subject to irresolution and exposed to illusion than he from whose mind all the blind and irrational principles of action, which are meant to supplement reason, have been extracted, by the power of the habit of philosophizing, and who submits to the influence only of motives which are regulated by pure intelligence. Without the gravitation of forces such as those we have indicated, the spirit of unmixed speculation would (unless in the case of a genius of extraordinary strength) quit its hold of the lower and more palpable departments of universal knowledge, and find sufficient occupation among the most abstract, and general relations of things. Contemplating the framework which contains knowledge more than the knowledge which the framework contains, the mind is apt


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 to lose a direct acqaintance with the actual and the individual, in the splendid theory of the possible.

The world of speculative reason differs from the actual world of living men, for man, as he is, differs from man as he ought to be. Philosophical theories are the nourishment of the purely rational principle; but they tend, unless the influence is counteracted by strength of mind, and an attentive observation of the infinite variety of the existing modifications of the instincts, affections, and other irrational causes of action, to deaden, or at least to distort, the keen perception of the common mechanism of man’s practical nature; and they may in this way expose the retired student of abstract metaphysics, like the astronomer of Rasselas who fancied that he ruled the stars, to the influence of ludicrous, or even of dangerous illusions, in the conduct of life, and in intercourse with living men. The machinery of society is regulated in a great measure by habits and desires, that are only indirectly, if at all, influenced by the operations of the understanding. The moving world of human beings often does not coincide with the hypotheses of human reasoning, while there exists in it much that cannot fail to be overlooked by the man of mere contemplation. His dreams are thus broken, from time to time, by unexpected collisions with living society, and by contact with modes of character which his speculations had not prepared him to expect.

It may be added that, except in the highest order of minds, this excessive development of the scientific faculty —this truth-seeking, only for the sake of knowing truth


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 as such, and with little or no extraneous tendency to the knowledge of particular departments of truth—is apt to leave uncultivated an order of sentiments which, in the best men, are always mingled with philosophical speculation. The motives of religion and duty, which find their highest appropriate stimulus in the department of truth which regards God and our relations to Him, ought not to be separated from a love for abstract truth. But, on the other hand, it is possible to speculate without any impulse from the conscience, and to find materials of science, among the objects of religious faith, which pervade the whole region of the higher philosophy, without forming the habit of converting the scientific knowledge into practice. An habitual employment, merely as the ministers of pure speculation, of those objects which, of all others, are most fitted to alter the character for good, is appropriately punished in the agonies of religious scepticism.

Another general characteristic of these Notes and Dissertations, hardly less remarkable than the one which has supplied a text for the observations contained in the preceding paragraphs, is the enormous accumulation of the materials of exact learning and historical research which they contain. Sir William Hamilton has long possessed a European reputation for extraordinary erudition. The evidences of his varied and accurate reading which his edition of Reid contains are not confined to one province of literature, although they are of course especially conspicuous in all that is in any way within the margin of the history of philosophy, and particularly of the


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 more ready, by a species of mental chemistry, to fuse among the productions of its own intelligence, as the elements of a new and distinctive creation, the materials that are thus presented to it; while in the writings of the Scottish philosopher, the treasures of learned research are oftener permitted to remain in mechanical juxtaposition with the results of his own intellectual activity, in which they are, as it were, visibly embedded like the fossil remains of a stratum of geology.

In both the qualities to which we have referred, as generally characteristic of this recent contribution to our philosophical literature, there is a remarkable deficiency in the current publications in Great Britain. Our literature indicates, for the most part, little exact acquaintance with the ancient or contemporary doctrines which it attempts to criticise; and original speculation is almost unknown. Vague doctrines, assumed to be the productions of recent German thinking, supply its nourishment to the greater part of the “philosophical” mind of this country. Glimpses of Germany engaged in speculation are, however, no substitute for original thought about matters such as those on which the Germans in these times, and Reid, Locke, and Bacon in Britain, in other times, have displayed the highest qualities of intellect. If these specimens, by Sir William Hamilton, of what a profound knowledge of the history of opinion really is, incite some men to an exact study of the books of foreign countries and of former generations, they are also fitted to rouse the still more dormant spirit that seeks direct and independent intellectual contact


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72 with the real problems themselves, which have afforded nourishment to the high philosophy of the great thinkers of other ages. It is not the repetition of a faint echo from Germany or France that constitutes the substance of what is contained in the immortal works of the British philosophers whom we have named, who created for us a National Philosophy, with certain invaluable characteristics peculiarly its own. But a chasm intervenes between their age and ours. Notwithstanding symptoms of a revived attention to certain metaphysical questions, often vaguely enough apprehended, it remains true, that during this generation there is hardly any trace in this island of profound and exact thought respecting those abstract topics which are implied in the discussion of the first principles of knowledge. Our repose from effort in the direction of philosophy is now interrupted by this volume, which seasonably presents to us the written results of the life-labours of a sagacious and truly Scottish mind, in the company of fragments which offer a tolerable indication of the more important principles of the Scoto-German philosophy of the great living thinker, by whom the doctrines of Reid have been rendered more refined and definite, and his basis of philosophy made more comprehensive.

