BOOKS.

IS LIFE WORTH LIVING ?* THIS is a striking book, with a weak conclusion. Mr. Mallock would have done better to limit his essay to his real subject,— the inadequacy of any theory of life which is destitute of a theology, to justify the grandiloquent language in which the Positivists speak of the sacredness of life and the dignity of its aims. To attempt, in the same book in which this subject is thoroughly discussed, to show that a good justification can be found for a theology, to answer the chief objections, and above all, to indicate which of the theologies is the best, was to enter ou a work requiring a very much wider treatment than Mr. Mallock could possibly give to it, and assuming as its condition a different kind of study from that with which he has in all probability prepared himself for his present volume. And the consequence is that while we are continually struck with the logical force and adequacy, as well as the literary power, of two-thirds of this volume, we are almost as much 'struck with the inadequacy, the logical weakness, and not unfre- quently eveu the literary feebleness, of the conclusion. Still, the earlier part of the volume, taken alone, is of great worth. It discusses and illustrates the tacit assumptions which give so great a moral value to life, with fire as well as strength ; and though of course it does not show, and could not show, that apart from supernatural religion, life would in general be lightly cared for and languidly lived, it does show that apart from super- natural religion, the most ennobling and exhilarating of the motives of life shrink and dwindle to poor and wasted threads, insufficient to support men in prolonged suffering, or through the prospect of dreary and monotonous care. Mr. Mallock has added materially to the value of his book by the very lucid and admirable riAsltmes of it which the margins of the pages, and again, the table of contents, contain,—thumia which both assist the reader in catching the essential drift of each paragraph, and also, after reading the volume, in recalling the order and connection of the reasoning.

In the first place, Mr. Mallock deals very powerfully with the common remark that the scepticism which is so much feared at the present day is not really more formidable, if to formidable, as the scepticism which attacked Greek and Roman thought respectively in the great day of the Soph- ists, and again in the early times of the Roman Empire. Such scepticism, it is often said, has been before, without really taking any great effect on human progress, or even paralysing the sources of human energy, and however far it may now spread, it will only assail, just as it only assailed before, the reflective class, who are but a cypher in the great march of life. It will not even touch the practical men who really determine the pace of progress, as well as its goal. To this Mr. Mallock replies that the body of opinion now forming amongst men is a far more formidable body of opinion than was ever before matured by any human society. He puts this well in his first chapters, but returns to it with so much more force at a later point of his argument, that we prefer to place before our readers his later exposition of the same view :—

" We are literally in an age to which history can show no parallel, and which is new to the experience of humanity ; and though the moral dejection we have been dwelling on may have bad many seem- ing counterparts in other times, this is, as it wore, solid substance, whereas they were only shadows. I have pointed out already in my first chapter how unexampled this state of things is ; but we will dwell once again upon its more general features. Within less than a century, distance has been all but annihilated, and the earth has practically, and to the imagination, been reduced to a fraction of its former size. Its possible resources have become mean awl narrow, set before us as matters of every-day statistics. All the old haze of wonder is melting away from it ; and the old local enthusiasms, which depended so largely on ignorance and isolation, are melting * J Llfe Worth Living ? 33y William Durrell Malloek. London: Matto and likewise. Knowledge has accumulated in a way never before dreamed of. The fountains of the past seem to have been broken lip, and to be pouring all their secrets into the consciousness of the present. For the first time, man's wide and varied history has become a coherent whole to him. Partly a cause and partly a result of this, a new sense has sprung up in him,—an intense self-consciousness as to his own position ; and his entire view of himself is undergoing a vague change ; whilst the positive basis on which knowledge has boon placed has given it a constant and coercive force, and has made the same change common to the whole civilised world. Thought and feeling amongst the Western nations are conforming to a single pattern ; they are losing their old chivalrous character, their possi- bilities of isolated conquest and intellectual adventure. They are settling down into a uniform mass, that moves or stagnates like a modern army, and whose alternative lines of march have been mapped out beforehand. Such is the condition of the Western world ; and tho Western world is beginning now, at all points, to bear upon the East. Thus the opinions that the present ago is forming for itself have a weight and a volume that opinions never before possessed. They are the first beginnings, not of natural, or of social, but of human opinion, —an o3cumenical self-consciousness on the part of man as to his own prospects and his own position. The great question is, what shape finally will this dawning self-consciousness take P Will it contain in it that negation of the supernatural which our positive assertions aro at present supposed to necessitate P If so, then it is not possible to conceive that this last development of humanity—this stupendous break from the past which is being accomplished by our understand. ing of it, will not be the sort of break which takes place when a man awakes from a dream, and finds all that ho most prized vanished from him. It is impossible to conceive that this awakening, this dis- covery by man of himself, will not be the beginning of his decadence ; that it will not be the discovery on his part that he is a lesser and a lower thing than he thought he was, and that his condition will not sink till it tallies with his own opinion of it."

