when his hands had been liberated from walking and from climbing, and had been elaborated into an instrument of the most subtle and various use; when his feet had been adapted for holding him in the erect position; when his breathing apparatus had been set to musical chords of widest compass and the most exquisite tones; when all his senses had become ministers to a mind endowed with wonder and with reverence, and with reason and with love then a work had been accomplished such as the world had not known before, and such as has never been repeated since. All the conditions under which that work was carried forward must have been happy conditions-conditions, that is to say, in perfect harmony with its progress and its end. They must have been favorable, first to the production and then to the use of those higher faculties which separated the new creature from the beasts. They must have been in a corresponding degree adverse to and incompatible with the prevalence of conditions tending to reversion or to degradation in any form. That long and gradual ascent, if we assume it to have been so-or, as it may have been, that sudden transfiguration--must have taken place in a congenial air and amid surroundings which lent themselves to so great a change. On every conceivable theory, therefore, of the origin of man, all this seems a necessity of thought. But perhaps it seems on the theory of development even more a necessity than on any other. It is of the essence of that theory that all things should have worked together for the good of the being that was to be. On the lowest interpretation, this "toil co-operant to an end" is always the necessary result of forces ever weaving and ever interwoven. On the higher interpretation it is the same. Only, some worker is ever behind the work. But under either interpretation the conclusion is the same. That the first man should have been a savage, with instincts and dispositions perverted as they are never perverted among the beasts, is a supposition impossible and inconceivable. Like every other creature, he must have been in harmony with his origin and his endwith the path which had led him to where he stood, with the work which

made him what he was. It may well have been part of that work-nay, it seems almost a necessary part of it-to give to this new and wonderful being some knowledge of his whence and whither-some open vision, some sense and faculty divine.

With arguments so deeply founded on the analogies of nature in favor of the conclusion that the first man, though a child in acquired knowledge, must from the first have had instincts and intuitions in harmony with his origin and with his destiny, we must demand the clearest proof from those who, assume that he could have had no conception of a Divine being, and that this was an idea which could only be acquired in time from staring at things too big for him to measure, and from wondering at things too distant for him to reach. Not even his powers could extract from such things that which they do not contain. But in his own personality, fresh from the hand of nature-in his own spirit just issuing from the fountains of its birth-in his own will, willing accord- / ing to the law of its creation-in his own desire of knowledge-in his own sense of obligation-in his own wonder and reverence and awe-he had all the elements to enable him at once to apprehend, though not to comprehend, the Infinite Being who was the author of his

own.

It is, then, with that intense interest which must ever belong to new evidence in support of fundamental truths that we find these conclusions, founded as they are on the analogies of nature, confirmed and not disparaged by such facts as can be gathered from other sources of information. Scholars who have begun their search into the origin of religion in the full acceptance of what may be called the savage theory of the origin of manwho, captivated by a plausible generalization, had taken it for granted that the farther we go back in time the more certainly do we find all religion assuming one or other of the gross and idolatrous forms which have been indiscriminately grouped under the designation of Fetishism-have been driven from this belief by discovering to their surprise that facts do not support the theory. They have found, on the contrary, that up to the farthest limits which are reached by

records which are properly historical, and far beyond those limits to the remotest distance which is attained by evidence founded on the analysis of human speech, the religious conceptions of men are seen as we go back in time to have been not coarser and coarser, but sim

pler, purer, higher-so that the very oldest conceptions of the Divine Being of which we have any certain evidence are the simplest and the best of all. In particular, and as a fact of typical significance, we find very clear indications that everywhere idolatry and fetishism appear to have been corruptions, while the higher and more spiritual conceptions of religion which lie behind do generally even now survive among idolatrous tribes as vague surmises or as matters of speculative belief. Nowhere even now, it is confessed, is mere fetishism the whole of the religion of any people. Everywhere, in so far as the history of it is known, it has been the work of evolution, the development of tendencies which are deviations from older paths. And not less significant is the fact that everywhere in the imagination and traditions of mankind there is preserved the tions of mankind there is preserved the memory and the belief in a past better than the present. "It is a constant saying," we are told," among African tribes that formerly heaven was nearer to man than it is now; that the highest God, the Creator Himself, gave formerly lessons of wisdom to human beings; but that afterward He withdrew from them, and dwells now far from them in heaven." All the Indian races have the same tradition ; and it is not easy to conceive how a belief so universal could

