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By Relativity is here meant the all-pervading fact of our nature that we are not impressed, made conscious, or mentally alive, without some change of state or impression. An unvarying action on any of our senses is the same as no action at all. An even temperature, such as that enjoyed by the fishes in the tropical seas, leaves the mind an entire blank as regards heat and cold. We can neither feel nor know without recognising two distinct states. Hence all knowledge is double, or is the knowledge of contrasts or opposites: heavy is relative to light; up supposes down; being awake implies the state of sleep.

The applications of the law in the sphere of emotion are chiefly contemplated in what follows. Pleasure and pain are never absolute states; they have reference always to the previous condition. Until we know what that has been in any case, we cannot pronounce upon the efficacy of a present stimulation. We see a person reposing, apparently in luxurious ease; if the state has been immediately consequent upon a protracted and severe exertion, we are right in calling it highly pleasurable. Under other circumstances, it might be quite the reverse.

There is an offshoot or modification of the principle, arising out of the operation of habit. Impressions made upon us are greatest when they are absolutely new: after repetition they all lose something of their power; although, by remission and alternative, the causes of pleasure and pain have still a very considerable efficacy. Many of the consequences of this great fact are sufficiently acknowledged, or, if they are not, it is from other causes than our ignorance. The weakness is moral, rather than intellectual, that makes us expect that the first flush of a great pleasure, a newly-attained joy or success, will continue unabated. The poor man, probably, does not overrate the gratification of newly-attained wealth; what he fails to allow for is the deadening effect of an unbroken experience of ease and plenty. The author of "Romola" says of the hero and the heroine, in the early moments of their affection, that they could not look forward to a time when their kisses should be common things. So it is with the attainment of all great objects of pursuit: the first access of good fortune may not disappoint us; but as we are more and more removed from the state of privation, as the memory of the prior experience fades away, so does the vividness of the present enjoyment. It is the same with changes for the worse: the agony of a great loss is at first overpowering; gradually, however, the system accommodates itself to the new condition, and the severity dies away. What is called on these occasions the "force of custom" is the application of the law of Accommodation, or Relativity modified by habit.

[RELATIVITY IN PLEASURES.]

It is a familiar experience of mankind, yet hard to realise upon mere testimony, that the pleasures of rest, repose, retirement, are wholly relative to foregone labour and toil; after the first shock of transition, they are less and less felt, and can be renewed only after a renewal of the contrasting experience. The description, in "Paradise Lost," of the delicious repose of Adam and Eve in Eden is fallacious; the poet credits them with an intensity of pleasure attainable only by the brow-sweating labourer under the curse.

The delights of Knowledge are relative to previous Ignorance; for, although the possession of knowledge is in many ways a lasting good, yet the full intensity of the charm is felt only at the moment of passing from mystery to explanation, from blankness of impression to intellectual attainment. This form of the pleasure is sustained only by new acquisitions and new discoveries. Moreover, in the minor forms of the gratification due to knowledge, we never escape the law of relativity; the "power" delights us by relation to our previous impotence. Plato supposed that, in knowledge, we have an example of a pure pleasure, meaning one that had no reference to foregone privation or pain; but such "purity" would be a barren fact, not unlike the pure air of a bladeless and waterless desert. A state of uninterrupted good health, although a prime condition of enjoyment, is of itself a state of neutrality or indifference. The man that has never been ill cannot sing the joys of health; the exultation of that strain is attainable only by the valetudinarian.

These examples have been remarked upon in every age. It is the moral weakness of being carried away by a present strong feeling, as if the state would last for ever, that blinds each of us in turn to the stern reality of the fact. There are, however, numerous instances, coming under Relativity, wherein the indispensable correlative is more or less dropped out of sight and disavowed. These are the proper errors or fallacies of Relativity, a branch of the comprehensive class termed "Fallacies of Confusion". The object of the present essay is to exhibit a few of these errors as they occur in questions of practical moment.

When it is said, as by Carlyle and others, "speech is silvern, silence is golden," there is implied a condition of things where speech has been in excess; and but for this excess, the assertion is untrue. One might as well talk of the delights of hunger, or of cold, or of solitary confinement, on the ground of there being times when food, warmth, or society may be in excess, and when the opposing states would be a joyful change.