That is very forcibly put, and it may be added that wherever scepticism of a profound kind has really prevailed, there the kcal opinion pervaded by it has been emasculated. Athenian life was undoubtedly emasculated of all its power and vivid force by the scepticism which began to be fashionable in the leading circles of Athenian thought in and after the days of Socrates. Roman life—the political life of the early Empire—was un- doubtedly emasculated by the Stoical and Epicurean schools of scepticism which fascinated the more educated statesmen and politicians of Rome during the earlier centuries of the Empire.

So, too, in the last century, French political life was dangerously emasculated by the prevalence of French scepticism, and nothing, probably, is so dangerous to the great fabric of the Russian Empire of to-day as the prevalent Russian Nihilism. If this be true of the effect of comparatively local schools of thought, who can doubt that any organic body of opinion which should really gain for itself a sure predominance over the educated classes of modern Europe and the United States, would soon, as Mr. Mallock suggests, exercise a sort of cocumenical authority over mankind,—and after dominating the mind of America and Europe with far greater influence than the old scepticism ever exerted over the ruling class in Rome, would begin to strike overwhelming blows at the shallow, credulous predispositions of the East ?

Next, Mr. Mallock deals with the Positivist statements that theology, so far from adding dignity to human life, takes from it its true dignity. And he deals with this strange position very powerfully. He shows that to constitute a truly moral end for human action, in the sense in which the Positivists themselves maintain that their end is moral, and even the more purely moral that it contains no admixture of alien superstition, the end must be inward, must be of an importance great out of all proportion to any

apparent results, and must be one of a kind comfortned to an absolute standard, and not variable with the taste or tempera- ment of the individual. If any of these criteria fail, the dignity of the end, in the very sense in which the Positivists maintain .uhe dignity of human action, fails at once. If the end is not consti-

tuted by the motive, the intent, the state of heart, rather than by any external consequence, man cannot be truly responsible for it, and this is precisely what the Positivists themselves earnestly maintain. All that men can really purify with any certainty isftheir own minds. All they can be responsible for is their own purposes. None maintain more eagerly than the Positivists that the ideal of moral action is an inward ideal,—that the first principle of morality is," Purify the heart." Well, then, says Mr. Mallock, it being admitted that to constitute a moral end in the highest sense, it must be an end. of motive, rather than of con- eequence,—that there must 'be an inordinate and, in some sense, mysterious importance attaching to the end; and that there must be an absolute standard for that end, to which all alike are bound to conform,—how will a system without a theology, without a God, without any belief in an eternal development of the personal life, make these characteristics felt by mankind? The moral end must be inward to each, but it can only be enforced on each,—so far as it is not deeply enough felt already;—by some higher authority which has access to that inward world of consciousness. But on the Positivist system, who has access to the inward world of any man's cons.ciousuess except himself? Suppose a man with a. defi- cient sense of the inward end, whatever it be, and a com- plete belief or illusion that no one except himself can see him and find out his deficiencies, if he have any, and then, of course, his inward deficiencies, whatever they be, will tend to increase. He lives, as he thinks, in a perfect solitude ; if he find fault with himself, he may relax his fault-finding without being conscious of any other censorship, and so the inward deficiency, 'whatever it be, will tend, first, to grow, and then to be forgotten. And then as to the absoluteness of its standard. If there is no spiritual Being to weigh us all in the same balance, to try us all by the same standard, the standard will tend to become a matter of subjective taste, and nothing else. One man may say that he values the happiness of mankind more than their purity. Another may value truth more than either. Whatever standard each takes, he takes without believing his own judgment liable to any revision ,and so the standards multiply, and necessarily there- fore degrade. And lastly, as to the solemnity of the moral end, its incalculable importance, as compared with external con- sequence. How can this incalculable importance, be the same for those who are sure that the individual dies soon, and the race itself within a strictly limited period, as for him who believes that the individual character is for eternity, and the race for eternity also Mr. Mallock argues the last point, in relation especially to the dignity of human love viewed from the Positivist point of view, with more than even his usual force.