have arisen unless as a survival. It has all the marks of being a memory and not an imagination. It would reconcile the origin of man with that law which has been elsewhere universal in creation the law under which every creature has been produced not only with appropriate powers, but with appropriate instincts and intuitive perceptions for the guidance of these powers in their exercise and use. Many will remember the splen

did lines in which Dante has defined this law, and has declared the impossibility of man having been exempt therefrom:

Nell' ordine ch'io dico sono accline
Tutte nature per diverse sorti
Più al principio loro, e men vicine ;

**

Nè pur le creature, che son fuore D'intelligenzia, quest'arco saetta, Ma quelle c'hanno intelletto ed amore. the mystery which arises out of the fact The only mystery which would remain is that somehow those instincts have in man not only been liable to fail, but that

they seem to have acquired apparently an ineradicable tendency to become perverted. But this is a lesser mystery than original birth or creation of any creature the mystery which would attach to the in the condition of a human savage. It is a lesser mystery because it is of the essence of a being whose will is comparatively free that he should be able to deviate from his appointed path. The great mystery. But this at least may be origin of evil may appear to us to be a said in mitigation of the difficulty, could be no possibility of any virtue. without the possibility of evil there Among the lower animals obedience has always been a necessity. In man it was raised to the dignity of a duty. It is in this great change that we can see and understand how it is that the very elevation of his nature is inseparable from the possibility of a fall. The mystery, then,

that

The

which attaches to his condition now is shifted from his endowments and his gifts to the use he made of them. question of the origin of religion is merged and lost in the question of the origin of man. And that other question, how his religion came to be corrupted, becomes intelligible on the supposition

of wilful disobedience with all its consequences having become "inherited and 99 This is the formula of expression which has been inorganized in the race. vented or accepted by those who do not believe in original instincts or intuitions, order and with the reasonableness of naeven when these are in harmony with the in a case where we have to account for ture. It may well therefore be accepted tendencies and propensities which have no such character-which are exceptions with all that is intelligible in its order, to the unity of nature, and at variance

or reasonable in its law.

If all explanation essentially consists *" Paradiso," canto i 110-120.

in the reduction of phenomena into the terms of human thought and into the analogies of human experience, this is the explanation which can alone reconcile the unquestionable corruption of human character with the analogies of creation.

For the present I must bring these papers to a close. If the conclusions to which they point are true, then we have in them some foundation-stones strong enough to bear the weight of an immense, and, indeed, of an immeasurable superstructure. If the unity of nature is not a unity which consists in mere sameness of material, or in mere identity of composition, or in mere uniformity of structure, but a unity which the mind recognizes as the result of operations similar to its own; if man, not in his body only, but in the highest as well as in the lowest attributes of his spirit, is inside this unity and part of it; if all his powers are, like the instincts of the beasts, founded on a perfect harmony between his faculties and the realities of creation; if the limits of his knowledge do not affect its certainty; if its accepted truthfulness in the lower fields of thought arises out of correspondences and adjustments which are applicable to all the operations of his intellect, and all the energies of his spirit; if the moral character of man, as it exists now, is the one great anomaly in nature-the one great exception to its order and to the perfect harmony of its laws; if the

corruption of this moral character stands in immediate and necessary connection with rebellion against the authority on which that order rests; if all ignorance and error and misconception respecting the nature of that authority and of its commands has been and must be the cause of increasing deviation, disturbance, and perversion-then, indeed, we have a view of things which is full of light. Dark as the difficulties which remain may be, they are not of a kind to undermine all certitude, to discomfit all conviction, and to dissolve all hope. On the contrary, some of these difficulties are seen to be purely artificial and imaginary, while many others are exposed to the suspicion of belonging to the same class and category. In some cases our misgivings are shown to be unreasonable, while in many other cases, to say the least, doubt is thrown on doubt. Let destructive criticism do its work.

