BOOKS.

THE LITE PROFESSOR DE MORGAN.* This book contains not only a remarkable picture of a remark- able life, but is full of a lively interest which would not be generally expected in the memoir of a great mathematician and

* Memoirs of Augustus Do Morgan. By hie Wife, Sophie Elizabeth De Moroo, With Selections from his Lettere, London: Longmans.

a great logician. Mrs. Dp Morgan's picture of her husband's hearty laugh, and of his being constantly heard "whistling and singing merry snatches of song" in the years before he had lost any of his children, is fully reflected in the tone of his earlier letters, which, in spite of their scientific cast, are genuinely merry and light-hearted, and often very humorous. Only in his later days they became now and then so touched with eccentricity,—as, for example, in the case of the letter resigning his Chair in Univer- sity College, Loudon,—as perhaps to dimnish in some degree the weight of a most needful as well as most valuable expression of the convictions of a singularly strong and noble character. No reader of any intelligence will find, this volume dull. There are so many topics of general interest raised in it, ranging from the

conditions of eternal salvation and damnation to clairvoyance, and every subject treated is treated after so characteristic a fashion, and with a precision of touch at once so thoughtful and so quaintly conscious of disappointing illegitimate expecta- tions, that many of these letters of Professor De Morgan's de- serve to live as first-rate specimens of effective correspondence. It would be difficult to find letters which take in more distinctly the presumed attitude of mind of the correspondent, and address themselves more explicitly to that attitude of mind, endeavour- ing to fix the receiver's attention on a specific and manage- able field of thought, and not to let it wander beyond that field; while, within that field, the endeavour is made to pro- duce an indelible impression of the writer's convictions, and the reasons for them. Thus, after the death of one of his sisters, Mr. De Morgan's mother, who was a very strong Evangelical, as the phrase goes, wrote to him to try and persuade him of the infinite danger of his soul, if he did not forthwith change his attitude towards the Gospel of Christ (au attitude which may be defined as that of an orthodox or supernaturalist Unitarian). Mr. De Morgan's reply was characteristic. He wrote with the strongest affection, but used all his powers to convince his mother that she and he had no sufficient common ground of argument to make a controversy on the subject anything but profitless :— "But between us there is in this matter no common ground on which to argue. Nothing is more easy than to be positive and cer- tain or to affirm the perdition of all who cannot see any particular system of doctrines to be true : bat before you declare that you must be right and I must be wrong, consider the following points, and ask yourself what part of the whole New Testament has more right to a literal interpretation than this : In the measure which you measure with, you shall be measured.' I take the moat literal translation, and not what your misleaders are pleased to call their 'authorised version.' 1. You have a number of books bound up into one, which you call the New Testament. You never meddled with the question whether all these books are genuine, and were really written by the persons whose names they bear. Still less with the question whether, being written by different persons, at different times, to different persons, &o., they can be used in interpreting each other in the same manner as the different parts of a book written by the same person. I have been obliged to consider this. 2. These books are written in a foreign language, and more than that, in a dead language, of which every one knows that it is utterly impossible to render any phrase exactly into corresponding English. This question no way concerns you. You dwell upon a single English word in the translation just as much as if it were the original itself. To me' your version is useless, as I know that those who made it were utterly incompetent to take that view of the original language which the subject requires. 3. These books have come down to us in manuscripts which differ from each other repeatedly, and in one or two instances, if not in more, there is proof, which theologians of all parties unite in admit- ting, that additions have been made to the writers' text. You care nothing for this ; I doubt if you knew the fact. I have been obliged to know it. 4. Your expressions amount to the following :—If you do not take it for granted that King James's translators chose the right Greek, and turned it into the right English, and more than that, drew all their inferences correctly, God Almighty will punish you to all eternity. 5. Out of all that precedes you have got a complicated creed, on implicit belief in which you insist. I recommend you to follow the plan adopted by Locke, when he wanted to ascertain what the Christian religion was. He looked carefully through the Acts of the Apostles, and collected every single instance in which a Christian was made by the Apostles; for, he argued—and in so doing he upset every Church which has existed since A.D. 300—if I can become as much of a Christian as the first converts of the Apostles, I shall certainly obtain the essentials of Christianity. Do this yourself. Construct a creed out of all which the Apostles required, without adding a single word, and compare it with your own. For what else was so precise an account given of so many admissions into the Church ? And this not with a view to changing your own opinions, for if your creed gives you comfort, I would not change a letter of it ; but with a view to the following question : Do you believe that the God of truth has so misled the world as to give it a religion the essential parts of which cannot be gathered from the manner-in which those who first taught it admitted proselytes ? Certainly a newly baptised Christian, if sincere, did not perish everlastingly if he died the moment after his baptism. But your Church positively declares he did, unless he believed what they call the Catholic faith.' Now, ask of yourself in sincerity, where is it set down in such a manner that a wayfaring man, though a fool, could not err, that the Apostles taught this creed, or anything like it ? All this has no reference to the question whether the creed could be got out of the whole New Testament together, if permitted. Before God, I declare that I have examined closely the history of the early Church, together with abundance of controversy on both sides, not forgetting the books of the Now Testament on which they are written, and can find nothing like the creed of the Churches of Rome or England. The former does not pretend to find what you call the essential doctrines of Christianity in the New Testament, but appeals to tradition. It is easy to rail at them, but to the best of my know-. ledge and belief, derived from historical reading and actual observa- tion' the Church of Rome contains as much honesty as that of Eng- land, and a vast deal more knowledge. It would not take one-quarter as much evidence to make me a Catholic as to make me a Church of England man" (pp. 139-142).

