wandering too wide. He must therefore be content to neglect tempting and interesting details, (which always recommend themselves,) and confine himself to the grand principles and the scientific method of his subject, dealing with facts and details only so far as is necessary to illustrate his theories. He must be a mere guide-post, pointing the way, but not going himself; he must draw a map of the country for the young explorers, but not undertake to guide them over it. They will find their way back far better if they have to find their way there. Of course these duties presuppose, on the part of the professor, a previous knowledge, a self-denial and a devotion rarely found in combination among weak mortals; but, as we would fain believe, quite as frequent in English as in German universities, notwithstanding all the extravagant eulogies bestowed on the latter, and the unfair abuse lavished on the former. Our countrymen are very prone to admire all things foreign, whether lace, leather, or learning, at the expense of the home produce. With a perverse pride, they are forward to discover and blazon what most mortifies them in reality. Accordingly, a great many brilliant 'slashers on the universities' are written, to illustrate the following vicious syllogism:

Germany is a-head of England in science,

Science is taught at the universities,

Therefore the English universities ought to be Germanized.

Now we have no intention of denying the major, although we often hear it put in an exaggerated form; the minor also may pass unchallenged; but we recalcitrate with all our heels against the conclusion.

Admitting that Germany does produce more scientific and literary celebrities than this country, we must not forget that there are about sixty millions of Germans against twenty-seven millions of British and Irish, so that their quota of great men ought to be to ours in the proportion of two to one at least. And, in comparing the national universities, it is not fair to bring Oxford and Cambridge by themselves, (as is often done,) to

one

bear the brunt of comparison with all the German universities together. In mere justice, the Scotch and Irish contingents, not to mention the newly-levied trainbands of London and Durham, ought to be brought into the field, for the credit of the common fatherland. Accord ing to an official statement which appeared in the German papers last autumn, the number of universities in Germany and Switzerland is twenty-eight, having in all thousand five hundred and eightysix professors in ordinary, and sixteen thousand and seventy-four stu dents. This statement does not include the University of Vienna, which, like many other patriotic bodies, has been suspended since the revolution. It would be very strange if, out of all those numbers, they did not produce more great men than Oxford and Cambridge absolutely. The comparison should be made, if at all, relatively-consideratis considerandis.

But, again, our universities do not get the credit of half the men who really belong to them. Our whole system is such as to tempt the enterprising and ambitious to non-residence, and even the residents get draughted off to country livings before they have well come to the prime of life. And so when the Rev. Mr. So-and-So brings out his long pondered work on the History of Abdera, the little village of Mugton Parva, Wilts, carries off the reflected honours which belong of right to St. Eligius' College, Cambridge. Our friends of the advanced school, who talk with such profound scorn of monastic institutions, and the old world studies which only addle men's brains and make learned idiots of them, would be rather surprised, we fancy, if they knew how many of the 'leaders' in The Times or The Morn

ing Chronicle, which show such knowledge of life and such practical good sense, are written by Fellows of those very institutions, submitted from their youth up to the addling process above-mentioned. The Ger man universities, on the other hand, have a sufficient number of professor ships (involving residence, of course), and those sufficiently well endowed (considering the value of money in Germany), to tempt all their best

men to stay. And a German is not by half so luxurious an animal as an Englishman, therefore his notion of a competence is humbler.

One often hears the lazy wealth of the English contrasted with the industrious poverty of the German universities. They who so speak forget, or choose to ignore, the fact that the private endowments of the one are more than compensated by the patronage enjoyed by the other. In Germany the university is a state affair, and the whole of the patronage at the disposal of government is conferred upon it. The road to all professions, legal, medical, clerical, or diplomatic, lies through the university. Whereas in England, the favour of Government displays itself in the annual exaction of some thousands of pounds in the shape of a tax on degrees, and in the occasional appointment of a commission. On the whole, we believe that the worldly temptations to industry offered by the universities are considerably greater there than here.

It must not be forgotten, also, that the vast majority of German students have had the luck to be born without the incumbrance of a silver spoon in their mouths,-that fatal obstacle to the intellectual feeding of our fellow-commoner class.