There is one other characteristic of these Notes and Dissertations to which we can only refer, although it deserves a copious discussion, and may, we hope, receive for itself a place among the principal objects of the regard of some earnest and thoughtful mind. We mean the peculiar nomenclature and terminology, and indeed the


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 general texture of the language in which Sir William Hamilton’s speculations are presented. A defect of precision and permanence in that whole portion of language which relates to what is not to be classed among the objects of our senses, is an old and often-repeated complaint. Now, in respect of precision, and clearness, and adaptation to the peculiarities of the manner of thinking which it is meant to represent, and especially to the exhaustive conveyance of condensed results of thought, the style of these Notes and Dissertations appears to us unequalled by that of any English treatise in philosophy. It is an especial contrast to Locke, whose vagueness and variation in the use of scientific words has occasioned a large proportion of the thought and discussion that have been expended on his opinions. Here, on the other hand, the matter to be represented by the terms is rigidly appropriated to them; and if the ratiocination in which they are included sometimes appears to imply a mere involution and evolution of the signification of a series of names, it is all the more remarkable, in such absence of argument about things, to observe the accuracy with which a precise meaning is preserved in association with each name.

These important ends are no doubt secured only by means of great sacrifices. The nicely manufactured terminology and sentences, so charged with meaning when used by the manufacturer, are treasures for the feebler minds who can study that philosophy only which consists in the ability to make a noise with uncommon and imposing words. It may be doubted, too, whether the


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 resources of our good old native English, with its agreeable suggestions of common or less abstract objects, have been rendered so available as they might have been, with a view to the more general diffusion of the doctrines, and the increase of their influence as means for modifying the public mind. But on this question we cannot now enter. When it is considered that the abuse of words has hitherto been among the most productive of all the causes that have indirectly contributed to the formation of philosophical literature in general, and of abstract controversy and discussion in particular, it must be evident that the theory and use of the proper signs for the statement and most effective circulation of philosophical ideas, is the theme for a volume and not for a paragraph—an appropriate task for the labour of a life, and not one which can be disposed of in an episode in an occasional Essay.

It may readily be concluded that the qualities to which we have referred are on the whole unfavourable to the popularity, and (in many cases) to the intelligibility of these Notes and Dissertations, among general readers. Such condensed results of the highest generalization, and jets of thought cast forth without the amplification and ornament of popular eloquence, and with little reference to any of their various possible applications, are ill-fitted to coalesce with the prevailing mental habits. Most men are unwilling to consent to grope their way, in the lowest depths of intellectual abstraction, where the light of evidence is hardly sufficient for steady progress, and where they must ever be on their guard against the illusion


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 of vague formulas, susceptible of almost any meaning, which occasion that dangerous collapse of the mind upon itself, that is often experienced after an intense effort of thinking with scanty materials about which to think. There seems to be an intellectual necessity that, in the present age of unscholastic and ill-disciplined philosophical taste, this remarkable addition to our literature shall slowly, if at all, find direct admission for its doctrines, possessing, as it does, a selection and arrangement of words unsurpassed among the books of the English language for precision and consistency—a formal clearness and distinctness of method—a singular incapacity to rest contented with a partial or isolated view of any great doctrine—a depth of thought and a refinement of distinction, the very apprehension of which implies the exercise of mental functions hardly ever in these times called into action, and a copiousness of pure argument unrelieved by those lighter graces and ornaments of fancy which are usually needed to seduce men to an exertion of the higher powers of mind. Even students of speculative science may confess the existence of a wish that, amid themes so ennobling and kindred with the most suitable objects of imaginative emotion, the metaphysician had given occasional vent, through the mass of subtle distinctions and profound principles, and the accumulation of passages extracted from his stores of unequalled reading, to the living copious eloquence of which such themes are susceptible, and in which the literature of philosophy supplies so many illustrious examples. The gorgeous imagery of Bacon has done much


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 to illuminate the ages that followed him with the light of his great doctrines, and his exquisite adaptations to philosophical purposes of the “winged words” of common language have helped to waft his philosophy down the stream of time.

We must now, however, refer more particularly to the materials proper to philosophy itself, that are contained in the book that has suggested the preceding remarks.

Though somewhat an excrescence upon the discussion of metaphysical topics, we cannot dismiss without some notice the ninety pages of the “Life and Letters of Reid,” which occupy the opening part of the volume, and which, introducing us as they do to the genius and peculiarities of an individual man, and associating these with the exercise of abstract speculation, may prove to many readers not the least interesting section of its contents.

