21 DECEMBER 1872, Page 15

BOOKS.

MR. GREG'S ENIGMAS OF LIFE,

MR. GREG has never written a more eloquent book than this, and never any so full of deep religious feeling, in spite of its deep underlying doubt ; but a gOod many of his readers will perhaps agree with us that he has added one to the deeper " Enigmas of life" by his discourses on them, rather than taken any- thing from their enigmatic character. The great postulate of the book is doubt, and yet a large part of the book is spent in lending support to spiritual attitudes of mind which can only grow out of positive convictions and are inconsistent with stick doubt. The author confesses this apparent inconsistency quite candidly in his preface. " By the severer class of scientific reasoners," he says, "it will, I am aware, be noted with dis- approval that throughout this little book there runs an under- current of belief in two great doctrines, which yet .I do not make • Enigmas of Lift. By W. B. Greg. Loudon: Trdbuor. the slightest attempt to prove. I have everywhere, it will be said, assumed the existence of a Creator and of a continued life beyond the grave, though I give no reason for my faith in either ; though I obviously do not hold these points of the Christian creed on the ordi- nary Christian grounds; and though I cannot fail to be conscious that these questions underlie or inextricably mingle with nearly every one of the subjects I have treated. I have approached with some pretension to philosophical investigation a few of the enigmas of human life, yet have deliberately evaded the two deepest and darkest of all, and precisely the two, moreover, whose determination can most satisfactorily solve the rest." And Mr. Greg defends this proce- dure only on the ground that faith in these truths has grown with his growth, and though not exactly strengthened with his strength, yet survived the mouldering-away of the grounds upon which he formerly held them, and that it does not seem to him unphilo- sophic to allow his contemplation of life, or his speculations on the problems it presents, " to run in the grooves worn in the mind by its antecedent history, so long as no dogmatism is allowed, and no disprovable datum is suffered for a moment to intrude." We could understand this position if the subjects to which Mr. Greg devotes his essays were chiefly subjects in relation to which the question of faith or doubt were not of their very essence. We can quite understand that while Mr. Greg is writing on the earthly miseries which are not irremediable, and the advantages which might be within the grasp of the whole race if the race were wiser, it is perfectly permissible to let his argument be coloured by these two great faiths in God and in immortality, because it would not be essentially altered even by their disappearance ; nay, in some respects it might be held to be strengthened. For if some of his expectations or hopes for the destiny of the human race on earth were to vanish,—as no doubt they would before the disappearance of these two great faiths, especially before the loss of the former, —yet the motive for realising as many as possible of the earthly ideals, the motive for putting in force the whole of the disposable resources of human prudence in order to realise them, would be regarded by many as only the stronger if the Throne of the Universe were supposed to be vacant, and the prospects of man beyond the grave were held to be a blank. While, then, Mr. Greg remains on the ground of strictly earthly destiny,—while he talks of the economical and legislative provisions by which the lot of innumer- able creatures on earth might, in his opinion, be brightened,— there is no special reason why faiths which he regards as entirely open questions, but yet so closely interwoven with the fibres of his own nature as to be inseparable from them, should not be assumed in treating of human duties. For if these faiths had eventually to ba abandoned, there would be nothing materially altered, except a certain colouring and tone, in his line of thought. A more sombre tint would pervade the whole, but as far as he at least is concerned, the substance of the argument would be still valid ; and if men who had no trust and no hope beyond life, only had the heart to work for fellow-creatures still unborn but about to inherit lives of equally insignificant moral proportions with them- selves, they would certainly be right in doing what would tend to alleviate the burdens or enhance the enjoyments of their posterity.