The Relativity of Pleasures, although admitted in many individual cases, has often been misconceived. The view is sometimes expressed, that there can be no pleasure without a previous pain; but this goes beyond the exigencies of the principle. We cannot go on for ever with any delight; but mere remission, without any counterpart pain, is enough for our entering with zest on many of our pleasures. A healthy man enjoys his meals without any sensible previous pain of hunger. We do not need to have been miserable for some time as a preparation for the reading of a new poem. It is true that if the sense of privation has been acute, the pleasure is proportionally increased; and that few pleasures of any great intensity grow up from indifference: still, remission and alternation may give a zest for enjoyment without any consciousness of pain.

The principle of Comparison is capriciously made use of by Paley, in his account of the elements of Happiness. He applies it forcibly and felicitously to depreciate certain pleasures—as greatness, rank, and station—and withholds its application from the pleasures that he more particularly countenances—namely, the social affections, the exercise of the faculties, and health.

[SIMPLICITY OF STYLE A RELATIVE MERIT.]

The great praise often accorded to Simplicity of Style, in literature, is an example of the suppression of the correlative in a case of mutual relationship. Simplicity is not an absolute merit; it is frequently a merit by correlation. Thus, if a certain subject has never been treated except in abstruse and difficult terminology, a man of surpassing literary powers, setting it forth in homely and intelligible language, produces a work whose highest praise is expressed by Simplicity. Again, after the last century period of artificial, complex, and highly-wrought composition, the reaction of Cowper and Wordsworth in favour of simplicity was an agreeable and refreshing change, and was in great part acceptable because of the change. It does not appear that Wordsworth comprehended this obvious fact; to him, a simplicity that cost nothing to the composer, and brought no novelty to the reader, had still a transcendent merit.

It has been a frequent practice of late years to celebrate the praises of Knowledge. Many eloquent speakers have dilated on the happiness and the superiority of the enlightened and the cultivated man. Now, the correlative or obverse must be equally true: there must be a corresponding degradation and disqualification attaching to ignorance and the want of instruction. This correlative and equally cogent statement is suppressed on certain occasions, and by persons that would not demur to the praises of knowledge: as, when we are told of the native good sense, the untaught sagacity, the admirable instincts of the people—that is, of the ignorant or the uneducated. Hence the great value of the expository device of following up every principle with its, counter-statement, the matter denied when the principle is affirmed. If knowledge is a thing superlatively good, ignorance—the opposite of knowledge—is a thing superlatively bad. There is no middle standing ground.

In the way that people use the argument from Authority, there is often an unfelt contradiction from not adverting to the correlative implication. If I lay stress upon some one's authority as lending weight to my opinion, I ought to be equally moved in the opposite direction when the same authority is against me. The common case, however, is to make a great flourish when the authority is one way, and to ignore it when it is the other way. This is especially the fashion in dealing with the ancient philosophers. Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle are quoted with much complacency when they chime in with a modern view; but, in points where they contradict our cherished sentiments, we treat them with a kind of pity as half-informed pagans. It is not seen that men liable to such gross errors as they are alleged to have committed—say on Ethics—are by that fact deprived of all weight in allied subjects, as, for example, Politics—in which Aristotle is still quoted as an authority.

[DIGNITY OF ALL LABOUR ABSURD.]

Many of the sins against Relativity can be traced to rhetorical exaggeration. Some remarkable instances of this can be cited.

When a system of ranks and dignities has once been established, there are associations of dignity and of indignity with different conditions and occupations. It is more dignified to serve in the army than to engage in trade; to be a surgeon is more honourable than to be a watchmaker. In this state of things a fervid rhetorician, eager to redress the inequalities of mankind, starts forth to preach the dignity of all labour. The device is a self-contradiction. Make all labour alike dignified, and nothing is dignified; you simply abolish dignity by depriving it of the contrast that it subsists upon.