This is the kind of letter which Mr. De Morgan wrote when he felt that the utmost earnestness and directness were

required by the depth of his correspondent's feelings. When the subject was one of less intense significance, he wrote. with equal trenchancy, but in a more playful style. For example, take this very happy illustration (contained in a letter to Dr. Whewell) of the a priori necessity or contingency of

certain ideas, as illustrated by Professor De Morgan's cross- examination of his little daughter :—

" I tried an experiment yesterday with my daughter of 81 years old as to the ideas of necessity, and there was a dialogue as follows : —Q. If you let a stone go, what will happen ? A. It will fall, to be sure.—Q. Always ? A. Always.—Q. How do you know ? A. sure of it.—Q. How are you sure of it ? Would it be true at the North Pole, where nobody has been ? A. Oh yes, people have been to the North Pole, else how could they know about the people who live there, and their kissing with their noses ?—Q. That's only near the North Pole. Nobody has ever been at the Pole. A. Well, but there's the same ground there and the same air. Hotter or colder can't make the air heavier so as to make it keep up the stones. Besides, I've read in the Eveninge at Home that there is something in the ground which draws the stones. I am quite sure they would fall. Now, is there anything else you want to be a little more con- vineed of ?—Q. How many do 7 and 3 make ? A. Why, 10, to be stire.—Q. At the North Pole as well as here F A. Yes, of course.—Q. Which are you most sure of, that the pebbles fall to the ground at the North Pole, or that 7 and 3 make 101' A. I am quite sure of both.—Q. Can you imagitte a pebble falling upwards ? A. No, it's impossible. Perhaps the birds might take them up in their beaks, but even then they wouldn't go up of themselves. They would be hold up.—Q. Well, but can't you think of their falling up ? A. Oh yes, I can fancy three thousand of them going up, if you like, and talking t each other too, but it's an impossible thing, I know.—Q. Can you imagine 7 and 3 making 12 at the Pole ? A. (Decided hesitation.) No, I don't think I can. No, it can't be ; there aren't enough.—Here her mother came into the room. As long as the questions were challenges from me it was all defiance and certainty, bathe moment Mrs. De M. appeared, she ran up to her and said, What do you think papa has been saying ? He says the stones at the North Pole don't fall to the ground. Now, isn't it very likely they fall just as they do here and everywhere ?' But she did not mention the 7 and B = 12 question, nor appeal to her mother about it.—I remain, dear Sir, yours very truly, A. DE MORGAN " (pp. 197-198).

We are not told what Professor De Morgan's inference was but we doubt, judging from the concluding remark, whether he drew the inference which we should have drawn,—that tha child only appealed to her mother on the subject on which she felt a little bewildered herself, while leaving alone the question. on which she saw that by reflection she could satisfy herself (even if she had not already satisfied herself, by that final criticism that there were not " enough" in seven and three to make twelve), We suspect that Mr. De Morgan meant to hint to Dr. Whewell that the child found less difficulty in conceiving that seven and three made twelve at the North Pole, than she found in con- ceiving that pebbles might fly upwards, instead of downwards.

If so, the ingenious experiment on his daughter which he re- counts to Dr. Whewell seems to us to have suggested to him a very questionable inference. The use of the words "very likely" in relation to the movement of pebbles at the Pole sufficiently showed that the child was thinking of what was likely or unlikely, while in regard to seven and three making twelve, she saw that if there were not enough, in seven and three to make twelve here, the change of place would not help the matter at all. The eagerness with which she tried to get a further opinion in relation to the one question, and the comparative indifference with which she treated the other (probably because she felt that she had the materials for solving it within her own mind), seem to us to suggest that the one was recognised as a question for experience and authority, the other, as one for simple reflection. In another letter to Dr. Whewell, Mr. De Morgan suggests this humorous and, at the same time, really profound definition of meta-

"Lisbon to my last brand-new definition of metaphysics The science to which ignorance goes to learn its knowledge, and knowledge to learn its ignorance. On which all men agree that it is the key, but no two upon how it is to be put into the look.'"

