be enhanced.

It is not possible to advance our military frontier-even to the extent of the (so-called) "Scientific Frontier"-without an enormous enhancement of our military expenditure. And all military expenditure is unprofitable, in the sense that it takes so much from the tax-payer and brings him no material equivalent. Consequently, whatever else this forward policy accomplishes, it cannot fail to impoverish the people and stimulate their discontent. Moreover, the incidents of the war have demonstrated that an invasion of India from Central Asia is physically impossible. We started from the Indus, firmly resolved to march to Herat, if necessary; but when we had reached Kandahar, we found it impossible to advance further. It would be equally impossible for a Russian army to march from Herat to the Indus. There is, therefore, no such reason for a change of frontier as was alleged in justification of the war. In all probability there is not even a Tory in England who does not in his heart approve of a policy of withdrawal; but there are, he would say, difficulties in the way. There are. After all the glowing eulogies they have pronounced upon themselves, it will not be pleasant or easy for Ministers to transfer these eulogies to their opponents. It will be extremely disagreeable for a "specially gifted Viceroy" to have to confess that his chiefest gift was a gigantic capacity for blundering. But if India is to be preserved to the nation, there is no escape from this unpleasant alternative. Either Ministers must acknowledge an error that is now patent to all the world, or India must be saddled with the heavy costs and the incalculable risks of an annexation of Afghanistan. These risks, it must be remembered, are not transitory, but enduring; and if we accept them, we must be prepared for a doom of absolute effacement in the politics of Europe. The argument which will be urged against withdrawing from Afghanistan is, of course, the old familiar one—the loss of prestige. This is an argument impossible to refute because the exact worth of prestige is an unknown quantity, as to which no two people are agreed. But whatever be its value, to rush upon ruin and destruction in order to preserve our prestige is an act of insanity. It is as if a man should commit suicide in order to preserve his reputation for courage. When we retired from Afghanistan in 1842, we frankly confessed the mistake we had committed, and I am not aware that any evil resulted from the confession. The wrongs that we had done left behind them a legacy of evil, but not the confession of those wrongs. And so it is now. The frontier policy of Lord Lytton has ruined our reputation for justice, truthfulness, and generosity, and the stain of that policy must cling to us for ever. We shall not conceal or efface it by laying a crushing burden upon our native subjects and upon future generations of Englishmen, in order to evade the humiliation of a confession. On the contrary, we make what reparation is still in our power when, in the interests of both, we refuse to annex Afghanistan.

ROBERT D. OSBORN,

Lieutenant-Colonel.

CRITICAL IDEALISM IN FRANCE.

La Science positive et la Métaphysique. Par LOUIS LIARD, Professeur à la Faculté des Lettres de Bordeaux. (Ouv rage couronné par l'Institut de France.) Paris, 1879.

OR some years past there has been observable in France, outside of

positivion, a growing movement in

idealism in general, and of the critical idealism of Kant in particular. This philosophy, which had previously found very few adherents in our country, has now begun to make its way into our teaching and our Universities. Berkeley and Kant have been the subjects of special works, and an attempt has been made to translate and reproduce their ideas by harmonizing them with the principal doctrines of spiritualism. We have here a movement full of promise and well deserving of attention.* Among the different productions affording some notion of this philosophical tendency, we make choice-as being both the most recent and the most complete-of a remarkable work, distinguished and crowned by the French Institute, Positive Science and Metaphysic, by a young and learned professor of Bordeaux, M. Louis Liard.

To begin with, M. Liard's work is well composed, its plan being simple, severe, and lucid. It divides itself into three parts. The first is devoted to determining the nature and limits of positive sciences-that is, of the sciences properly so called-and to showing that they cannot pretend to abolish or replace metaphysics. In this portion of his book the author discusses the three forms of the experimental philosophy of our day, namely-Positivism, the philosophy of association, and that of evolution.

In the second part, the author examines what he calls Criticism—that is to say, the philosophy of Kant. The preceding discussion having demonstrated that the human mind is incapable of departing from

* We already endeavoured to make this philosophy known at its earliest appearance, by an article that appeared in the Revue des Deux Mondes of the 19th October, 1873, under the title, "A New Phase of Spiritualism." We are now dealing with the most recent form of this new school.

certain forms, certain laws, without which experience itself would be impossible, the author now resolves these into five fundamentals: space, time, substance, cause, the Absolute. But are these forms or laws of the mind the laws of things as well? Have they an objective authority? We know that metaphysics hang upon the solution of this question. We know, too, what is the solution given by Kant to this great problem. In recognizing the necessary existence of these forms as laws of the mind he disputes their external reality; hence he only admits critical, not real and dogmatic metaphysic. Now, as regards this point the author of the book under our notice, instead of dissenting from Criticism as he had done from Positivism, appears on the contrary to accept it by its own name, and to admire and endorse its conclusions. seems to grant or even to affirm that if Positivism is wrong, Criticism is right, and that, strictly speaking, metaphysic is not a science.

He

And yet if metaphysic were not a science in the strict sense of the word that is to say, in the sense of objective sciences-would it follow that it was nothing, or nothing more than criticism itself? By no means: our author does not stop at that apparent solution; metaphysic according to him has an object that criticism has not reached, has not shaken; metaphysic has its own proper function, in which criticism can never take its place. Only instead of founding it on the object, we must found it on the subject. The mind must turn away from the external world and re-enter itself. It is there that, without need of forms or categories of which criticism has demonstrated the fallacy, the subject grasps itself not only in its phenomena but in its being, and determines itself in conformity to an end. This end is goodness: and this is the only notion we can form to ourselves of the Absolute. Thus, metaphysic is not the science of the object, but that of the subject; or if the name of science be still withheld, it is at least the study of the subject, and it is founded on and completed by morality. Thus, the author ends by an evolution very similar to that of Kant, but with certain differences which it will be our part to point out.