The letters addressed by Reid to several of his distinguished contemporaries, form the most important supplementary matter appended by Sir William Hamilton to the biography by Stewart. Nearly all of this correspondence may be included in three parcels—(1.) Thirteen letters, written by Reid during the first six years after his removal from Aberdeen to Glasgow, to Drs. A. and D. Skene, physicians in Aberdeen. These interesting documents were furnished by Mr. Thomson of Banchory, and have not before been published. They contain some amusing pictures of Glasgow College in the last century, and “afford what was perhaps wanting to Mr. Stewart’s portraiture of Reid—they shew us the philosopher


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 in all the unaffected simplicity of his character, and as he appeared to his friends in the familiar intercourse of ordinary life.” (2.) Nine letters addressed to Lord Kames, and already published in Lord Woodhouselee’s Memoirs of that philosopher. These afford some suggestive thoughts on what we may style the metaphysics of physical science. This and the former body of letters, also illustrate Reid’s intelligent interest in the sciences of external nature, such as chemistry and mechanics, on their own account. (3.) A selection from upwards of twenty of Reid’s letters to his kinsman, the late Dr. James Gregory, Professor of the Practice of Medicine in the University of Edinburgh. Of these the most curious parts relate to the controversy on free-will, and to the theory of causation.

Stewart’s “Account of the Life and Writings of Reid,” is a work so well known to most of those in this country who are even moderately versed in the history of recent philosophy, that we need hardly occupy our readers upon anything like an abstract of its contents. A life of which the greater part was passed in the humble but agreeable seclusion of academical office successively in two Scottish provincial universities, cannot be expected to offer incident for the gratification of the lovers of brilliant external adventure, and must derive its interest from the peculiarities of the mental phenomena which it manifests, and the circumstances by which these were called forth, or amid which they struggled into action. Himself born in the commencement of the eighteenth century, Dr. Reid’s ancestors by the father’s side were for generations ministers of the Church of Scotland,


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 in the parishes of Upper Banchory in Aberdeenshire, and Strachan in Kincardineshire, and some of them were not unknown in the world of letters. By his mother he was connected with the most illustrious of the Scottish hereditary aristocracy of talent—the renowned family of Gregory. The name of Reid, and the associations connected with his family, may thus increase the interest of the thoughtful traveller in the beautiful vale of Dee. As the favourite residence of Reid himself, and of his friends Campbell, Gerard, and Beattie, the town and neighbourhood of Aberdeen may be regarded as classic ground in reference to the Philosophy of Scotland.

The early youth of the philosopher does not seem to have given remarkable promise of the eminence which he afterwards reached, but his love for an academic life was soon indicated, and probably increased by his more than usually (in Scotland) protracted residence at Marischal College, and by his subsequent visits to the more splendid academical establishments of England. For fifteen years he was pastor of the remote rural parish of New Machar, where, according to Mr. Stewart, “the greater part of his time was spent in the most intense study; more particularly in a careful examination of the laws of external perception, and of the other principles which form the groundwork of human knowledge.” Gardening and botany were the chief relaxations of the meditative country clergyman. In 1752, he was elected Professor of Philosophy in King’s College, Aberdeen, where he found the opportunity to mature his fundamental doctrine, and


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 to test it in a course of active public instruction, at the same time that he was one of the founders and leaders of a Literary Society, which then rendered Aberdeen a focus of Scottish intellect. From King’s College Reid was, in 1764, removed to the chair of Morals in Glasgow, which he occupied actively for nearly twenty years, after which, until his death in 1796, he was engaged in preparing for the press and publishing his final and more elaborate treatises, in a serene old age, eminently characteristic of the long term of cheerful meditative industry, and the habits of integrity and self-control which had marked his life.*

The Scottish Philosophy of Dr. Reid, and the ScotoGerman Philosophy of Sir William Hamilton, constitute together an important stage in the great revolution which metaphysical science has been undergoing since the age of Des Cartes, and as such, they occupy an important historical place in modern philosophy. A few sentences of explanation may illustrate this.

Des Cartes is an influential and prominent person in the succession of great thinkers, chiefly because he was


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 a thorough-going doubter, who, by means of his doubts, got rid of an accumulation of propositions, assumed on authority to be true,—the intellectual division, generalization, and argumentation of the contents of which formed the materiel of the preceding or scholastic epoch of philosophy. The Cartesian “scepticism” raked up the foundations of things, and during the lifetime of the philosopher himself, as well as since, it has communicated a corresponding impulse to meditative minds by whom his works have been studied. Des Cartes doubted in order to believe and know. From the foundation down to which his doubts conducted him, he attempted to rear a comprehensive theory of knowledge. But the reconstructive has exerted small influence compared to the destructive part of his teaching, and it is mainly through the operation of the latter element that a revolution in the manner of thinking regarding the first principles of every sort of knowledge is the permanent result of his labours.

