strain of the soul to grasp and assimilate the perfect, and by the sense of failure, because the perfect is unattainable. The cravings of the soul of man before music and painting were discovered must have resembled the stutterings for impossible utterance in the dumb. And when these cravings found expression, man felt that the expression he gave them was inadequate to sate his sense of perfection. Music, painting, architecture, were and are so many moulds into which he pours the boiling stream of spiritual passion, but to the man of genius the moulds are too strait, and the flood overflows.

The Ideal is to the heart what certainty is to the reason. Truth is the assembly of laws. Reason seeks law after law in succession. The ideal is the assembly of perfections, æsthetic and moral; the sentiment proceeds in quest of it, in a manner resembling the process of reason, it compares analogous and opposed ideas, eliminates some, identifies others, and arrives after an analysis, more or less subtle, at a generalization; that is, through variety it seeks unity.

In the pursuit of the Ideal, happiness is the notice to the sentiment that it is following the right track, that it is accomplishing its destiny. All the forces in the human. soul, all the investigations of the mind, the artistic creations of the fancy, all refinements in the pursuit of pleasure even, are the gravitation of man's higher being towards the Ideal. In art and literature, the ideal is a subtilized reality truer than reality itself. The history of the human race is a perpetual legend of creations of the imagination to satisfy this want. It is a singular fact that men generally, and every man in particular, constantly endeavour to desert real life for one which is altogether artificial, artistic, and, in a word, ideal. The ideal is an image of perfection created by the soul itself, which it places before it as a type

to be realized; looking at times back indeed, as though that Ideal were something lost, but, generally forward, as though it were something to be won, so that the ideal is to man's spirit as an Eden, at once an aspiration and a regret.

Reason is a faculty for extracting truth out of materials provided by the sentiment. There are certain fundamental axioms, indemonstrable, which it is obliged to accept or to fall into paralysis. In mathematics it works uncomplainingly from axioms, which serve as the base of all certainty. We know that the whole is greater than its part, that a right line is the shortest way between two points, but we cannot prove these truths. We accept them. Philosophy, in attempting to surpass the rigour of the mathematical sciences, has sought to resolve the problem of certainty; and has, instead, only succeeded in obscuring it. There are axioms self-evident, which are the cyphers with which reason must work; if it refuse the cyphers, it is reduced to practical inaction. We believe in the real existence of that thinking and perceiving unit, the Ego. We believe in the real, substantial existence of the objects presented to us by our senses. But these beliefs are irrational, that is, we cannot say of any one of them, How or why it is. They remain insoluble to logic, dogmas imposed by the sentiment, and accepted at once.

Descartes laid down his axiom Cogito, ergo sum; Hume was right in saying that it was a pure hypothesis; Quod sentio, est, the basis of sensational philosophy, is also an assumption, but it is a truth of which we are assured by the sentiment.

When philosophy refuses to accept these fundamental axioms, in themselves indemonstrable, but which serve as the base of all demonstration, and whose evidence convinces man in spite of himself, it results in proving nothing at all.

Man exists: that cannot be proved, it is evident in itself. The question of certainty implies this first axiom. The exterior world, of which we have conscience, exists; that escapes demonstration, it carries conviction with it. The fact by means of which we know our own existence assures us of the existence of the world outside: it is the double face of one invincible fundamental evidence. The existence of objects other than ourselves is a second axiom. In us exists thought, with its laws, or the assembly of relations which unite the ideas of our reason: that also cannot be discussed, it can only be felt as certain. The question of certainty implies this third axiom, for every question supposes thought, which is its conception, and reason to which it is submitted. Such are the three axioms from which all intellectual activity starts: they are axioms whose evidence surpasses that of the mathematical axioms which no one disputes.

Thus reason must act upon faith as its foundation; but as reason is by its nature sceptical, it is tempted to question first one, and then another of these axioms, and thus have arisen the philosophic schools which have wrangled for ages over what no one, not even a sceptic, can practically deny.

Every one acts upon the assumption that certainty is derived from faith and reason. Every one believes invincibly in the testimony of sentiment and reason, and cannot reject this testimony without annihilating his being. When they attest to us physical or metaphysical facts, we hold them to be constant. We conclude from the appearance to the reality by an inductive process of which we are not ourselves masters.

By this means we affirm the primitive facts of our existtence, of the world, of our faculties, the legitimacy of the principle of our knowledge, the reality of the first notions

we acquire. Human science, made up of demonstrations, can go no further back. It must rest on faith; it must accept the Cartesian and Sensationalist and Idealist hypotheses, and work up from them. Reason and faith, as two principles of certainty, have sufficed man, and have sufficed him so well, that no sceptic has yet appeared who has not in common life, at every instant, practically contradicted his assumed disbelief. Pyrrho himself, in the abstraction of reason, denied all certainty, but when he entered into real life; "It is impossible," said he, "to shake off human nature."

That reason and faith have a tendency to encroach on one another's domains, and to stand in antagonism, is matter of universal experience. Everything believed in is irrational and every demonstration destroys belief. When I believe something to be true, as that two triangles whose sides are equal have also equal angles, I accept the testimony of my eyes, or of some one else; but when I have worked out the problem, I no longer believe this, I know it. As faith thus disappears before knowledge in many cases, we rashly conclude that knowledge can destroy all faith. But, as has been already shewn, without faith, reason would be totally unable to act. Sentiment and reason have their respective lines, distinct always, divergent often, sometimes convergent, but never disappearing into one another. Under the most favourable circumstances, reason is the asymptote of sentiment, approaching it indefinitely, but never meeting it. Each has its special function, both are a first necessity. In that field which is peculiar to reason alone, or that specially appertaining to sentiment, there can be no antinomy. The delight I receive from a beautiful sunset, or from a strain of Mozart, is purely sentimental. Reason in no way participates in the pleasure of which I am conscious, for reason is no criterium of beauty.

In scientific analysis the process is strictly rational. Sentiment is no criterium of truth in mathematical or physical demonstration.

In art sentiment has the field to itself, in science reason is alone master of the situation. But when we come to ethics, politics, and religion, there is no such simplicity. They are mixed questions, in which both reason and sentiment intervene. As they lose simplicity they lose absolute certainty. Rational verities are indisputable. They are the same for all. Three angles of a triangle cannot be equal to two right angles to an Englishman and equal to four to a Caffre; but moral actions vary in their relative morality according to circumstances; and reason alone is no criterium of their morality; nor would a rational judgment be invariably just. Though reason can apply to moral verities an uniform measure up to a certain point, it has never been able to so formulate them as to make them of universal application. It follows, that if the principle of our duties be certain to ourselves, it is not so in the same degree to others. Moral acts are debateable; the judgment has often to decide between two principles really, or apparently conflicting, if it pretends to be just.

In politics the antinomy becomes more evident. Man as an individual has his rights, as a member of society he has his duties. As a rational being he has a right to absolute freedom, as a social being his liberty must be curtailed. Liberty is requisite for individual development, authority is necessary for social improvement. Right, as a personal faculty, is the manifestation of liberty in opposition to hostile wills which prevent its exercise; as a social requirement it is the erection of a wall of duties around the individual, limiting his freedom.

Thence a bitter, incessant feud between liberty and