cian who remonstrates against the enor- to It is asserted by the same critic that Swift's reputation has been gained "by a less degree of effort than that of almost any other writer"-his writings, in point of length, being altogether insignificant. To this curious complaint we might be content to reply in Mr. Leslie Stephen's words : A modern journalist who could prove that he had written as little in six months would deserve a testimonial.'' An age of which Mr. Gladstone is the prophet is tender to, if not vain of, verbosity; but the great books of the world are not to be measured by thei: size. Hume's Essay on Miracles,' which may be said to have revolutionized the whole course of modern thought, is compressed into some twenty pages. "A Tale of a Tub" is shorter than a Budget speech which will be forgotten to-morrow: but then-how far-reaching is the argument; the interest-how world-wide; the scorn his feelings as has scarcely been rivalled in our literature. Lord Macaulay's testimony is even more valuable. Macaulay disliked Swift with his habitual energy of dislike. It must be confessed that the complex characters where heroism and weakness are subtly interwoven-Bacon, Dryden, Swift--how consummate! Brief as Swift is, did not lend themselves readily to the manipulation of that brilliant master. § Yet in spite of his repugnance to the man, his admiration of the magnificent faculty of the satirist is emphatic and unstinted. Under that plain garb and ungainly deportment were concealed, he tells us, some of the choicest gifts that have ever been bestowed on the children of men-rare powers of observation; brilliant wit; grotesque invention; humor of the most austere flavor, yet exquisitely delicious; eloquence singularly pure, * Memoirs of Jonathan Swift, D.D., p. 439. + The English in Ireland. By J. A. Froude. Vol. i. pp. 501-503. English Thought in the Eighteenth Century, vol. i. p. 209, vol. ii. p. 375. Addison was his literary hero; but surely, in spite of exquisite urbanity and a charming style, Addison, both as man and writer, has been prodigiously overrated by Macaulay. The others had sounded depths which his plummet could not reach, had scaled heights on which he had never adventured. This, to be sure, may have been his attraction for Macaulay, to whom the difficult subtleties of the imagination and the ardent aspirations of the spiritual life were enigmatical and antipathetic -a riddle and a byword. NEW SERIES.-VOL. XXXVII., No. 5 he makes it abundantly clear, before he is done, that there are no limits to his capacity. He has looked all round our globe--as from another star. It is true that with the most lucid intelligence he united the most lurid scorn. Though he saw them as from a remote planet, he hated the pigmies-the little odious vermin-with the intensity of a nextdoor neighbor. Yet this keenness of feeling was in a measure perhaps the secret of his power-it gave that amazing air of reality to his narrative which makes us feel, when we return from Brobdingnag, that human beings are ridiculously and unaccountably small. Swift was a great master of the idiomatic -one of the greatest; but his intellectual lucidity was not less noticeable than his verbal. His eye was indeed toa keen, too penetrating he did not see through shams and plausibilities only; he saw through the essential decencies of life as well. Thus he spoke with ap-palling plainness of many things which nature has wisely hidden; and he * History of England, vol. iv. p. 369. 38 became at times in consequence outrageously coarse. Swift, it is said, never laughed; but when he unbent himself intellectually, he was, we think, at his best. The serious biographer complains of the rough horse-play of his humor-of his weakness for puns and practical jokes. The puns, however, were often very fair; and the humorous perception that could meet William's favorite Recepit non rapuit, with the apt retort, The receiver is as bad as the thief-or could apply on the instant to the lady whose mantua had swept down a Cremona fiddle, Mantua, va misera nimium vicina Cremona !-must have been nimble and adroit. Even the practical joking was good in its way. The dearly beloved Roger is probably apocryphal-borrowed from some older jest-book; but the praying and fasting story, as told by Sir Walter, is certainly very comical, and seems to be authentic.* Mr. Bickerstaff's controversy with Partridge the almanac-maker is, however, Swift's highest achievement in this line. His mirth (when not moody and ferocious) was of the gayest kind-the freest and finest play of the mind. It is not mere trifling; there is strenuous logic as well as deft wit so that even Partridge has his serious side. Whately's Historic Doubts regarding Napoleon Buonaparte are now nearly forgotten; but they suggest to us what may have been in Swift's mind when he assured the unlucky astrologer * Scott's Life of Swift, p. 381. The whole note is worth quoting, as containing some .characteristic details of manner, etc. "There is another well-attested anecdote, communicated by the late Mr. William Waller of Allanstown, near Kells, to Mr. Theophilus Swift. Mr. Waller, while a youth, was riding near his father's house, when he met a gentleman on horseback reading. A little surprised, he asked the servant, who followed him at some distance, where they came from? 