But surely, Mr. Greg's position becomes quite untenable when his subject touches directly the very contents of his great " Perhaps." When he comes to deal with our duties in relation to our spiritual nature, if haply we have a spiritual nature, he seems to us to be acting precisely like the man who sat on the branch of a tree while lopping it off at the point where it issued from the trunk. Who would take the trouble to discuss the proper form of a science whose very existence he doubted ? to reduce alchemy to rules while he questioned its foundations ? to consider the beet international relations between an actual nation, and one of which the existence was a surmise ? To construct a vessel for the navigation of a possible sea ? to raise an army for the attack on a questionable foe ? Yet all these things seem almost wise compared with the discussion of the relative weight which we ought to give habitually in the general conduct of life to considerations which we fully recognise as possibly illusive, in comparison with others of which we know the strength and the reality. Are we really to discipline ourselves severely in order that we may postpone certainties of one kind to guesses of another? Are we to subdue our hearts to obey the authority of what, as we candidly recognise, may turn out to be dreams, when they compete for our guidance with clear knowledge ? " It may well be doubted," says Mr. Greg, very frankly, " whether some degree of fanaticism —i.e., wrong appreciation of the essential value of things,—is not necessary to prompt the higher efforts of self-sacrifice ; whether any calm-judging, far-seeing, profoundly sagacious man would think any opinion certain enough, or any cause valuable or spotless enough, to be worth dying for, except, indeed, the right of free actiou and free thought. If all men had been deep thinkers,—had seen everything correctly, valued everything at its precise- worth, measured the relative importance of each object, esti- mated accurately the degree of certainty attainable regard- ing each opinion or each faith, could we ever have had those martyrs who have conquered for us our present freedds ? and who won it, so to speak, incidentally and by a sort of fluke, for they died, not for the right of every man to whatever he thought true, but for their right to hold and to proclaim their own special form of error." Now, if that be true, it seems to us final, and final against Mr. Greg's right to proclaim on his own premisses, as he• does, that there should be a harmony established between the bodily, the mental, and the spiritual culture of man,—that his body, his mind, and his soul should all be developed, and all de- veloped on a certain basis of tripartite evenness. For Mr. Greg,. with his usual frankness, admits that his third division of human nature, the soul, is a conjecture. He defines the soul (p. 140) as. " that element and ingredient of our nature which we believe, or- fancy, to be something distinct from the understanding, which is the seat of our moral nature, our emotions and affections, which is the embodiment of our consciousness, which we feel to be more- peculiarly ourselves, in virtue of which we live in the future and aspire to the Eternal, — by which wa come into relation with the unseen and spiritual world." He admits, how- ever, in the same breath that in supposing there is such a• thing in man as a soul he may be quite wrong, and he has shown us already how strong and practical this doubt is with him, when he has suggested that men with sufficient knowledge and calmness of judgment would hardly die for any cause at all.. Indeed, he presses the same conclusions home with his usual literary vigour, giving us such apophthegms as this,—that " a large part of the business of the wise is to counteract the efforts of the good," declaring with Goethe that "the greater the knowledge, the• greater the doubt ;" and stating with the gravest deliberation that " profound thought, if thoroughly honest, is deplorably apt to sap the foundation and impair the strength of our moral as well as our- intellectual convictions. It weakens the power of self-sacrifice• inevitably by weakening that positive, undoubting confidence in the correctness of our conclusions and the soundness of our cause from which all the great marvels of self-sacrifice have sprung." Well, how, with these admissions, and the thesis Mr. Greg lays down- with more certainty than any other proposition in his book, namely, that the only thing certain about any religion is its- uncertainty,—how with these admissions can he reasonably ask men to cultivate, even on a basis of equality with the bodily and mental powers,—and to our minds, if the spirit is not to be supreme- when it pronounces at all, it cannot be anything, — the faculty which is at best one of surmise, and which has led human beings into such excesses of mistake? It is surely much more than a paradox, it is wholly illegitimate, to urge men to cultivate "a faculty of insight" of which Mr. Greg remarks parenthetically, " if indeed the existence of such faculty be not altogether a delusion," (p. 167)—on any terms of equality with faculties of which he asserts the objective worth. Let him settle the real existence of the faculty before he asks• us to cultivate it. Let him not tell us to regard as a pro- vince of our being of even equal weight with the others, one which, whenever it has really been trusted at all, has asserted' its supremacy over the others, but of the real authority of which he himself has not satisfied himself. The man who said, " ()- God I if there be a God, save my soul, if I have a soul," put up an intelligible prayer. He asked a Being whose existence he only conjectured, to pour, if his conjecture were true, a real influence into his soul, just as a man cries out " Help I help ! " on the chance of some one being within hearing to assist him. Bat any one would be laughed at who enjoined upon us to cultivate• elaborate affections towards—to discipline our whole nature in relation to—a person who might or might not be there to help us. And this seems to us to be what Mr. Greg requires of us in four at le.1..4 of his essays. Surely before he exhorts us to be- spiritual creatures, he should be quite satisfied that that does not mean that we should be unreal creatures.