He says of the Positivist view of human love :—

" They have imagined that what religion adds to love is the hope of prolongation only, not of development also ; and thus we find Professor Huxley curtly dismissing the question by saying that the quality of such a pleasure is obviously in no way affected by the abbreviation or prolongation of our conscious life.' How utterly this is beside the point may be shown instantly by a very simple example. A painter, we will say, inspired with some great conception, sets to work at a picture, and finds a week of the intensest happiness in pre- paring his canvas and laying his first colours. Now, the happiness of that week is, of course, a fact for him. It would not have been greater had it lasted a whole fortnight ; and it would not have been less, had be died at the week's end. But though obviously, as Pro- fessor Huxley says, it in no way depends on its prolongation, what it does depend on is the belief that it will be prolonged, and that in being prolonged it will change its character. It depends on the belief on the painter's part that he will be able to continue his paint- ing, and that as ho continues it, his picture will advance to comple- tion. Th0 Positivists have confused the true saying that the pleasure of painting one picture does not depend on the fact that we shall paint many, with the false saying that the pleasure of beginning that one does not depend on the belief that we shall finish it. On this last belief it is plain that the pleasure does depend, largely, if not entirely; and it is precisely this last belief that Positivism takes away.'

And what is true of human love is equally true of human character. How is it possible to attach incalculable import- ance to the single touches you give to a picture, when that picture, as you well know, is doomed to be de- stroyed long before it is half-finished ? A man who believes in the immortal growth of character, holds that every touch makes a difference to an eternal life,—makes a difference of incalculable importance in the relation which he himself will hold to God. One who does not, who thinks of himself as a work soon to pass away, and even of the consequences of his life, as a series of slight modifications in the history of a race which must itself lapse into the void before long, is pretty sure to let even such importance as he inclines to attach to his actions, sway sooner or later in the direction of his wishes. As Mr. Matlock well puts it :—

" Men of such a character as I have boon just describing may find conscience quite equal to giving a glow, by its approval, to their virtuous wishes; but they will find it quite unequal to sustaining them against their vicious ones ; and the more vigorous the intellect of the man, the more feeble will be the power of conscience. When a man is very strongly tempted to do a thing which he believes to be wrong, it is almost inevitable that be will test to the utmost the reasons of this belief ; or if he does not do this before he yields to the temptation, yet if he does happen to yield to it, he will certainly do so after. Thus, unless we suppose human nature to be completely changed, and all our powers of observation completely misleading, the inward condition of the class in question is this. However calm the outer surface of their lives may seem, under the surface there is a continual discord ; and also, though they alone may perceive it, a. continual decadence. In various degrees they all yield to tempts-

tion ; all men in the vigour of their manhood do ; and conscience stiTI fills them with its old monitions and reproaches. But it cannot en- force obedience. They fool it to be the truth, but at the same time they know it to be a lie ; and though they long to be coerced by it, they find it cannot coerce them. Ronson, which was once its minister, is now the tribune of their passions, and forbids them, in times of passion, to submit to it. They are not suffered to forgot that it is not. what it says it is, that

"It never moo from on high, And never rose from below :"

and they cannot help chiding themselves with the irrepressible self- reproach,

" Am I to be overawed By what I cannot but know, Is a juggle born of tho brain I"'

Thus their conscience, though not stifled, is dethroned ; it is become a fugitive Pretender; and that part of them that would. desire its restoration is set down as an intellectual me/igh au t, powerless indeed to restore its sovereign,

" Invalid:mune tibi tendons, hoe non tun, pnlmas."

Of the insufficiency of Positivism to provide us with the essential props of moral action, in the case of such creatures as we are, Mr. Mallock's book is not merely an illustration, but almost may be said to be a demonstration.

When, however, he goes on to show us what sort of theology is most likely to be true, by way of brief supplement to this argument, he becomes feeble, and his way of putting his case becomes ludicrously meagre. The Roman Catholics will hardly thank him, we think, for the very weak statement of their claim to represent the only true Christianity ; nor will Christians of any class thank him much for the curious and very unwise admissions he often makes to their assailants. The truth is, that all this part of the book is raw, ill-considered, and infinitely too brief for its purpose, even if the author were in a position to work his purpose out with any power. Indeed it takes away from the effectiveness of what Mr. Mallock has previously done, just as all evidence that a man has not really grasped one subject with which he nevertheless deals, sends—perhaps unjustly—to disparage the power with which he has treated another subject to which he was really competent. Mr. Mal- lock should have limited himself to the hypothetical subject of the intrinsic worth of life, in the absence of any religious creed. By trying to deal with the truth of a religious creed in a post- script, he has detracted from the weight of the text to which that postscript is affixed.