'From the Black Lion,' answered the man. 'And where . · are you going?' To heaven, I believe,' rejoined the servant, for my master's praying and I am fasting.' On further inquiry it proved that the Dean, who was then going to Laracor, had rebuked the man for presenting him in the morning with dirty boots. Were they clean,' answered the fellow, they would soon be dirty again.' And if you eat your breakfast,' retorted the Dean, you will be hungry again, so you shall proceed without it, which circumstance gave rise to the man's bon-mot." The that logically he was dead (if not buried), and that he need not think to persuade the world that he was still alive. futility of human testimony upon the plainest matter-of-fact has never been more ludicrously yet vividly exposed. The grave conduct of an absurb proposition is of course one of the most striking characteristics of Swift's style; but the unaffected simplicity and stolid unconsciousness with which he looks the reader in the face when relating the most astonishing fictions, is, it seems to us, an even higher reach of his art. It is quite impossible to doubt the good faith of the narrator; and when we are told that the author was so distinguished for his veracity, that it became a sort of proverb among his neighbors at Redriff, when any one affirmed a thing, that it was as true as if Mr. Gulliver had spoken it," we are not surprised at the seaman who swore that he knew Mr. Gulliver very well, but that he lived at Wapping, not at Rotherhithe. How admirable is the parenthetical, "being little for her age, in the account of Glumdalclitch- She was very goodnatured, and not above forty feet high, being little for her age ;" or the description of the queen's dwarf-"Nothing angered and mortified me so much as the queen's dwarf, who being of the lowest stature that was ever in that country (for I verily think he was not full thirty feet high), became so insolent at seeing a creature so much beneath him, that he would always affect to swagger and look big as he passed by me in the queen's ante-chamber! One cannot believe that Swift was so unutterably miserable when he was engaged on Gulliver," or that he wrote his els"-the earlier voyages at least-not to amuse the world, but to vex it. This consummate artist was a great satirist as well as a great story-teller; but it is the art of the delightful storyteller, not of the wicked satirist, that makes Gulliver immortal. trav mainly remarkable for its resolute homSwift's verse, like his prose, was liness; but when the scorn or the indignation or the pity becomes intense, it sometimes attains, as we have seen, a very high level indeed. The "Jolly Beggars" of Burns is scarcely superior in idomatic pith and picturesqueness to the opening stanzas of the "Rhapsody place, not in the Church, but in the on Poetry:' "Not empire to the rising sun, By valor, conduct, fortune won ; Not boy brought up to cleaning shoes, To rise in Church, or law, or State, As he whom Phoebus in his ire Hath blasted with poetic fire." Yet the impeachment of Swift as the writer has, after all, a basis of fact. His influence was largely personal. He was greater than his books. It is easy to take up one of his pamphlets now, and criticise the style, which is sometimes loose and slovenly, at our leisure. But it did its work. It struck home. That, after all, is the true standard by which the Dean should be judged. He was a ruler of men, and he knew how to rule. If he had been bred to politics, if he had occupied a recognized House of Commons, he would have been The one of our greatest statesmen. sheer personal ascendancy of his character was as marked in political as in private life. Friend and foe alike admitted that his influence, when fairly exerted, was irresistible. He was one of those potent elementary forces which occasionally appear in the world, and which, when happily circumstancedwhen not chained as Prometheus was, or tortured as Swift was-revolutionize society. The unfriendly Johnson, as we have seen, was forced to confess that for several years Swift formed the political opinions of the English nation; and Carteret frankly admitted that he had succeeded in governing Ireland because he pleased Dr. Swift. 