For this reason we regard the essays with the sentiment of which we have the most sympathy, and the pages of which are ful- lest of eloquent and touching writing, as the least coherent, indeed as fall of contradictory tendencies which appear to be battling for the mind of the author, and which are in absolute antagonism to each other. It is impossible to tell us to train in ourselves a supreme calm intellect, and, to train also self-denying spirituak

affections, at the very moment that he tells us that the former is fatal to the latter, and when he does not even suggest how a modus vivendi is to be arranged between the two. Would he exhort us openly to win victories for our posterity "by a flake"? and how would he ensure us against "the fluke" resulting in lost battles for our posterity instead of victories? One understands what Mr. Greg means when he says we should keep up our bodily health as a rule, but yet not cultivate it so exclusively as to interfere with our intel- lectual development, for we are perfectly aware that up to a certain point the mind is aided by bodily health, though it may be sacrificed to bodily exercises. But one does not understand at all what he means when he says that we are to cultivate our intellectual nature so as not to interfere with our spiritual nature, though he admits in the same breath that possibly the spiritual nature is an illusion, and yet that it is real and not merely apparent knowledge which subverts its foundations and paralyses its life. The mental life is higher than the bodily, and therefore the bodily life must not encroach upon it ; but Mr. Greg does not maintain that the spiritual life is higher than the mental,—indeed, he could not, as he thinks even its existence problematic, though probable,—and where, therefore, are we to stop in cultivating what is true and certain, for fear we should weaken what is only probable and uncertain ?

It is for these reasons that we say that this eloquent and candid book adds a fresh enigma to the enigmas of life, whatever it may do towards attenuating the mystery about some of them. The second and third essays in the book seem to us the moat valuable, and though on the latter of these, "The Non-Survival of the Fittest,"—that is, the essay on the Darwinian principle in its application to the cultivated and uncultivated classes in human society,—we had some years ago some controversy with Mr. Greg, we do not think that he really differed from us as much as we then supposed that he did. To one point, however, we would call his attention. The law of the human world, from the beginning of time, has, in all nations, involved a more rapid multiplication of the ignorant and vulgar than of the educa- ted and refined classes within each nation, and yet knowledge has gained upon ignorance, and refinement on coarse tastes. Does not this suggest that what has been, will be ?—that intellectual and moral and spiritual influences are diffused not so much by hereditary descent from the few to the many, as by example and other secret influences of which we hardly understand the rationale? Much that Mr. Greg says iu this essay is very true and very striking, but it hardly alarms us when we remember that it is quite as true of Greek, or Roman, or mediaeval times as of our own ; and that even the masses of Western Europe in our days are, in some respects at least, more cultivated and refined than the aristocracy of Sparta or of Rome.

Whatever faults we have to find with Mr. Greg's book, we can, at least, honestly say that it is full of writing of singular force and singular candour. But we utterly deny its fundamental as- sumption of the radical uncertainty of spiritual truth for all candid intellects, and hold that that foundation is to the latter essays in his book the foundation of a quaking bog, instead of the foundation of the rock.