Pope's lines—

Honour and shame from no condition rise;

Act well your part; there all the honour lies—

cannot be exempted from the fallacy of self-contradiction. Differences of condition are made by differences in the degree of honour thereto attached. If every man that did his work well were put on a level, in point of honour, with every other man that did the same; if the gatekeeper of a mansion, by being unfailingly punctual in opening the gate, were to be equally honoured with a great leader of the House of Commons, then, indeed, equality of pay would be the only thing wanted to abolish all differences of condition. There is, no doubt, in society, a quantity of misplaced honour; but so long as there are employments exceptionally arduous, and virtues signally beneficent in their operation, honour is a legitimate spur and reward, and should be graduated according to the desert in each case.

In spurring the ardour of youth to studious exertion, it is common to repeat the Homeric maxim, "to supplant every one else, and stand out first". The stimulating effect is undoubted; it is strong rhetorical brandy. Yet only one man can be first, and the exhortation is given simultaneously to a thousand.^[5]

[JUSTICE ADMIRABLE ONLY IF RECIPROCATED.]

In the discussion and inculcation of the moral duties and virtues, there has been, in all ages, a tendency to suppress correlative facts, and to affirm unconditionally what is true only with a condition. Thus, the admirable nature of Justice, and the happiness of the Just man, are a proper theme to be extolled with all the power of eloquence. It has been so with every civilized people, pagan as well as Christian. In the dialogues of Plato, justice is a prominent subject, and is adorned with the full splendour of his genius. Aristotle, in one of the few moments when he rises to poetry, pronounces justice "greater than the evening-star or the morning-star". Now all this panegyric is admissible only on the supposition of reciprocal justice. Plato, indeed, had the hardihood to say that the just man is happy in himself, and by reason of his justice, even although others are unjust to him; but the position is untenable. A man is happy in his justice if it procure for him justice in return; as a citizen is happy in his civil obedience, if it gain him protection in return. There are two parties in the case, and the moralist should obtain access to both; he should induce the one to fulfil his share before promising to the other the happiness of justice and obedience. It may be rhetorical, but it is not true, that justice will make a man happy in a society where it is not reciprocated. Justice, in these circumstances, is highly noble, praiseworthy, virtuous; but the applying of these lofty compliments is the proof that it does not bring happiness, and is an attempt to compensate the deficiency. There is a certain tendency, not very great as human nature is constituted, for justice to beget justice in return—for social virtue on one side to procure it on the other side. This is a certain encouragement to each man to perform his own part, in hope that the other party concerned may do the same. Still, the reciprocity occasionally fails, and with that the benefits to the just agent. It is necessary to urge strongly upon individuals, to impress upon the young, the necessity of performing their duty to society; it is equally implied, and equally indispensable, that society should perform its part to them. The suppressing of the correlative obligation of the State to the individual leaves a one-sided doctrine; the motive of the suppression, doubtless, is that society does not often fail of its duties to the individual, whereas individuals frequently fail of their duties to society. This may be the fact generally, but not always. It is not the fact where there are bad laws and corrupt administration. It is not the fact where the restraints on liberty are greater than the exigencies of the State demand. It is not the fact, so long as there is a single vestige of persecution for opinions. To be thoroughly veracious, for example, in a society that restrains the discussion and expression of opinions, is more than such a society is entitled to.

[PLEASURES OF BENEVOLENCE CONDITIONAL.]

The same fallacy occurs in an allied theme—the joys of Love and Benevolence. That love and benevolence are productive of great happiness is beyond question; but then the feeling must be mutual, it must be reciprocated. One-sided love or benevolence is a virtue, which is as much as to say it is not a pleasure. The delights of benevolence are the delights of reciprocated benevolence; until reciprocated, in some form, the benevolent man has, strictly speaking, the sacrifice and nothing more. There is a great reluctance to encounter this simple naked truth; to state it in theory, at least, for it is fully admitted in practice. We fence it off by the assumption that benevolence will always have its reward somehow; that if the objects of it are ungrateful, others will make good the defect at last. Now these qualifications are very pertinent, very suitable to be urged after allowing the plain truth, that benevolence is intrinsically a sacrifice, a painful act; and that this act is redeemed, and far more than redeemed, by a fair reciprocity of benevolence. Only such an admission can keep us out of a mesh of contradictions. Like justice in itself, Benevolence in itself is painful; any virtue is pain in the first instance, although, when equally responded to, it brings a surplus of pleasure. There may be acts of a beneficent tendency that cost the performer nothing, or that even may chance to be agreeable; but these examples must not be given as the rule, or the type. It is the essence of virtuous acts, the prevailing character of the class, to tax the agent, to deprive him of some satisfaction to himself; this is what we must start from; we are then in a position to explain how and when, and under what circumstances, and with what limitations, the virtuous man, whether his virtue be justice or benevolence, is from that cause a happy man.