'Dr. Swift had commanded him," said Lord Rivers, 66 and he durst not refuse it." And Lord Bathurst remarked, that by an hour's work in his study an Irish parson had often had often made three kingdoms drunk at once. We cannot be induced to believe by any criticism, however trenchant, that the man who could do all this was not only "bad" but "small." Blackwood's Magazine. THE LIMITS OF SCIENCE. BY REV. GEORGE EDMUNDSON. In his lately-published work upon Ants, Bees, and Wasps, Sir John Lubbock observes : It is, I think generally assumed not only that the world really exists as we see it, but that it appears to other animals pretty much as it does to us. A little consideration is, however, sufficient to show that this is very far from being certain or even probable (p. 182). In fact, he has established, by elaborate and careful observations, that animal organs of sense have a different range and are differently affected by external causes than the corresponding organs in human beings. He has proved, for instance, that while ants are wholly insensible to sounds which strike the human ear as being extremely loud, they appear to be furnished with organs of hearing so delicate as to be sensitive to those rapid vibrations Now it ap which are inaudible to us. pears to me that this observation of Sir John Lubbock is a very suggestive one, and has an important bearing upon the question as to how far the human mind, which derives all its information about external Nature by means of instruments of observation confessedly coarse, imperfect, and faulty, can venture, with any hope of success, upon the task which modern science has set before it, as the ultimate aim and object of its researches and discoveries-the task of unravelling and explaining all the secrets of the universe. In plain words, Is there not a definite boundary, set on this side and on that, beyond which the utmost powers of the human intellect, by their very nature, cannot pass? Is there not an unattainable to which the speculations of the human imagination cannot reach? Are there not problems too abstruse for human reason to comprehend, too refined for human ingenuity to solve? I hope to be able to show, in the course of this article, that the answer to these queries must be in the affirmative. The qualifications of man, as an observer of Nature, are limited-first, by his position in the universe; second, by the imperfection of his senses. Let us discuss these points in the order indicated. The researches of astronomers have shown that the earth which we inhabit is but a mere speck of dust, as it were, in the immensity of the universe. It is one of the smaller planets of the solar system, which is itself but one among countless myriads of similar systems scattered through infinite space. Man himself, too, according to the most recent theories of his origin by those who speak with the greatest show of authority upon the subject, is not, as was once supposed a being of special endowment, created in the image of God, but a mere natural product of the material world he inhabits; a being gradually developed, through a vast gradation of ascending orders of existence, from those lowest forms of animated substance which are still represented to us by the infusoria and the rhizopods. Now, if the true position of man in the universe be thus indicated, even with modified correctness-if the theories of astronomer and biologist stand on no insecure basis-is it not, on the face of it, preposterous that such a being should dare to imagine that he can discover and know the why and the wherefore, the laws and the causes, of all that he sees around him that he should aspire to comprehend all the wondrous working of that infinite whole of which he forms such an infinitely insignificant atom? It would scarcely seem more supremely ridiculous were one of Sir John Lubbock's more intelligent ants, drawing its conclusions from its limited field of experience, to deliver its views upon Physical Geography. The truth, plainly stated, amounts to this: That man, by no conceivable exertion of his limited faculties, can ever penetrate beyond that minute portion of the universe to which alone he has access, and will only be able to acquire a crude and fragmentary acquaintance with that. Facts he may tabulate, analyze and classify; he may even, after centuries of guesses and conjectures, at length hit upon certain approximate formulæ of relation between groups of observed phenomena, which he proudly labels Laws of Nature. But causes lie outside his cognizance, and he tries to veil his ignorance by the specious use of abstract terms, which, however convenient for practical purposes, are purely fictitious. A few instances will suffice. We are accustomed to find in scientific works a very free use of such terms as mass, matter, space, time, force, energy, etc. It is needless to point out that all these, and many other similar abstract terms, are not objective realities, but merely useful fictions of the human mind. For example, take abstract inert matter: such matter could not be in any way perceived by our senses, for it would, being inert, be devoid of color, light, heat, electricity, and chemical action, all of which are modes of motion. It would, in fact, be to us non-existent. Or if we take space, are we quite clear that we have any complete cognition of the meaning of this term? Our conceptions of space are strictly threedimensional. But mathematically there is no such limitation. By using the methods of Algebraic Geometry an equation in two variables can be shown