As a specimen of the shrewd humour of Professor De Morgan's more ordinary letters, take this very sensible and yet very amusing note to Sir Rowland Hill, in 1818, against the

prohibition placed by the Post Office on including written matter in book-post parcels :— Camden Street, Oarnderb Town, May 5th, 1818. " MY DEAR SIR,—I am much obliged to you for the notice. I believe you when you say there are difficulties, because you get over them. Still, to my untutored mind, it is wonderful the Post Office should imagine that anybody would write in a book at sixpence a pound to save postage. I hope that the end of it will be that anybody may write anything, and I have reason as follows :— There is an old book I want ; for example, the first edition of Win. gate's Arithmetic, 1630. If one of my country friends finds it, what will be in the inside of an old arithmetic P A hundred to one, some- thing like— 'Ann Prioe, her hooka,

God give her grace therein to looke,'

scrawled over the inside of the cover and the fly-leaf,—that is, over more than one page. Now it does not consist with the fitness of things that Ann Price's aspirations after arithmetic in the seven- teenth century should prevent a professor of mathematics in the nineteenth from ascertaining the exact share of Wingate in the invention of deoimal fractions. You stop the circulation of old books. However, as I said, if you say it can't be, I will believe you, provided the impossibility may be interpreted as temporary. But for the love of order, and the Constitution, and the other things that were dusted on the 10th ult., don't compel all the old-book people to stand up for equal rights and against class privileges. You'll make Chartists a Sir H. Ellis, and Hallam, &o., &o., to say nothing of,—

Yours truly, A. De MORGAN."

But the substantial interest of this biography is, of course, as it should be, the simple, manly, and noble character of the man whom it depicts, his profound respect for the rights of others

(including the lower animals, against whose vivisection he entered the warmest protest), and his strict sense of his own duties. His character was unique. Strangely enough, there was something essentially solitary about Mr. De Morgan's mind, in spite of the warmth of his friend- ships and the tenderness of his affections. His very deep sense of the paradox in life and his enjoyment of that paradox,— his johnsonian manner of laboriously wheeling his mind about so as just to catch a keen glimpse of his interlocutor's thought, though hardly sufficient to make it seem anything but strange to him,—his evident satisfaction in not confessing to the world (till he did so in his will) what his real faith was,—his unwonder- jug acceptance of the wonderful,—and his evident indifference as to whether he could or could not make himself intelligible to the world at large where he differed from it,—all produce on the mind the sense of one of the most solitary intellects that was over joined to a very profound regard for social morality and a very warm heart. There is nothing nobler in its way than Mr. De Morgan's double protest against the in- fraction of its principles by University College, London, —first, in its acceptance of a trust which imposed a sort of religious test on some of its officers ; and secondly, in the rejection of a very eminent man's claims for a particular Professorship—claims recommended by the usual advising body of the College—not because he was regarded as either unlikely to adorn it, or likely to misuse it for the purposes of religious advocacy, but because lie was the minister (as three of the College's original Professors also were) of a particular reli-

gious sect. On this last question Mr. De Morgan broke finally with the College, and entered a most powerful, if somewhat eccen- tric, protest against its proceedings, and his wife evidently believes

that the deep disappointment which he felt hastened his end. Very probably it did. There was so much fire in his heart which never kindled into words, that when it 'took the form of chagrin at what he held to be a dereliction of principle by colleagues with whom he had long taken pride in acting, it eat deep into the peace of a mind which had always been in the habit of "consuming its own

smoke." Not that, as a rule, there was much smoke in Professor Do Morgan's life to oonsume,—there was very little ; but all

the more, when there was any, it had a powerfully depressing effect on his inward life. The failure, as he justly held it, at a moment of critical trial, of the experiment of ignoring religious differences in the institution with which be had been so long connected, gave a sense of disappointment to his own retrospect of his own personal career, which weighed down the natural elasticity of his temperament, and weighed it down all the more as he spoke so little to others of his own griefs.