These constitute the three parts of the work. them up in succession.

I.

We will now take

It

Let us first of all consider the characteristics of positive science. has for its object the conversion of factsinto laws, or in other words the resolving the composite into the simple, the particular into the universal, the contingent into the necessary. But let us observe with our author that we are only dealing here with a relative simplicity, a partial universality, a conditional necessity. None of these characters present themselves in a really absolute manner. The simple is invariably composed of several terms; the universal only applies itself to a certain class of phenomena; the necessary is so only with relation to the consequences of a law, but the law itself always remains contingent. Thus, no

positive science can ever attain to the absolute. It is the same with methods. These methods are induction and deduction. Now, however precise these processes be, however marvellous the sequence and interdependence of the propositions they discover and demonstrate, their data are never more than particular and contingent facts; consequences, then, can only be proportioned to those data. Hence it is certain that the positive sciences cannot go beyond a relative universality or necessity. It may seem as though we ought to make an exception in favour of mathematics. But by a subtle discussion which it would be difficult to give summarily, the author shows that they too come under the same law, whence it follows that the domain of positive science properly so-called is contained within the relative.

As

From this consideration there has sprung up in our day a philosophy that reduces all sciences without exception to the knowledge of relation, and by so doing has declared all metaphysics impossible: and this philosophy is called Positivism. "Any proposition," says Auguste Comte, "which is not finally reducible to the simple enunciation of a particular or general fact, is incapable of holding a real or intelligible meaning." "There is nothing absolute," says the same philosopher, "if it be not this very proposition that there is nothing absolute." to the proof of this proposition, it lies, according to the school in question, in the celebrated law which reduces all progress of the human mind in all orders of research to three phases: the theological phase, in which facts are explained by causes and supernatural agents; the metaphysical, in which they are explained by abstract and ontological entities; and, finally, the positive, in which phenomena are verified by experience and referred to their laws-that is to say, to constant and always verifiable relations of coincidence and succession.

Our author, having expounded this doctrine with much precision, proceeds to criticize it with equal sagacity. He points out what is illusory in this law of the three states; shows that it confuses metaphysic with scholasticism; and proves, finally, that, in aiming at merging mind in knowledge, and subordinating, as he says, the subjective to the objective, Positivism does not understand what it is speaking of, since all knowledge is ultimately referable to facts of consciousness-that is to say, to something subjective, which is in effect, as Descartes has pointed out, the only order of absolutely certain truths. Besides which, let positive science, or rather the positive philosophy, in the name of positive facts, proscribe metaphysic as it will, is it not evident that the fundamental conceptions of all science— number, atom, force, matter, cause, law-are metaphysical conceptions? Is it not evident that all science whatever is impossible without a certain number of principles or notions,-in a word, of intellectual laws, which even govern experience itself? As yet the positive school has not answered the learned demonstration of Kant on the necessity of the à priori principle, or rather it has ignored it. It has made no addition to

that old empiricism which the school of Leibnitz and of Kant had refuted.

But since the Positivism of Auguste Comte, too little versed in metaphysical knowledge to discuss it authoritatively, there have arisen two important schools, the one of association, the other of evolution. The former has endeavoured to base experience on an experimental and positive law; the latter has generalized this law, and made of it a particular case of a more general law embracing the whole of Nature—namely, the law of evolution.

The doctrine of association may be referred to the fundamental law that all ideas rising simultaneously or successively in the human mind, tend invariably to recall each other in the same order; this is what is called association of ideas. When any two ideas have thus been constantly associated without ever being separated (as, for instance, form and colour), they unite indissolubly and thus become necessary laws. Now, of all these necessary connections, the most universal is this: no phenoever appears without having been preceded by some other phenomenon, which is always the same under the same circumstances. This law is that of causality, which is both the supreme principle and, at the same time, the result of all experience. To this doctrine of J. S. Mill and Alexander Bain our author opposes the two following objections:-1st, How does it explain the generalization? 2nd, How does it explain the necessity of the laws of the understanding? On the first point the English School appeals to a law that it calls the law of similarity or faculty of identifying the like in the different. But this is indeed, strictly speaking, a fact of association? Should not association, properly understood, be reduced to the law of contiguity-that is to say, to the fact of our ideas only becoming associated through relations of time? To admit the faculty of recognizing similarity in diversity, what is this but to admit mind, intelligence-something, in short, which is other than a simple external association? As to the second point, can we reduce the rational necessity that Kant and Leibnitz have laid down as the criterion of à priori principles to a pure necessity of habit-that is to say, to the automatic expectation of the future inscribed on the past? Where is the scientific guarantee in this hypothesis? Why should Nature bend to our habits? "Who can assure us that we do not dream in thinking of the future, and that the next sensation may not interrupt our dream by an unforeseen shock ?" We see how far-reaching this doubt is; it affects not only metaphysic but science as well.

As to the philosophy of evolution, we know that, with regard to the origin of the principles of thought, it consists in linking the experience of present generations to that of generations past; in substituting secular for individual experience—in a word, in filling up by the accumulation of ages on ages the interval existing between particular and contingent facts and the universality of principles. This hypothesis is always at bottom no other than that of the tabula rasa, only it is no