to represent a plane curve, and an equation in three variables a surface. then comes a pause. According to the principle of continuity there can be no valid reason why equations, involving any number of variables, should not be similarly capable of translation from Algebra to Geometry. The only assignable reason is, that n-dimensional space is inconceivable to human faculties, where n has a higher value than three. Distinguished mathematicians, such as Rieman, Helmholtz, Sylvester, and Clifford, have carefully examined into this difficult question, with the result that they think it possible that space may not everywhere have the same properties throughout the universe; and Professor Tait endeavors to explain our inability to conceive such properties by the analogy of the sensations of a book * worm in a piece of crumpled paper. The comparison may be described as rather apt than complimentary. Professor Zöllner has gone so far as to imagine that these unknown properties of space may account for the tricks and delusions effected by spiritualists. † Such an explanation has at least this merit, that it cannot be disproved, as is generally the case when we interpret ignotum per ignotius." Enough upon this head: let us proceed. Assuming that it is with but a minute superficial portion of the universe that man has power and opportunity of dealing at all, let us next inquire what are the implements by means of which he is enabled to conduct his researches even in this limited sphere of inquiry. It is plain that all perceptions of external things come through the agency of the senses (principally by the sense of seeing), which convey the impressions made upon them by special nerve-conductors to the centre of nervous action, the brain, where by some wondrous process these nerve messages are transmuted into intelligent thoughts and ideas. It is commonly asserted that the human mind is an instrument of marvellous flexibility and power, and is endowed with extraordinary capacities for invention, for discovery, and for research. But surely in connection with the subject under discussion, it is necessary to inquire who make these assertions? An answer is ready at once-all the greatest thinkers and philosophers, and men of learning and science. Yes; but I reply, may not all these learned men, philosophic, scientific, and otherwise, form a kind of gigantic human Mutual Admiration Society? What criterion have these to go by in estimating the intrinsic value of the human mind as a thinking machine, but themselves and their fellows? It is a universally received maxim that no man is a competent judge of his own capabilities, that no man can speak with impartiality upon the customs of his own country, as compared with those of foreign *See Tait, "Recent Advances in Physical Science," p. 5. On this read a curious passage in "A Philosophy of Immortality," by Hon. R. Noel, p. 35. countries; is it then to be supposed that human beings, however eminent for sagacity and wisdom, can form any fair and unprejudiced assessment of the relative range and amplitude of their Own intellectual powers? Sir John Lubbock, in his above-mentioned work, points out many resemblances between human and formic nature. Both men and ants are social creatures, both make slaves, and domesticate animals. Yet who can doubt that a Treatise upon Formic Nature, written by a learned ant, would be filled with the most exalted assumptions of formic superiority? Let the parallel stand for what it is worth, it is needless to point the moral. I will now proceed one step farther. The human brain, whatever its capabilities, can only receive its knowledge of the appearance of appearance of external Nature through the agency of the eye. The stars, for instance, would not exist to us if we did not see them; and it is by means of contrivances to enlarge and extend the power of the eye that the most important advances have been made in our acquaintance with the universe. It is clearly, then, vitally important before all things, that our eye should be a perfect contrivance, a faultless instrument. To show how far this is from being the case, it is only necessary to quote the words of the greatest authority upon the subject, Professor Helmholtz. I need not call to mind, he says, in his address at Innspruck,* the startling and unexpected results of ophthalmometry and optical research which have proved the eye to be a by no means more perfect instrument of research than those constructed by human hands, but on the contrary to exhibit, in addition to the faults inseparable from any dioptric instrument, others that in an artificial instrument we should severely condemn," etc. faultiness and coarseness of construction, then, of the medium, by which alone visual impressions can be conveyed to the brain, of itself constitutes a natural limit to our powers of observation, an inherent defect, which skill and experience may diminish, but cannot eradicate. And that which has been The *See also his Lecture on the Eye as an Op, tical Instrument, passim. |