BOOKS.

MAURICE'S MORAL AND METAPHYSICAL PHILOSOPHY.*

THE second edition of Mr. Maurice's Moral and Metaphysical Philosophy was reviewed at length in the Spectator, when it appeared ; and as the present edition is an exact reprint, excepting a new preface, it would not, under ordinary circum- stances, have claimed another notice now. But, published in the very moment when his hand and voice have ceased to be seen and beard among us, these volumes demand a word of special recogni- tion. They were his latest work ; they represent in one sense almost his earliest ; for what might be called the first rough notes of the first portion were dictated by him in the year 1836 to a friend who had asked him to work out in more detail the prin- ciples of his then recently published pamphlet, Subscription no Bondage. Writing to the same friend in April, 1862, he says :— " I want much to send you my new volume of Moral Philosophy.

It has a sort of old claim upon your kindness It has cost me more labour than anything else I have done." And then ten years later he marks his special value for the book by the touching words in which he dedicates this last edition to one to whom he would give his best,—" To THE FRIEND who has been my fellow- worker in writing these volumes, whose hints and corrections have been of greater worth to me than those of all other critics; whose sympathy has been more to me than that of the largest circle of readers could have been ; who has cheered me with the hope that a few may hereafter be the better for the lessons which we have learnt together respecting the lives of men and the ways of God." We may infer from these, and other such like indications, that this was in his own estimation, as in that of his friends, his most important work in many respects, as well as his latest ; and there- fore it seems fitting that some mention should again be made of it in a journal which has so long asserted its sympathies with him, now that-

" He his worldly task has done, Home is gone, and ta'en his wages."

Of the very numerous writings by which Mr. Maurice was during the last forty years influencing the whole course of modern thought and life, and helping to direct them into the channels they are actually flowing through, all except two—the Kingdom of Christ, and the Moral and Metaphysical Philosophy—are "occasional" in their form ; they are pamphlets, sermons, lectures, letters, addresses, called forth by the questions and controversies of the day, or by the regularly recurring duties of the preacher or the professor. Perhaps, indeed, we should hardly except the two works we have named, for the Kingdom of Christ was originally a aeries of "Letters to a Member of the Society of Friends," called forth by a controversy which at the time threatened to break up that Society, while the Moral and Metaphysical Philosophy was ori- ginally an article in the Encyclopedia Metropolitana ; though both were rewritten so completely that he who compares the two edi- tions of either may often feel regret for what has been left out, mingled with admiration for what has been added, in the maturer work : nor has either work really lost, nor did its author wish it to lose, its first " occasional " character in its final form. To create a complete literary work, rounded to an epic whole, like a Greek poem, or history, or statue is probably the youthful aspiration of every man of genius ; and the present writer remembers a conversation with Mr. Maurice some five-and•thirty years ago, in which the latter expressed his opinion that a man who in that day was more desirous to serve God and his fellow-men than to win a name for himself would give up the thought of producing any such great literary work, and employ himself in writing and teaching on the successive subjects on which the men of the day were thinking, and endeav- ouring to reduce thought to action ; and his words implied that he had felt, but had rejected, the allurements of that last infirmity of noble minds, the desire to win and leave a name for himself. So to decide was to choose, as his whole course proved that he had chosen, a life of action, and not of letters ; a life of self-sacrifice in the service of his fellow-men, and not one of self-culture and refinement ; although his natural disposition, both in what it had given and had not given him, had made it so much easier to have done otherwise. Great as were his powers of intellect and his stores of knowledge, his moral mastery and use of these was greater still; and while he showed that this was so in his sermons,

• Moral and Metaphysical Philosophy. By Frederick Denison Maurice, Professor of Casuistry and Moral Philosophy in the University of Cambridge. New Edition, With Preface. London : Macmillan. 1872.