The period of the history of human thought that has intervened since Des Cartes, is filled by a series of more or less imperfect reconstructions of philosophy, i.e., of the ultimate theory of knowledge,—out of the confusion consequent upon the sceptical method of the French philosopher. The attempt of Locke, in the “Essay concerning Human Understanding,” is the first of prominent historical importance. That great work is still properly an unfinished one. The metaphysical thinking of the last century and a half has been to a great degree employed in working out the problem suggested in it, which the


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 author himself had, however, carried a long way towards a satisfactory solution. The name of Locke, associated with the names of Clarke and Butler, distinguishes the close of the seventeenth and the commencement of the eighteenth century as the Augustan era of metaphysical science in the southern division of the island.

The imperfection or one-sidedness of Locke’s philosophy, as regards the expression of its fundamental principles, was exhibited, in what is virtually the form of a reductio ad absurdum, by David Hume, in his “Treatise of Human Nature,” where, on the principles of Locke, all knowledge is reduced to a succession of phenomena, while absolute existence and human philosophy are proved to imply a tissue of contradictions.

The philosophical doubts of Hume occasioned another independent effort to find the theory of knowledge. A conservative reaction, against the universal scepticism which he had extracted from the doctrine of Locke, was manifested almost contemporaneously in Scotland by Thomas Reid, and in Germany by Immanuel Kant—in Scotland with a tendency to what is practical and palpable, and in Germany to idealism and pantheism.

The epoch of Reid and Kant is distinguished by making the original structure of human intelligence a principal object of scientific attention. Each philosopher sought to find in that quarter a refuge from scepticism, and the only possible ultimate explanation of knowledge. Reid, on the inductive method of Bacon, systematically collected, under the name of “principles of common sense,” those inexplicable beliefs, or original living facul


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 ties, which must be assumed in all knowledge. His doctrine is formed by means of a reflex attention to that common sense which is spontaneously exercised by the many. Kant, assuming the famous test of necessity as the basis of his critical investigation, demonstrated the originality of many of those notions which Hume had rendered up as the illusions of a universe of mere phenomena. He thus exhibited a theory of subjective knowledge, seemingly self-consistent and permanent; while Reid exhibited those beliefs which are the security, if not the explanation, of all knowledge, subjective and objective. Both supplemented Locke. The “Essay concerning Human Understanding” had furnished an important analysis of what is contributed to our knowledge by experience, marked by the freshness of an independent thinker, who subjects old assumptions to a renewed act of careful observation. But in his desire to find, by means of induction, the limits within which the human mind may be advantageously occupied, Locke had omitted to examine critically the original structure of intellect that is implied in the ability to gain such experimental knowledge as he had noted and analyzed in his survey of the mind and its stores. The schools of Reid and Kant have given the prominence, which Locke neglected to assign, to this object of investigation in the prosecution of the theory of knowledge. The common sense of Reid is the object of Scottish inductive investigation; the categories of Kant of German formal criticism.

The philosophy of Sir William Hamilton is to a large


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 extent a fusion of the spirit and doctrines of Reid and Kant, wrought by an independent and highly speculative mind, and adapted to the stage in the progress of the theory of knowledge which follows the last seventy years of German thinking. The philosophy of Reid was pointed against a scepticism that, as we shall afterwards show, was the result of a doctrine of representational perception. The philosophy of Sir William Hamilton is fitted besides this to meet the virtual scepticism of the German absolutists, by a demonstration of the necessary limitation of all possible human knowledge to what is relative and conditional. The old Scottish philosophy maintained, against those who deny that science is possible, the existence of a body of vital beliefs, which are sufficient to infuse reality into our knowledge. The new Scottish philosophy uses the original beliefs and notions of the mind, at once against the sceptics, and against the philosophers who arrogate to man a knowledge of the infinite and the absolute. In the eighteenth century the citadel of human knowledge, and the ultimate foundations of human action, were assailed by Hume, on the principles taught by Locke and adorned by Berkeley. In the nineteenth century the assault is conducted by Schelling, Hegel, and the Continental transcendentalists, on principles suggested by Kant and Fichte. The Notes and Dissertations of Sir W. Hamilton are a refinement of our older national philosophy, and an expansion of its basis, fitted to adapt its doctrines to the rational defence of the knowledge that is gained by man, in his progress of inductive research along that via media between Pyr-


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 and Transcendentalism—extremes that virtually meet—which alone is open to him during his sojourn on this “isthmus of a middle state.”

But we must be more definite in our account of this stage in the Cartesian revolution. For this purpose three central ideas of the new Scottish Philosophy of Sir William Hamilton, selected from a host of others, presented in these Notes and Dissertations, which, with their text, embrace problems in the whole circle of the sciences of metaphysics, logic, and morals, may be employed as the basis of the remaining part of this Essay.

I. The theory of Common Sense, regarded as at once supporting and limiting human knowledge, which is developed in the first and most extended of the dissertations, and suggested in various of the footnotes throughout the work.