Finally, we hold that for the scientific inferiority of England we ought not to blame the universities, but the national character and the national circumstances. The German is of a temperament naturally phlegmatic and patient and quiescent; the Englishman, with all his placidity of feature, has a restless fever burning within which makes tranquillity and repose intolerable to him. He is in a perpetual turmoil of play or business, from the cradle to the coffin. The German is neither pestered at home with the din of money-making, nor tempted abroad by the facilities and attractions of ships, colonies, and commerce.

The Englishman is frighted from philosophic calm by the noisy competition going on around him, and if he be of a roving tendency, no uncommon case here, he has the run of the world. Ubi bene est ibi patria. All the present circumstances of the two countries tend to make the prac

tical Englishman more practical, and the studious German more studious. We are not speaking in a spirit of self-gratulation, we are stating facts which we deplore. Wisdom is better than gold, and the triumphs of science are more glorious than those of commerce.

To return to our original assertion -we say, that when all these modifying circumstances are taken into the account, the English universities have no reason to fear a comparison with the synonymous institutions of Germany. As places of general education, we believe the former to be superior, that is, taking the students altogether, an Oxford or Cambridge man, when he leaves the university, is better-informed, better-conducted, and more of a gentleman in every way than the Berlin or Göttingen man. Not but that we think our establishments might with advantage take a leaf here and there out of the German book.

If we could borrow their wide tolerance without straying into wild speculation-if we could learn their fearlessness in the pursuit of truth, without losing our reverence for the old landmarks-if we could acquire something of that concentrated earnestness with which each man devotes himself to his own allotted task, without weakening our sympathies for our fellow-men; it were indeed a consummation which would supersede all wishing. The imperfections which we have to deplore in our universities arise, not from their formal constitution, but from the national character, and are beyond the power of commissions to remedy. We have not heard that the University of London, which was untrammelled by tradition and custom, has yet produced any English Humboldts or Niebuhrs. We expect no very great or sudden improvement to result from the labours of any commission, but our faith is large in time, and that which shapes it to a perfect end.'

Wenow return to the consideration of the question immediately before us -to wit, Modern History, taking leave to remind our readers that we are still sticking to our text: I am extremely sceptical as to the real value of public oral teaching on such

a enfject as mine. Now, with al deference, we are inclined to think that, if pribute crai teaching can *... be said to have a vade at a s Ihas be in mobjects of this kind, acc yet reduced perhaps not reductie to exact sciennde forms, yet admitting wome degree of policeophical Icceed,

method in their treatruent.

if there be a subject willch does not admit so much, it cannot be worth the teaching or the learning. In the case of an embryo or growing science, the professor is, or ought to be, in advance of ali text-books, and may still claim some share of the preeminence which in former days, when all sciences were in embryo, belonged generally to his office.

Seeing that the phænomena of history are time-old, world-wide, and as the sand for multitude, there is an imperative necessity for selection and classification. Accordingly, all histories have been efforts more or less successful to select and classify, first on external grounds, that is, considerations of time and place, and afterwards on moral grounds, according to the nature of the phænomena in question. 1. The earliest history narrated the traditions referring to a particular age or country, without criticising their authority or apparently doubting their truth. Of this kind was the epic poetry of Greece, and probably the works of the first Logographi also. 2. In the second stage, the narratorexamines into the credibility of facts and balances authorities, but goes no further. We may call this the Herodotean form. 3. The third form is that which, still confining itself to a particular period or country, along with the narrative of facts, endeavours to explain the immediate motives of the agents, and the proximate causes of the national movements recorded. Thucydides is the earliest writer of this class. 4. The fourth form leaves particular for general history, and taking for starting point some principle of human nature and human conduct, traces its working among different nations at different times, and shows, by the way, what modifying causes contributed in each case to the separate result. 5. Recent philosophers have conceived the possibility of constructing a complete system of

historical science. Their u paenomena of society mo ferred to the lawS OF LAN

and letion. been baptised betimes by the so of Sociology, a a barbaros appender which will we rust, be caret: ever the child comes to be m born. Such a mélange of Grea and Roman is omincus of edetess and decay.