In onclusion, let us quote Mr. De Morgan's very interesting letter to his friend Mr. Heald, on the subject of clairvoyance. It is, in our estimation, the best-estatlished case of the kind in existence, and might form a sort of standard of credibility for the Society which has just been established to conduct psychical

research :—

" DEAR HEAL!),— Talking of curious powers, tell me

what you think of the following story. It quite beats me. I have seen a good deal of mesmerism, and have tried it myself on — for the removal of ailments which required much medicine, but which mesmerism met without medicine from the time it was employed. Of the curative powers of this agent I have no more doubt than one has of things which he has constantly seen for years. But this is not the point. I had frequently heard of the thing they call clair- voyance, and had been assured of the occurrence of it in my own house, but always considered it as a thing of which I had no evidence direct or personal, and which I could not admit till such evidence came. One evening I dined at a house about a mile from my own—a house in which my wife had never been at that tints. I left it at half-past ten, and was in my own house at a quarter to eleven. At my entrance, my wife said to me, We have been after you,' and told me that a little girl whom she mesmerised for epi- leptic fits (and who left her cured), and of whose clairvoyance she had told ins other instances, had been desired in the mesmeric state to follow me to — Street, to —'s house. The thing took place a few minutes after ten. On hearing the name of the street, the girl's mother said She will never find her way there ; she has never been so far away from Camden Town.' The girl in a moment

got there. Knock at the door,' said my wife. I cannot,' said the girl ; we must go in at the gate.' (The house, a most unusual thing in London, stands in a garden ; this my wife knew nothing of.) Having made the girl go in and knock at the door, or simulate it, or whatever the people do, the girl said she heard voices upstairs, and being told to go up, exclaimed, 'What a comical house ! there are three doors,' describing them thus. (This was true, and is not usual in any but large houses.) On being told to go into the room from whence voices came, she said, 'Now I see Mr. De Morgan, but he has a nice coat on, and not the long coat he wears here ; and he is talking to an old gentleman, and there is another old gentleman, and there are ladies.' This was a tine description of the party, except that the other gentleman was not And now,' she said, there is a lady come to them, and is beginning to talk to Mr. De Morgan and the old gentleman, and Mr. De Morgan is pointing at you and the old gentleman is looking at me.' About the time indicated, I happened to be talking with my host on the subject of mesmerism, and having mentioned what my wife was doing, or said she was doing, with the little girl, he said, Oh, my wife must hear this!' and called her, and she came up and joined as in the manner described. The girl then proceeded to describe the room ; stated that there were two pianos in it. There was one, and an ornamental sideboard not much unlike a pianoforte to the daughter of a poor charwoman. That there were two kinds of curtains, white and red, and curiously looped up (all true to the- letter), and that there were wino and water and biscuits on the table. Now my wife, knowing that we had dined at half-past six, and thinking it impossible that anything but coffee could be on the table, said, 'You must mean ooffee.' The girl persisted, Wine, water, and. biscuits.' My wife, still persuaded that it must be coffee, tried in every way to load her witness, and make her say coffee. But still the girl persisted, wine, water, and biscuits,' which was literally true, it not being what people talk of under the name of a glass of wino and a biscuit, which meats sandwiches, cake, &c., but strictly wine, water, and biscuits. Now, all this taking place at twenty minutes after ten, was told to me at a quarter to eleven. When I heard that I was to have such an account given, I only said, Tell me all of it, and I will not say one word ;' and I assure you that during the narration I took the most especial care not to utter one syllable. For instance, when the wine and water and biscuits Caine up, my wife, perfectly satisfied that it must have been coffee, told me how the girl persisted, and enlarged on it as a failure, giving parallel instances of cases in which the clairvoyants had been right in all things but one. All this I heard without any interruption. Now that the things happened to me as I have described at twenty minutes after ten, and were described to me as above at a quarter to eleven, I could take oath. The curtains I ascertained next day, for I had not noticed them. When my wife came to see the room, she instantly recognised a door, which she had forgotten in her nar- ration. All this is no secret. You may tell whom you like, and give my name. What do you make of it P Will the eever-failing doc- trine of coincidence explain it P I find that there are people who think that the house in the garden, the number of doors on the land- ing, the two gentlemen beside myself, and ladies, the red and white curtains, the singularity of the loops, the two so.called pianos, the lady joining myself and one old gentleman apart from the rest, the wine, water, and biscuits, the truth of the whole and the absence of anything false, are all things that may reasonably enough arise by coincidence, when the daughter of a poor charwoman (twelve years old) undertakes to tell a lady all about whore her husband is dining, in a horiee whore neither has ever been. I havo_s, seen other things since, and heard many more ; but this is my chief personal know. ledge of the subjeot.—Yours very sincerely, n

The witness is here unimpeachable, and the facts beyond the power of " coincidence " to explain. If these things can be, there is no question of the wisdom of trying to investigate the conditions under which they happen. _And one reason why we reverence the late Professor De Morgan so heartily as we do, is that there was nothing conventional in his scientific spirit, no desire to evade, as a priori impossible, any new category of well-established facts, however irreducible to old formula) and familiar laws.