II. The theory of immediate or conscious external Perception, expounded in the four dissertations on “presentative and representative knowledge;” on “the various theories of external perception;” on “the distinction of the primary and secondary qualities of matter;” and on “perception proper and sensation proper.” It is also referred to in the footnotes, especially those on the “Inquiry,” and the second of the “Essays” on the intellectual powers.

III. The germs or scintillations of a theory of Freewill, or responsible agency, which are contained in the footnotes on Reid’s essay on “the Liberty of moral agents.”


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 and explanation of human knowledge in general, and the influence of such treatment of it upon the establishment and extension of particular departments of science, and especially of that science which regards man in his most sacred relation.

The philosophical tendency may be popularly described as the question-putting tendency. Of every ascertained or alleged fact philosophy seeks the explanation. Science is a species of knowledge. The scientific kind of knowledge includes the possession of a precise and comprehensive acquaintance with its particular objects, and their relations. Thus we are said to know the solar system scientifically, because we can allege the law of gravitation in explanation of the various mechanical phenomena which are thereby connected. Other portions of our physical knowledge approach more or less nearly to the dignity of scientific, in proportion as their parts are joined in the tie of defined relations which, as the first principles of the science, at once unite and explain them.

But such explanations as those that are supplied even by the most advanced of our physical sciences are evidently incomplete, and the knowledge which they convey can hardly be styled philosophical. The last answers they afford to us only suggest more questions. Gravitation itself, for instance, or polarity, or electricity, need still to be accounted for, in order to satisfy philosophy, and explanations of them, if obtained, are only steps on the road of an infinite regress of analogous questions. But as an infinite number of receding explanations


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 is in itself an absurdity, and at variance with the limitation of the human understanding, there must be some point into which the answers shall finally converge. That ultimate point must be admitted to be the original structure of the mind of man.

What we have illustrated of physical induction holds good also of the results of deduction. Every explanation must rest on the inexplicable, and every demonstration must rest on the indemonstrable, while the last alleged inexplicable and indemonstrable belief is an instinct of human nature.

If all the sciences must thus converge in first principles, of which the only possible explanation is a statement of our own original mental structure, that structure itself may, it is evident, be made an object of the question-putting tendency. Though we cannot transcend our original notions and beliefs, we may at least collect or cricitise them. Those ultimate faiths, which cannot themselves be theorized, may be made the objects of metaphysical contemplation, as the mysterious foundation of human knowledge, and thus, as Mr. Hume profoundly remarks, “the most perfect philosophy of the natural kind only staves off our ignorance a little longer, as perhaps the most perfect philosophy of the moral or metaphysical kind serves only to discover larger portions of it.”

Questions regarding the nature and number of the ultimate answers that can be given to the principle in man which suggests questions, are not likely to be put in the infancy of the human understanding, although


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, seems to have been, in some form or other, a very common one previous to the publication of Reid’s philosophical treatises; although Des Cartes, Arnauld, and most of the Cartesians, Leibnitz, and probably Locke, understood by mental ideas, only modes of the mind itself in their representative capacity. The ideas assailed by Reid were, however, entities distinct from the act of perception, and they were employed to account for our knowledge of the material world, and for the phenomena of memory, imagination, and reasoning. These intellectual phenomena were supposed to have become more intelligible when—on the basis of self-knowledge, and without any critical account of what other notions and beliefs are implied in the ability to observe, experiment, remember, and compare—the existence of such representative images was assumed by the philosopher, in working his theory of knowledge from within the region of the mind outwards, to independent and permanent realities.

The inadequacy of this supposed intellectual machinery to afford an ultimate explanation of knowledge is manifest, especially in two respects. 1. In its opposition to the belief that has been inserted in the structure of our mental constitution, that we have a direct knowledge of the qualities of matter—this hypothesis regarding the understanding as in immediate connexion only with what is representative of these qualities. 2. It is implied that the philosophers who maintain this doctrine, thereby overlook the need, or at least superficially perform the process of a comprehensive inductive exa-


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 of the first principles of knowledge and belief, apart from which no real progress can be made towards the philosophy of knowledge.

The issue of philosophical scepticism is the analysis of knowledge into a succession of isolated phenomena, or into a series of notions of which no one can be predicated of another. The method employed by the pyrrhonist is to show that a radical contradiction is implied in every attempt to collect phenomena into science, or even into fragments of science, thus paralyzing the grasp of those beliefs and notions which create and cement our knowledge. But although David Hume worked this sceptical method with success against a metaphysical hypothesis which resolves all knowledge into experience alone, and accounts for its entrance, and its various kinds, by means of representations, the practical part of our nature always declares, by continuing in a state of activity, that human knowledge is in itself susceptible of a consistent defence, and at all events of a relative explanation, for a sane man hardly ever acts the sceptic, at least in the affairs of this life. It is for the philosopher to reconcile the speculative and the practical part of human nature, either by giving evidence that all our beliefs and notions are explicable, or else by exhibiting those of them that are mysterious in contrast to those of them which can be explained.