This miera est

En attendant, the question s issue is, whether the third or fea method be the better for oral zóing? We are clear for the foca where the field is almost TROSS We have hosts of capital werks a special subjects walten aber te third form; the fourth method makes | the step from empiricism to pus losophy; from its higher ground's takes a wide survey of the labouPEZS below, and estimates the relative bearing of their labours. The ste dents must gather their facts according to the third method, the professor must apply the fourth in teaching them how to generalize and interpret. We here are supposing that the audience are prepared to do their part by careful and diligent reading under the direction of the professor, an hypothesis, we fear, rarely, if ever, borne out by fact. For the young men who are dependent for a livel hood on their own exertions, cannot spare time from the particular studies which alone lead to honours and emoluments; and when you have excepted these, you will not find one in ten, either at the university or elsewhere, willing to undergo any intellectual labour whatever.

It was, perhaps, a regard for the probable short-comings of his class, as well as the limited time allowed him for preparation, which determined our professor to select the more popular form for his lectures.

to

Having expected,' he says, address myself to those, and to those only, to whom modern history was an almost untrodden field, I had prepared nothing which was not perfectly simple, familiar, and elementary.' The present work is, therefore, to be considered as a sort of primer; and, we suppose, each course of lectures will be more recondite than the preceding. To the undergraduates, divided, as we have said, into those who cannot,

L

and those who will not study an extraneous subject systematically, the profounder lectures will be of no avail; but we should suppose that the mass of the audience will then consist of the resident graduates, who have means, intellectual and material, for following up the required plan. We should regard with great hope and sympathy any scheme tending to foster among us a love for the philosophical side of history. As a people, we have a sturdy admiration of fact, and dislike to theory; in the spirit of Thomas, we will believe nothing that we canᄆ not touch. Hence, though our literature abounds with brilliant and life-like narratives, we have few or none among us who have looked beneath the surface of things with the keen penetration of a Niebuhr or a Guizot. We shall rejoice heartily if Sir James Stephen succeeds in raising his own name to a level with the greatest, and in training younger men worthy to receive the torch from his hand.

We confess that we should look for this result with more confidence were it not for a passage at the close of the seventh lecture, in which he falls foul of sociology-not on etymological grounds as we have done, but on principle; and moreover appears, by implication, to deny the possibility of applying scientific method to historical inquiry altogether. We should like to have quoted this passage in extenso; because, differing as we do from some of the doctrines advanced, we feel that it is hardly fair to produce them to the reader stript of the terse, vigorous, and eloquent language in which the author has clothed them; however, as the discussion extends over sixteen pages, we have no choice but to attempt an abstract.

After sketching the history of the Albigensian Crusades, and the calamities immediate and remote which they entailed upon France, he enforces, by way of moral, the truth that in the whole system of human affairs, the Lord God omnipotent reigneth-that our free-will is the inevitable, because it is the appointed minister of the Divine will; that to render that ministration cheerfully and with a ready mind, is our highest attainable good; and that to render

it in opposition to our desires and purposes, is too often at once our unhappy doom and our well-merited punishment. Such phraseology, he is well aware, will expose him to the contempt of the sociologists, of whom he mentions M. Comte the inventor, Mr. J. S. Mill, the expounder, Mr. Grote, the illustrator. The philosophers of this school are censured for arrogance in appropriating to themselves the name of thinkers;' this system of historical inquiry is not new, and the science they would build upon it is not possible. For the laws of human nature which are to form the ground-work, must be for ever hidden from us. • What is this ceaseless and almost irresistible influence of our material organism upon the soul which thinks, and feels, and wills within us? What is this fatal predominance of the worthless present over the inestimable future? What mean, and whence come all these gradations from the frenzy of the maniac, to the absolute mental health of the most gifted of the children of men? What is this ante-natal predestination which confers on one, and denies to another, the facility for every attainment, and the aptitude for every virtue? What is this transmission in almost each particular family from one generation to another, of peculiar gifts, moral and intellectual, and of corresponding responsibilities with their attendant rewards or punishments? And yet, why do two children, twins of the same womb, inmates of the same home, and pupils of the same preceptors, occasionally exhibit from the cradle moral and intellectual characters as dissimilar as their physical structure is alike? What is life, and what is death? When these questions, and such as these, are resolved, then we may boast our knowledge of the laws of human nature-but not till then.' (This is eloquent, but the eloquence is worthy of the pulpit rather than the chair.)