his lectures, his ecclesiastical controversies, and his organisa- tion of colleges and co-operative societies, be showed it not less in this his most completely and properly literary work, the history of Moral and Metaphysical Philosophy before us; From the first to the last page of it, from the introduction to the

original Encyclopedia article to the preface of the new edition of+ the finished book, the reader is reminded again and again in every possible form that the writer offers him no elaborate and complete system of philosophy, which shall comprehend and so supersede all" others; but only some help towards seeking and finding for himself that truth of things which is above all systems, and not contained within the limits of any. He gives an account of all systems of philosophy, from the earliest to the latest, but never fails to urge not only that they are but broken lights of the one perfect light, but that this light is more than they, and that it is not made up of the whole sum of them. Thus while he recognises with hearty sympathy the great share that Coleridge had in forming the mind of Mr. Maurice's own generation—a work which those who are old enough to have seen and felt while it was going on, can hardly believe it possible to over-rate—he expresses his satisfac- tion that Coleridge never succeeded in creating a system and a school :—

" Coleridge himself was always promising a great work called Logo- Sophia, which might perhaps settle all questions and be a complete organ of philosophy and theology. The habits of mind which he himself, as well as those who admired or attacked him so much, complained of, proved is this instance a blessing to himself and his country. He was not able to produce the great book. What Hegel did in Germany and Cousin did" in France was happily not to be done in England. There would have been a contradiction in it in Coleridge's case which there was not in either of the others. A system of ontology must be contained in a book ; the Word of Wisdom is a living teacher speaking to men. A. book which confused our apprehensions about that difference would be merely mischievous." (Vol. IL, p. 670.)

And in the introduction to the book he had said

It would, however, be a fatal mistake to make even the most rapid and superficial sketch of philosophical investigation merely a record ct the conclusions at which different Schools have arrived. These concloe sions are in general premature efforts to terminate the search for Wisdom, to confine the results of it within a few meagre propositions; To trace the thoughts which were working in the minds of those who. founded Schools, to discover how they were affected by their characters, teachers, disciples, opponents, personal and political conflicts, to watch. the processes of which they were expanded, completed, narrowed, is a far more interesting work, and one which falls far more properly within, the province of the historian of philosophy. Those who busy them- selves with the speculations and contradictions of School, are likely to. begin with extravagant expectations and to end in despondency. Earnests sympathising meditations upon the actual efforts of men to discover the- secret of their life, and the ends for which they live, contain equal" encouragement to humility and to hope." (Vol. I., p. xlv.)

And again, in the dialogue which forms the uew preface :-

" U.: You would have us become eclectics 2— W.: No, my friencls, anything but that. Picking and choising an opinion here, there, and everywhere, is not for the man who is learning to fight and live; it is for those who are compounding a grand system." (Vol. L, xxxiv.) We insist upon these passages, and on all that they mean,, because Mr. Maurice has frequently, and even within the last few

weeks, been called an Eclectic. The eclectic endeavours to form, a scheme, a system, an abstract of truth, by the combination of the selected portions of all other schemes. Sir Isaac Newton, with the humility of true knowledge, said,—" To myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting my- self by now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered. before me ;" and the work which the eclectic sets before him is to.

collect and arrange the whole series of smooth pebbles and pretty shells which men of all times have been so finding, to build' them up into a palace of art, and think no more of the ocean. whence they came : but the whole aim and end of the philosophy of Mr. Maurice is to " have sight of that immortal sea, and hear its-' mighty waters rolling evermore." No positivist, no geologist nor ethnologist, respected and valued facts more than Mr. Maurice did ; in the whole range of human investigation there was nothing alien or uninteresting to him, nothing, even in those departments. of physical science of which be knew least, to which his quick in- tellect did not respond with a prompt alacrity and sympathy. But still all these facts were to him but the shells and the stones which

the ocean of truth was ever rolling upon its shores, and the truth itself was to him something different in kind, and not in degree, from any accumulation or selection of those. Writing to a friend' in August, 1838, he says :- " Coleridge belonged to another generation than ours, one of which the business was to vindicate the preciousness of Truth as distinct from Facts. This function he performed marvellously well. It is very wrong to disparage either him or the matter-of-fact men of the last century. So far as either did its work rightly, they caught occasional glimpses of the principle realised by the other sufficient to hinder them from walking in darkness. But I believe also that we are come upon an age in which Truth without Facts will be as impossible as Facts without Truth ; and that the attempt to set up either exclusively must be conducted in quite a different spirit from that which animated either Coleridge or the good men of the preceding age, however the results may at times correspond."