To do something towards the accomplishment of this task was the aim of Dr. Reid. With a view to this, the prevalent doctrine of representative perception must be overthrown, because it is inconsistent with experience,


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 and with the fundamental notions and beliefs which belong to the original structure of the human mind, as an agent consciously capable of knowing, and coming into direct and practical contact with, objects that are independent of itself. An inductive enumeration must, besides, be made of those first principles which the older philosophy had overlooked and in consequence traversed. And Reid has set himself to effect each of these tasks. He has exploded the favourite hypothesis of representative images or entities, by showing that it is destitute of the evidence of internal experience, irrational, contradictory to the immediate dictates of our faculties, and, therefore, by vitiating the testimony of our original mental structure in one department of its utterances, and thus precluding any decisive appeal to its testimony as the ultimate criterion of truth in any other, fairly resolvable into universal scepticism. He has also, both in the “Inquiry” and the “Essays,” in the course of an analytic examination of the phenomena of the external senses, memory, imagination, and reasoning, collected many other specimens of judgments of which we cannot rid ourselves, while, at the same time, we cannot explain their presence in the mind by means of any derived origin. To a faith in these utterances of our nature he had cleared a road by removing the hypothesis of representative perception, and thus enabling philosophy to return, in that particular, to an acknowledgment of the credit of the common sense. In a word, Reid removed the excrescence of representations, which, in spite of common sense, the philosopher had introduced into the


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 theory of perception, and demanded the homage of the speculative world to the other judgments of the violated principle, which he had noted and treasured up in the course of an experimental investigation of his own mind.

But the powerful tendency of the habit of self-observation to lose the way that conducts out of self-consciousness, has, notwithstanding Reid’s protest, retained its sway, and led its victims through paths of illusive idealism more retired and seductive than any of those against which he had warned them. The hypothesis of images numerically distinct from the percipient mind, which constitute the entire material world of Berkeley, has indeed been almost banished from philosophical literature by Reid, but only to leave all the room for a more refined hypothesis of representation, which is still very generally received by Continental and British metaphysicians. The exposition and criticism of this subtle species of the doctrine of representative knowledge is one of the principal novelties of the philosophical works of Sir William Hamilton, and his disquisition deserves study, were it only as the most elaborate specimen of purely speculative ingenuity that modern British philosophy has yet produced. We can afford only a few sentences to this subject, and must refer the reader to these Dissertations.

A quality or phenomenon of mind, e.g., a sensation, judgment, or desire, is evidently an object of knowledge to the mind itself not less than a quality or phenomenon of matter is. On the doctrine of the representationalist philosophers to whom we have referred, the observing


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 mind is in fact in closer connexion with its own observed qualities than with the observed qualities of matter, and, in the opinion of many of them, we know the latter through the medium of the sensations which they occasion in the former. According to Dr. Thomas Brown, for instance, we know immediately, i.e., are conscious of, all our mental states, whereas any external object is known only by means of certain modes of mind (external states or sensations) which its presence has somehow occasioned. In this view of perception, the intercourse of the mind with the external world is through the intermediate sensations which alone are perceived by it; but in self-consciousness it is in direct intercourse with its objects. As in the less refined hypothesis of representation, the sphere of immediate knowledge is still confined within the mind itself, only instead of a succession of representative entities, distinct at once from the percipient mind and from the material object, the understanding is presented with a succession of its own states. Each of these evanescent modes of mind, is, according to the relation in which it happens to be regarded, either an object or an act of perception. Now, it is argued by Sir William Hamilton that the germ of universal scepticism is latent in this more subtle, as Reid had proved it to be latent in a less refined, hypothesis respecting our knowledge of matter. On neither hypothesis do we get directly beyond the objects of self-consciousness, and, therefore, as each is said to violate that utterance of the original judgments of our nature which declares that we do, on neither can we get beyond the succession of our


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 own thoughts and feelings, while in both even this self-knowledge itself becomes illusory, and must fall with the original faith that has been, in both hypotheses, assumed to be deceitful.