But let that work be itself subjected to the same rigid analysis which it professes to employ. Under the analysis, unless I am much mistaken, the destroyer will be destroyed. That which pretends to be the universal solvent of all knowledge and of all belief, will be found to be destitute of any power to convict of falsehood the universal intinct of man, that by a careful and conscientious use of the appropriate means he can, and does, attain to a substantial knowledge of the truth.-Contemporary Review.

was.

THREE years ago, on the occasion of the Voltaire and Rousseau centenary, I had the honor of writing something about it in these pages. Shortly after the appearance of the article I met a young lady-an old pupil of mine-who saluted me with the reproachful greeting: "I see you have been praising that wretch Voltaire. How could you do it?" Although I was fully aware that considerable numbers of presumably sane human beings still thought and spoke of Voltaire as a wretch, I confess I was a little startled to find that among them were persons of intelligence and cultivation, as this lady certainly The astonishment was perhaps unphilosophical, for prejudice in general and ignorance in particular will account for most things. But the general prejudice against Voltaire has certainly not died out, and it may be doubted whether knowledge as to what he actually said, wrote, and thought is as yet very widely spread in England. It is certainly not necessary to say to readers of the Fortnightly Review that we have in English admirable works of the biographical essay kind on Voltaire of much more recent date than Mr. Carlyle's famous and still indispensable study; but no work of the compass of those alluded to can possibly do more than summarize the events and comment on the productions of a life so long and so busy as Voltaire's. The sort of book that is now wanted is a book that shall contain in full measure and orderly arrangement the pièces the supporting documents and facts of Mr. Carlyle's and our editor's conclusions, and of such conclusions as may be formed by a reader who likes to create for himself, and who yet does not care to work through the hundred volumes supplemented by all the biographies from Duvernet to Desnoiresterres, and all the criticisms from Folard to Martin. This is what Mr. Parton has attempted to supply. I do not purpose in this place to examine very

"Life of Voltaire." By James Parton. Boston Houghton, Mifflin & Co.

minutely into the manner in which he has performed his task; though I must say briefly that it is not well performed. The author, I believe, is an American journalist of some position, and a recent article of his on American politics has excited a good deal of attention on both sides of the Atlantic. He writes fairly well, and seems to have taken a great deal of trouble with his work; but he does not appear to possess anything like the width of literary culture which is the necessary equipment of any one who writes on Voltaire. He makes a good many grotesque blunders, and his critical powers seem to me altogether defective. But he has got together a very great deal of information about his hero from a very large number of different sources, and his book, with the exception of the eight volumes of Desnoiresterres, gives probably the most extensive and the fullest store of information on the subject to be found between the covers of any single work. I shall, therefore, in this article busy myself very little with Mr. Parton, and almost entirely with the portrait of Voltaire's life and works which Mr. Parton has got together.

The knowledge of the general English public as to Voltaire may be said to begin with his second Bastille experience, his exile to England, and the Henriade." Before, that time his Jesuit education, the Ninon legacy, and perhaps the love affair in Holland, almost sum up the list of events in his life which have held their ground with most of us. Mr. Parton has filled up this somewhat scanty outline with plenty of interesting detail. His indications of the society and atmosphere in which the future patriarch acquired or developed the peculiarities which afterward distinguished him are sufficiently full. The home with the solid and business-like father, the Jansenist elder brother, the mother of whom so little is known, but whose attraction for the men of letters and wits of the period had so much to do with her son's future career, can be sufficiently realized from his pages. An exposition of the profound ethnicism which resulted