But while thus giving facts and knowledge of facts all due honour, he maintained—and his Moral and Metaphysical Philosophy is an historical summary of the evidence—that truth, distinct from, and above all facts or knowledge, is itself absolute, infinite ; that no finite intellect can comprehend it and bring it down within its own finite limits, but that it is not therefore foreign to and unknowable by the reason of man, but is the proper object of that reason, and to be apprehended by it, as being itself the Infinite Reason, and therefore in relation to every finite reason, though not to be brought within the limitations of any. In the new preface, after a modest and graceful allusion to his controversy with the late Dean Maned, he thus re-asserts this position, and protests against

the fallacy of those who say that we can know nothing of the Infinite :-

"Whilst I use the word Infinite, as if it were a mere negative of finite, the opinion of Sir W. Hamilton need not be established by proof, it may be assumed as an axiom. There can be no answer to it. For a finite creature to grasp at the Infinite, how monstrous ! The word passes from one to another ; each sees the absurdity from his own point of view. Each is eager to make use of it against his neighbour. It is a famous weapon for the philosopher against the theologian. As they fight, like Hamlet and Laertes, rapiers are changed, and the theologian strikes with it presumptuous speculators who dare to judge of that which is above reason by the reason. But what if the finite is itself the negative ? What if the Infinite expresses the fullness of that whereof the other is the contraction ? When you consider the two words you feel and know that it is so, though all your cleverest arguments have rested upon the contrary hypothesis. Still, that is only a hint towards a solution of the difficulty, far enough from the solution itself. To find that we divines must begin with a confession. We have treated theology as if it meant a discourse or system about God. We have given up the old rendering of the name. We have not understood by it what he whom Christen- dom called The Theologian understood by it ; God speaking to man by a Word : In whom is the light of men,' and ' who took flesh and dwelt among Men.' That first kind of theology must rise from the finite to the Infinite, and can only escape from the contradiction which that sealing the heavens on giant hills involves, by investing some power, which is not God, with the right to decree what men shall think about Him. The other theology involves no such necessity. It supposes the Infinite to be goodness and wisdom—to be at the ground of all finite good- ness and wisdom—and to be guiding men by various processes, in various regions and ages, into the apprehension of that which, by their constitu- tion they were created to apprehend. The history of Moral and Metaphysical History is, as I think, the History of this Education." (Vol. I., p. xxxviii.) This education of the human race in all times and places implies a teacher as well as learners, and therefore while Mr. Maurice on the one hand defines philosophy as the love of wisdom, and— since wisdom is a hidden treasure—as thence coming to mean a search after wisdom, on the other hand, he recognises and asserts the propriety of the assumption throughout the Hebrew Scriptures that the possibility as well as the duty of this search for wisdom; on which they so habitually insist, presumes the existence of a revelation from above, by which the desire for wisdom is both awakened and satisfied. In the original edition of the work, Mr. Maurice wrote : —" He [the student] perceives that . . . . philosophy must be the search after wisdom ; it must be, therefore, the formal opposite of wisdom communicated, that is to say, of a revelation. But he knows also, that in all common education we communicate infor- mation in order to excite the desires and faculties which receive information." These words do not appear in the second nor in the last edition ; and though—knowing Mr. Maurice's habitual pre- ference for rewriting rather than modifying by verbal correction even what he would still affirm—we would not confidently infer that those words had ceased to express his exact view of the subject, yet in the new preface to the last edition there does seem some expansion of the earlier statement, when, after observing that " the prophets assume that God reveals Himself," while those who deny the universality of God's teaching to all men "assume that only certain men or certain sentences out of a book reveal Him," he goes on to say,—" Discovery and revelation are, it strikes me, more nearly synonymous words than any which we can find in our language. I may call that which is withdrawn a cover or a veil ; what is the difference ?"—and adds that this applies to the dis- covery of physical no less than of moral laws. He is careful to maintain that the discovery is made to, not by man ; but it seems to us that in this his maturest utterance upon Revelation there is to be noticed an expansion of his earlier views, just as there is elsewhere between his earlier and later views of the Church, though the one is in each case in perfect harmony with the other,—an expansion and development, not a retractation or contradiction. In this, as in

all things, the essential unity of the human family, and the all- embracing fatherhood of God, were ever becoming more living realities to him.