Sir William Hamilton deals by the mental modes of this refined or egoistical idealism as Dr. Reid had dealt by the representative entities, which are not mental modes, of non-egoistical idealism. Discarding the interposition of any state of the mind as the immediate object of perceptive knowledge, or of any reflex act of mind upon its own sensations as a requisite for our first apprehension of the outer world, he maintains that certain of the qualities of matter are the direct objects of a mysterious insight, and thus that the mind is conscious of material as well as of mental qualities. On this theory we become immediately acquainted, at least in certain limited relations, with the material world that is outside and independent of us, and on the foundation of this direct apprehension of a very limited portion of its contents—to wit, its Primary Qualities—we gradually reach, in the light of our former information, by means of abstraction and reasoning aided by habit and association, that growing knowledge of its properties, which in the earlier stages of its progress collects some of the secondary qualities of matter, obtains the notions of distance and form by means of sight alone, educates the general senses to an indefinite acuteness, and rises at last to those varied and recondite properties, characteristic of the different objects, by a precise acquaintance with the nature and laws of which, the physical sciences are con


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 stituted. An inductive history of this whole process is a principal part, as it is still a desideratum, in psychology. Much that is valuable for the explanation of its earlier stages has been contributed in the Dissertation on the “Primary and Secondary Qualities of Body” a dissertation which appears to us to form an important step of progress in this department of mental science.

The opposite to this theory of a consciousness of certain qualities of matter, which is itself styled Natural Realism, is the doctrine of Absolute Idealism, which denies to the material world any external independent existence. Intermediate between the two are the various hypotheses of representative perception or Hypothetical Realism.

It is evident that this alleged immediateness of our knowledge of the qualities of matter is to be contrasted, not merely with that sort of mediate knowledge which is implied in the possession of the results of inductive or deductive reasoning, but also with that other kind of mediate knowledge which, according to some philosophers, (and among others Sir William Hamilton, who has rediscovered and revived the old scholastic distinction of presentative and representative knowledge,) is implied in every act of memory and imagination. It is a more subtle analysis than the familiar one, which divides the propositions that compose what we believe, into those that are the result of reasoning, and those that are known by us intuitively, and it suggests some curious questions regarding the nature and economy of certain of our intellectual functions.


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One characteristic of the view of this economy that is taken in the Dissertations, is the development of a distinction—open to reflex observation and investigation— between that knowledge of the phenomena of matter, now and here present, to which the name Consciousness is exclusively appropriated, and which is asserted not to involve any act of mediate self-consciousness, and that other knowledge—of the past and possible—which is, on the contrary, maintained to imply an act of the mind conscious of its own state as representative of something separate from the state itself. Thus, when I imagine a scene described in the Iliad, or when I remember the events of yesterday, the immediate objects of my knowledge are certain phenomena of my own mind. Let the siege of Troy, or the events of yesterday be enacted before my senses, and the immediate objects of my knowledge are radically qualities of matter. When we know the possible and the past, the very operation of knowing is the only object of which the mind is conscious. But when we know the present states of our own minds, or the present primary qualities of matter, these states and qualities are known in themselves, and not through the medium of a representative mental state. Memory and imagination is thus each of them a species of self-consciousness, in which the intellect has for its immediate objects those phenomena of self, which form, in the one the acts of remembering past objects of perception or self-consciousness, and in the other of apprehending the creations of the poetical faculty.

This theory of the knowledge of what self once was


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 conscious of, in the modes or qualities of self, contrasted with the more direct sort of knowledge of consciousness, suggests a variety of questions, and, among others, an inquiry into the laws according to which those objects of the mind that are at first observed, in a direct experience of the inner and outer world, become, as objects of memory and imagination, converted into mental modes, and pass into the current of our associated thoughts. This field of investigation may, perhaps, be illustrated by the well-known doctrine of Leibnitz, regarding latent states of consciousness, to which Sir William Hamilton often refers in the course of his philosophical writings.

The theory of perception maintained by Sir William Hamilton is not likely, we think, to exhaust discussion in a province which experience has proved to be so fitted to kindle metaphysical genius, and to give scope to speculative ingenuity. The new and revived doctrines of which his philosophy is composed, have uncovered too many unsolved difficulties to permit such a result; and we are inclined to expect an increase rather than an abatement of the intellectual gladiatorship which has hitherto been associated with the theory of our knowledge of matter, as the result of a more diffused acquaintance with the assumptions and arguments of these Dissertations.

It should be remembered, however, that it is as the arena of the struggle with philosophical scepticism, that this region of speculation has attracted combatants,


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 earnest in the defence and development of the theory of human knowledge, as well as in the endeavour to reconcile intelligence with practice, and to maintain for man the possibility of sciences, relative and limited, yet solid and suited to his circumstances. It is when regarded in relation to a specimen in one department, of the manner in which the war against this scepticism is to be maintained in all, that the question respecting a presentative or representative knowledge of the external world is likely to be studied with most seriousness, and that it connects itself most nearly with our natural feelings and desires.

