MR. JOSEPH COOK'S LECTURES ON TRAN- SCENDENTALISM.* • Boston Monday

Lestures : Transcendentalism, with Preludes on Current Events. By Joseph Cook. Glasgow : Bryce and Son. 1878. THESE lectures form a part of the series delivered in Boston under the name of "Boston Monday Lectures." They have been reprinted and published in this country under Mr. Cook's own authority, and though there may not be many ideas contained in' them of absolute novelty, the incisiveness and raciness of their style make them decidedly worthy of attention. Each lecture is preceded by a short prelude on contemporary social and poli- tical questions, having in many instances little or no connection with the subject of the lecture itself, but possibly useful in attracting and stimulating a miscellaneous audience. The title of the course is Transcendentalism, a much-abused word, and one used in an infinite variety of senses. In Mr. Cook's mouth it means the intuitional as distinguished from the sensational or experimental philosophy, or rather, mode of attain- ing to philosophical truth. There is a great show, per- haps a little too much, of strictly scientific and logical method ; but this, and the occasional use of illustrations some- what far-fetched and not in the most severe taste, will be ex- cused, in consideration of the intrinsic value of the argument, and the necessity for effective and popular treatment of a subject which is, on the one hand, apt to be one of the driest, and on the other, has been recently handled and brought before the thinking part of the public almost ad nauseam, and, on the orthodox side at least, in language deficient in precision.

Mr. Cook's mind is deeply penetrated by the conviction of the importance of fully recognising and defining all those beliefs which are part of the original framework of the human mind, without some of which, indeed, thinking is simply impossible, and the authority of some of which must be assumed, if we are not to land in the extremest Pyrrhonism. The term "intuition" he confines to such ideas as are self-evident, necessary, and universal, —which cannot be thought away. To use his own illustration, it is possible, he says, to imagine all the articles in the room to be annihilated, or never to have existed ; but it is impossible to imagine the portion of space contained in the room to be non-existent. It is possible to imagine that any one or all of the events or changes which will take place between the present moment and sunrise to-morrow will not happen, but it is impossible to think away'that portion of time itself. It is impossi-

ble to believe that any effect or change shall take place without a cause. To say that a change must have had a cause is not an identical proposition, for an identical proposition is an equation,

and the word must takes it out of that category. An intuition is not merely what somebody strongly feels or believes, but some- thing which all feel to be true for all time and in every place. It must be distinguished from insight, emotional, reflective, or poetic ; and from inspiration, sacred or secular. It must also be distinguished from an instinct, which is "an impulse or propen-

sity existing independent of instruction, and prior to experience," but which, if " organic " and common to humanity, must be assumed to have a correlate somewhere, in the nature of things, to match it,—for the soul implies a plan of the soul, and a plan implies consistency. "The supreme question in philosophy is whether the self-evident, necessary, and universal truths of the mind are derived from experience, or are part of the constitution

of man, brought into activity by experience, but not derived from it, nor explicable by it." There are moral and msthetic intui-

tions, as well as intellectual. Our conviction, in the moral field, that sin can be a quality only of voluntary action is a transcend- ental fact. This moral axiom, we feel, is true in all time and in

all space. We feel this to be a certainty, and we cannot go be- yond it. These beliefs transcend experience, which teaches only what is, not what must be.

The ideas of immortality and of the existence of God are not intuitions, for there can be and are sane men who have no con- fidence in them as facts ; but there never was a sound mind that

did not act on the assumption that every change must have a cause, and that a thing cannot be and not be at the same time in

the same sense. To our author, the Divine Existence is evident, but not self-eviClent. Even if you adopt the well-known argu- ment that as time and space are objectively real, they imply the existence of something that is as necessary and eternal as they are, which must be Deity, you have not arrived at your conclusion intuitively, but by a process of reasoning founded, with more or less accuracy, on your intuitions. The truth of the Divine Existence is instinctive, not intuitive, and so is that of our future existence.