His intense humanity, his ardent sympathy with his fellow-men in all things, were indeed a feeling of brotherhood springing out of a still stronger sense of personal relation to the Father of all. He showed it in private life, and in those social organizations into which he threw himself so heartily, though with what must have been the greatest effort and sacrifice to one whose natural disposi- tion was to quiet contemplation rather than to rough work ; and

he shows it in all his writings, and not least in the volumes before us. They are no hortus siccus of philosophical systems, duly arranged and labelled, but a living history of human thought and action. In his first edition he describes his work as- " An outline map, which, though very rudely sketched, and only in- dicating here and there a mountain and a river, may yet give the student such a general impression of the country as he could scarcely have obtained from a more minute survey, and may enable him with greater interest to examine particular localities in the company of more learned and critical travellers,"—

while in the new preface—striking at once with delicate double- edged irony at his own deficiencies of formal learning, and at the popular readiness to substitute cramming for thinking—he assures the undergraduate with whom the dialogue is main- tained that it does not contain a single question or answer which could be of the least use for those who are preparing for an examination in the moral sciences. Both accounts of the book are true. It has no pretensions to be an exact and complete analysis and summary of all philosophical systems, ancient and modern, such as learned German scholars write and learned English scholars translate, and which we presume are useful for those who are preparing—in the sense of cramming—for such examinations but it is an invaluable help for the real student, who, while mean- ing to read and think for himself, with the original documents before him, yet desires the guidance of a master at first ; and it is also a most readable book for him who has not time to do more than learn the results and conclusions of other men's investigations,

and yet asks something other than a mere caput mortuum of know- ledge. To borrow a simile from Goethe, the book is a loaf of

wholesome and nutritious bread, and it is also a store of seed-corn, which if sown in fit soil will spring up night and day, a mac•

knows not how, and bear fruit a hundred-fold. It was a part of Coleridge's scheme for the Encyclopedia Metropolitana that the

division of History should be written in the form of the biography of the great men of successive generations ; and though we have• heard Mr. Maurice express his opinion that it was not possible

in this way to cover the whole field of history, yet in his own division of the work he has made the largest possible- use of all biographical materials available, for that purpose a tracing out the thoughts of the several founders of philo-

sophical schools which he set before him in the passage we have quoted above. These sketches, slight as they necessarily are, are full of life and character. The present Dean of St. Paul's has given us a full-length portrait of Anselm, and his predecessor, Dean Milman, has given us another of Savonarola, both evidently true and life-like, as well as completely finished in all details ; yet the slight sketches of these men by Mr. Maurice will not lose by com- parison with the other more elaborate works. Nor would there be any difficulty in multiplying such illustrations of the excellence of these sketches, and of their effectiveness for their purpose. And in this biographical element—in this habitual endeavour to observe the personal character and circumstances of the men whose philo- sophical speculations are under investigation,—lies a farther answer to those who say that Mr. Maurice is not only an eclectic,

but that he is prone to find in every philosopher his own views, which he has—unconsciously, but actually—first put into their several systems. The question is one of fact—solvetur ainbulando-

and we appeal to every one who will examine the facts whether these successive sketches do not fairly represent the men themselves, and their own thoughts and feelings, and not such as have beea imagined for them. Possibly there are errors in details, which Dryasdust can point out ; but we may as soon expect to understand the genius of a poet or a statesman by dissecting his dead body, as to understand the history of Moral and Metaphysical Philosophy by the study of such dead analyses as Dryasdust will alone sanction as correct. It is only the man of genius who can give life to the original records of a past age, so that they may be intelligible to the ordinary man who would read them for himself ; and it is a mistake to suppose that he is not doing this,

and cannot do it, because he throws upon them the light of his own age, and finds a common humanity of origin under the most diverse and distinct developments. It may be that Mr. Grote was thinking of O'Connell when he described Cleon, or of Sir Robert Inglis when he depicted Nikias, or that in his account of the de- cline and dissolution of religions belief in Greece, the modem scep- tic can hear the whispered, "De to fabula narratur ;" but for all this, or rather by all this, Mr. Grote enables us to understand what manner of men the Athenians actually were far better than we could else have done. The like is true of every historian, ancient or modern, who is worthy of the name. It is not less true of Mr. Maurice, as regards his History of Philosophy ; and even if Dryasdust could point to exceptional instances in which he had imagined what could not be verified by documents, we should still say, as Mr. Hallam says of Shakespeare's historical plays, that " what he invented is as truly historical, in the large sense of