The science of metaphysics—in its polemical aspect, the controversy with the Pyrrhonists—is a region into which those are forced who seek the ultimate answers that can be given to the inquiry, as to how much man is capable of knowing in any of the sciences. “Reasoning,” says Pascal, “confounds the dogmatist, and nature the sceptic.” It is the aim of the metaphysician to compose this difference—a task which the philosophy of Common Sense accomplishes in the only manner in which it can be effected by man. That philosophy seeks for, and renders prominent the inexplicable feelings, judgments, and notions in which reasoning and nature meet; and in doing this, it ascends to the highest elevation that the human mind can reach, so long, at least, as man is constituted as he is. It is here that man gains the most comprehensive survey of the sciences, and were it not that the elevation is likely to dim his vision of the separate objects of which the panorama is composed, it is


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 from thence that each science receives for him its most pervading illumination. There all his knowledge tends towards the organized unity—the sophia of the old Greek—to which our understandings can only make an approach; and, as regards which, man assumes his highest function when it is the object of his love and aspiration, according to the original eloquent meaning of the word philosophy.

It is as much for the sake of this illumination, as for the purposes of defence, that we need to foster those habits which send us in quest of the First Principles of metaphysics. Nature is usually sufficiently strong to defend, for all the uses of life, those portions of knowledge which the powerful original motives of human activity require to be converted into practice, and she can always silence, by means of action, the objections of the few sceptical adventurers who seek to find their way behind the scenes, and ingeniously contrive literally to lose themselves in the attempt. “All sceptical reasoning,” says Sir James Mackintosh, “is merely blowing up the ship, where you and your enemy go into the air together.” But the speculative consistency and completeness of those sections of knowledge, which form the various sciences, is materially diminished, and the sciences themselves must inevitably undergo a process of gradual deterioration, if human thought is not sometimes turned towards those remote outworks, whence so commanding a view may be gained of what is knowable, in contrast with what cannot be known. If the comprehensiveness of the knowledge that is possessed by the students of the


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 subordinate sciences is increased, as wider laws are, in their several provinces, gradually revealed to observation and experiment,—if the discovery of gravitation, for instance, is perceived to be valuable because it has illustrated the whole region of mechanics—this analogy may help to explain the effect, upon what we may call the style in which we hold every kind of knowledge, of a habit of intimacy with those highest laws, which, as ultimate propositions, mark the frontier that may not be passed by the human intellect. The progress of physical discovery upon this planet has become more enlightened since men have learned its figure, and the limits within which their exploration has been confined by the Creator. The fears of the followers of Columbus are now unknown, nor is El Dorado any longer searched for. In like manner, the more nearly the metaphysician is able to find the precise sphere within which our researches must be confined, the more successfully may we expect knowledge to be converted into science, and the more submissive should be our reverence, when we turn to those mysteries which are created for us by the limitations of human thought, which are disclosed to metaphysical investigation. The elements of philosophical faith—or, in the language of Reid, the principles of common sense—which are acted on by all, but to which the metaphysician alone directs an intelligent attention, as the special objects of his own science, are the materials of the foundation on which must rest that Classification of the Sciences, towards which “Advance-


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 There are two statements connected with this doctrine which should be carefully noted and reflected on by the metaphysical student. Of these the one is a question of terminology, and relates to the precise object, or collection of objects, that is signified by the technical term “common sense,” when it is used as the term expressive of the proper province of his science. The other is a question of scientific method, and enforces the necessity of the labour of analysis and criticism for the discovery and arrangement of the genuine principles of common sense, purified from the prejudices and conventionalisms with which they are apt to be confounded, and by which they are almost always marred.

Common sense, as a term of science in metaphysics, expresses those notions and beliefs which are essential to man regarded as an intellectual and moral being. The existence of such original convictions is assumed when man is declared to be capable of collecting knowledge from experience; but they are not themselves built up of the materials of experience. Reflective induction may observe and systematize them, but it is not as the results of induction that they have gained an entrance into the mind. The phrase Common Sense, when used in the higher philosophy, is to be entirely dissociated from its more vague and popular meanings, in which it expresses natural prudence, or acquired skill in the management of common affairs and in the intercourse of society. These unscientific significations, while they are expres-


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 of mental qualities which, on their own account, very much deserve the attention of psychologists, are likely to be productive of confusion when the term is used metaphysically, inasmuch as many popular principles of common sense are far indeed from having any proper claim to the dignity of ultimate notions and beliefs. Instead of the collected original judgments of the human mind, appeals to common sense are often directed to the prejudices of individuals, which must be analyzed not into the inspirations of the Author of our mental structure, but into the perverseness of him on whom that structure has been bestowed.

The detection of the genuine principles of common sense is therefore the result of an intellectual effort which requires qualities peculiar to the philosopher, and the argument from common sense is no irrational appeal to vulgar feeling. The reflex criticism which distinguishes the primary from the other qualities of matter, and which appropriates the former exclusively to the external world, is an illustration, from the phenomena of perception, of the difference between an intelligent and an unscientific appeal to the ultimate criterion of truth. Analogous illustrations might be quoted, from other provinces of knowledge, of the manner in which prejudice is sifted, by the application of this test, and these also may be made to prove that the purport of the Scottish philosophy is by no means to encourage the mob to carry away the ark of metaphysics.