The testa of truth are thus intuition, instinct, experiment, and syllogism. This is a rough sketch of the philosophy propounded in these lectures. We confess that we like its general foundation, and especially these four "tests," in the order in which they are stated. Much of the controversy of the present time would receive wholesome light, were this order adhered to, the distinc- tion between these tests, and their relative places and authority recognised, and the necessity kept in view that the necessary beliefs which are part of the furniture of our souls must not be taken in fragments, but in their totality. There is no doubt a phase of experimental philosophy which is insane enough to hold that even the most irresistible of our primary beliefs may be, for aught we know, not universally true ; that there may be regions of the universe in which even mathematical axioms may be false, and where two and two do not make four. With such we ourselves can have no controversy, for where there is no concord there can be no legitimate contention. Their idea is suicidal and subversive of their own, as of all other philosophy. The diffi- culties which attach to Mr. Cook's scheme do not lie in his first principles themselves, but in their application and the manner in which he works out of them a system of orthodox theology. His lectures appear to have followed others of a biological nature, in which the fashionable views of evolutionism were advocated ; and against these, and still more against the "absolute religion" of the late Theodore Parker, the more detailed portions of the course are mainly directed.

The following quotation from the second lecture is a specimen of his mode of dealing with that more thoroughgoing evolutionism to which we have just alluded :—

" The school of Sensationalism in philosophy maintains that the soul's laws are only an accumulation of inheritances. To that school self- evident truths are simply those which result from an unvarying and the largest experience, or those which have been deeply engraver' on our physical organism by the uniform sensation of our whole line of an- cestors, back to the earliest and simplest forms of life. Haman experience cannot embrace all space and time. Sensationalism in philosophy, there- fore, which holds that all the intuitive or axiomatic truths arise from experience, must deny that we can be sure that these truths are true in all space and time. But we are thus sure ; and sensationalism is wrecked on its palpable inability to explain by experience this confessed certainty. Face to face with this inadequate explanation which evolution offers for the sell-evident, necessary, and universal truths of the soul, let us look at the worst. It matters to me very little how my eyes came into existence, if they only see accurately. You say conscience was once only a bit of sensitive matter in a speck of jelly. You affirm that, by the law of the survival of the fittest, in the struggle of many

jelly-specks with each other for existence, one particular jelly-speck obtained the advantage of its brethren, and so became the progenitor of many vigorous jelly-specks. Then these vigorous jolly-specka

made war upon each other; and individuals, according to the law of heredity with variation, having now and then fortunate endow- ments, survived, and transmitted these, to become better and better, until the jelly-specks produce the earliest sea-weed. By-and-by a mollusk appears, under the law of the survival of the fittest; and then higher and higher forms, till at last, through infinite chance and mischance, man is produced. Somewhere and somehow the jelly- specks got not only an intellect, not only artistic perception, but a con- science and a will, and this far-reaching longing for immortality, this sense that there is a mind superior to ours, on which ours are de-

pendent Now for a moment admit that this theory of evolution is true, the supreme question yet remains,—whether my con-

science is authority. Take something merely physical, like the eyes. When I was a jelly-speck of the more inferior sort, or at least when I was a fish, I saw something, and what I saw I saw. When I was a lichen, although I was not yet a sensitive plant, I felt something, and what I felt I felt. So when these marvellous lenses began to appear, as the law of the survival of the fittest rough-hewed them age after age, I saw bettor and better ; but what I saw I saw, and to-day I feel very sure that the deliverance of the eyes is accurate. I am not denying here any of the facts as to our gradual acquisition of the knowledge of distance and direction ; that comes from the operation of all the senses, but we feel certain that what we see we see. Sup- pose, then, that in this grand ascent from the jelly-speck to the arch- angel, the process of evolution shall at last make our eyes as powerful as the best telescopes of the present day. It will be plainly true, will it not, that what we see we see? and as the eyes are now good within their range, so when they become telescopic they will be good within their range. Just so, even if we hold to the evolutionary hypothesis in its extremest claims, we must hold that if conscience was good for anything when it was rudimentaiy, it is good now in its higher stage of development. If by-and-by it shall become telescopic, what it sees it will see. I will not give up for one instant the authority of connate, although you deny all innate truth. You may show me that fatalism is the result of your evolutionary hypothesis ; you may prove to me that immortality cannot be maintained, if your philosophy is true ; you may assert, as nickel does, that there is no God but necessity,' if you are an evolutionist of the thorough- going type, that is, note Darwinian, but a Hdekelian. But let Hiickel's consistent, atheistic evolutionism, which Germany rejects with scorn, be adopted, it will yet remain true that there is a plan in man ; and that while there is a plan in man, there will be a best way to live; and that while there is a best way to live, it will be best to live the best way. Observing our mental operations, we very easily convince our- selves that we are sure of the truth of some propositions, concerning which neither we nor the race have had experience. If it be true that all those certainties that we call self-evident arise simply from ex- perience, it must be shown that our certainties do not reach beyond our experience."