Again the phenomena of society are not, as say the sociologists, generated by outward circumstances upon the mass of human beings, but produced by the two internal principles of natural corruption and Divine grace-two in scrutable mysteries. The sociolo

gists have no business to omit all reference to Christianity and the Bible. True, no man is really free to express his dissent from the established creed. (See the passage quoted first in our article.) Sir

James does not, however, suspect them of infidelity, but in any case, if men are not prepared to enter into the question of religion, neither are they in a position to discuss sociology, because it is inconceivable that Christianity should be true, and yet irrelevant to any system of social science.' Assuming, then, the truth of Christianity, we must refer social phenomena to supernatural agencies'- -we must hold to the universal precepts' of the Bible, the observance of which involves the temporal welfare, and their neglect the temporal misery, of all people's. And lastly, we must admit the doctrine of a 6 particular Providence ;' and in all speculations be guided by the revealed Word of God. Thus far, Sir James.

Now, in the first place, we object to his treating Mr. Mill as if he were a mere follower of M. Comte, and not, as he unquestionably is, a great and original thinker. If our readers will turn to p. 422, vol. ii. of the System of Logic, they will see that he differs from his supposed master; and in p. 430, charges him, in no equivocal phrase, with aberra tion from the true scientific spirit.'

Again, Mr. Mill does not arrogate the term thinker' to himself and those who agree with him. course he believes those to be the truest thinkers who think with him.

Of

Moreover, we are puzzled to know how and where Mr. Grote in practice illustrates M. Comte's theory, any more than Dr. Arnold, or Mr. Macaulay, or the Bishop of St. David's does. An Edinburgh reviewer mooted the idea without proving it, and Sir James has taken it for granted.

Mill's view of historical science, as it ought to be constructed, may be found in the 9th and 10th chapters of the 6th book of his Logic. Where no word is superfluous, compression is impossible; we must, therefore, refer our readers to the book itself, contenting ourselves with stating, generally, that he holds an historical science capable of being

constructed after the analogy of astronomy, natural philosophy, &c., that is to say, by the ⚫ concrete deductive method.' These be hard words, and Sir James has made good fun of them, according to the well-known rhetorical artifice, whic encourages the audience to conclude, that what they do not comprehend, is beyond all comprehension.

Now what we are concerned to show is, that Mr. Mill's theory con tains nothing, expressed or implied. contrary to revealed religion, and that, in fact, no science is possible. if you do not leave theology out of the question for the time being.

We may premise that, whatever services M. Comte may have rendered to philosophy, we have no wish no rank ourselves among his disciples, and no intention to undertake the desperate task of vindicating his orthodoxy. If psychology be, as he holds, merely a department of physiology, it follows that the soul is nothing but a material organism; and therefore mortal. This theory annihilates at a blow not only Christianity, but all religion and all morality; it makes man but the best of beasts; and volatilizes all the hope, the happiness, and glory of life into a baseless dream. From such a philosophy our nature instinctively recoils. Mr. Mill repudiates it, calmly and quietly as it behoved, (Book VI. chap. 4.) Passion would be out of place in a treatise on logic. But M. Comte's heresies on one point need not involve the summary rejection of his conclusions on others. All the world accepts Newton's Principia, while it makes light of his Chronology.

We say, then, that the doctrine of a particular providence cannot be made to harmonize with a system of political, any more than with a system of physical science. Would Neptune ever have been discovered if providence' had been dragged in to account for the perturbations of Uranus? The Bible by no means leads to the inference that we are to look for special interventions among all nations so long as time lasts. The Jews were a peculiar people, the establishment of the blessed reign of Christ was a special occasion then and then only need we look