This style of reasoning is very legitimate in reference to that phase of sensational philosophy and evolutionary science which insists on the element of experience. It is needless to say that it does not touch that more moderate evolutionism which looks upon the higher functions of body and of mind as having been in the Course of ages somehow or other superadded to the lower, in creatures derived from the simpler forms by ordinary generation. The truth of the latter hypothesis is a question of mere science, not of philosophy.

Mr. Cook's objection to the theology of Parker, which has so many admirers across the Atlantic, and even here, is founded chiefly on what he considers his fragmentary recognition of the primary intuitions and instincts, and his want of scientific distinction between those two classes. Parker, he says, in his two propo- sitions, that "when we are free from the love of sin, we are also free from the guilt of it," and that "sin is the tripping of a child who is learning to walk, as a necessary and, for the most part, incul- pable stage in human progress," omitted to take into account the fact that "when man is free from the love of sin, he is not free from constitutional apprehension as to the effect of past sin on his personal future in this world and the next ;" that the desire to be sure of sin being overlooked is one of the most powerful forces in human nature ; and that an atonement may, in the soli- tudes of conscience, "be scientifically known to be the desire of all nations,—that is, of all who have fallen into the disturbance of the moral nature which is called sin." His discussion on the real hatefulness of moral evil, and his lecture "On the Permanence of Moral Character," and the self-propagating power of sin, so that eventually it becomes too late to mend, are striking and forcible in no small degree. We confess, however, that we do not quite see what Mr. Cook's notion of Freedom of Will really amounts to, when he says that a man who by persistence in evil has been smitten with judicial blindness, so that his going on to sin has become a matter of "certainty," though not of "necessity," still retains his freedom. It is plain that he believes in the eternal (that is permanent) opposition to good- ness of a vast number of the race,—consequently in their ever- lasting misery. As to the annihilation hypothesis (or we should say rather, the natural dying-out of such spirits as have not attained to communion with God), he dismisses it with the remark that

be does not find in this world that the permanent dissimilarity of feeling with God or incorrigible badness produces any tendency

to annihilation. We are not advocating the annihilation theory, bat it must be remembered that the class of persons in question,

while in this world, are still animals, and there is nothing in the nature of things to indicate that wickedness should be the poison of animal life, or its reverse the cause of animal vitality. On the question, "Can a perfect Being permit evil ?" there is a deeply interesting lecture ; but on this, the most profound and torturing difficulty which besets, and until we reach a clearer atmosphere in a higher state of being, will ever beset, all earnest minds, his con- clusions are not more satisfactory than those of the best who have already attempted the solution. He says, and this is a sort of summary of his thoughts on this matter,—

" 1. In the nature of things, there cannot be an upper without an under, a right without a left, a before without an after, a good without at least a possibility of evil. 2. In the nature of things, the gift of free agency carries with it the possibility that the wrong as well as the right way may be chosen. 3. In the nature of things, a created being must be a finite being. 4. In the nature of things, a finite is an im- perfect being. 5. In the nature of things, there will be the possibility of less than absolutely perfect action in every less than perfect agent. 6. Man is such an agent. It may be that God cannot prevent sin, if he deals with finite creatures according to what is due to himself, and it may be better to allow free agents to struggle with sin, and then grow in the vigour of virtue, than to preserve them from such struggle, and thus allow them to remain weak."

Does not Mr. Cook in some of these sentences approach more nearly than he thinks to Theodore Parker's negative idea of sin, —that "every fall is a fall upward ;" and does he not, in the last of them, give some encouragement to that hypothesis of Univer- salism which he elsewhere repudiates ?

It appears to us that the author rather evades than meets the difficulty attaching to the ordinary doctrine of Vicarious suffering. He uses the word "atonement," no doubt, in its original, etymo- logical sense, but in discourses expressly aiming at clear analysis, it would have been better had there been some more distinct utterance on what is one of the chief stumbling-blocks in the path of all who take our natural intuition as the starting-point of belief. The concluding lectures, on the barrenness of ethics with- out a personal God, and on "Trinity and Tritheism," are full of true and elevating thoughts, and genuine and wholesome senti- ment. We cannot, however, afford more space to this vigorous and suggestive little book, but must conclude by strongly recom- mending it to all who are interested in those principles which lie at the root of the questions which are among the most important that can occupy human thought. Independent of their intrinsic merit, these lectures are interesting from the glimpses which they give of the present phases of speculation, in what is emphatically the most thoughtful community in the United States.