It is a fallacy of the suppressed relative to describe virtue as determined by the moral nature of God, as opposed to his arbitrary will. The essence of Morality is obedience to a superior, to a Law; where there is no superior there is nothing either moral or immoral. The supreme power is incapable of an immoral act. Parliament may do what is injurious, it cannot do what is illegal. So the Deity may be beneficent or maleficent, he cannot be moral or immoral.

Among the various ways, proposed in the seventeenth century, of solving the difficulty of the mutual action of the heterogeneous agencies—matter and mind—one was a mode of Divine interference, called the "Theory of Occasional Causes". According to this view, the Deity exerted himself by a perpetual miracle to bring about the mental changes corresponding to the physical agents operating on our senses—light, sound, &c. Now in the mode of action suggested there is nothing self-contradictory; but in the use of the word "miracle" there is a mistake of relativity. The meaning of a miracle is an exceptional interference; it supposes an habitual state of things, from which it is a deviation. The very idea of miracle is abolished if every act is to be alike miraculous.

[MYSTERY CORRELATES WITH THE INTELLIGIBLE.]

We shall devote the remainder of this exposition to a still more notable class of mistakes due to the suppression of a correlative member in a relative couple—those, namely, connected with the designation, "Mystery," a term greatly abused, in various ways, and especially by disregarding its relative character. Mystery supposes certain things that are plain, intelligible, knowable, revealed; and, by contrast to these, refers to certain other things that are obscure, unintelligible, unknowable, unrevealed. When a man's conduct is entirely plain, straightforward, or accounted for, we call that an intelligible case; when we are perplexed by the tortuosities of a crafty, double-dealing person, we say it is all very mysterious. So, in nature, we consider that we understand certain phenomena: such as gravity, and all its consequences, in the fall of bodies, the flow of rivers, the motions of the planets, the tides. On the other hand, earthquakes and volcanoes are very mysterious; we do not know what they depend upon, how or in what circumstances they are produced. Some of the operations of living bodies are understood—as the heart's action in the mechanical propulsion of the blood; others, and the greater number, are mysterious, as the whole process of germination and growth. Now the existence of the contrast between things plainly understood, and things not understood, gives one distinct meaning to the term Mystery. In some cases, a mystery is formed by an apparent contradiction, as in the Theological mystery of Free-will and Divine Foreknowledge; here, too, there is a contrast with the great mass of consistent and reconcilable things. But now, when we are told by sensational writers, that everything is mysterious; that the simplest phenomenon in nature—the fall of a stone, the swing of a pendulum, the continuance of a ball shot in the air—are wonderful, marvellous, miraculous, our understanding is confounded; there being then nothing plain at all, there is nothing mysterious. The wonderful rises from the common; as the lofty is lofty by relation to something lower: if there is nothing common, then there is nothing wonderful; if all phenomena are mysterious, nothing is mysterious; if we are to stand aghast in amazement because three times four is twelve, what phenomenon can we take as the type of the plain and the intelligible? You must always keep up a standard of the common, the easy, the comprehensible, if you are to regard other things as wonderful, difficult, inexplicable.

[LOCKE ON THE LIMITS OF THE UNDERSTANDING.]

The real character of a MYSTERY, and what constitutes the Explanation of a fact, have been greatly misconceived. The changes of view on these points make up a chapter in the history of the education of the human mind. Perhaps the most decisive turning point was the publication of Locke's "Essay concerning Human Understanding," the motive of which, as stated in the homely and forcible language of the preface, was to ascertain what our understandings can do, what subjects they are fit to deal with, and where they should stop. I quote a few sentences:—

"If by this inquiry into the nature of the Understanding, I can discover the powers thereof; how far they reach; to what things they are in any degree proportionate; and where they fail us: I suppose it may be of use, to prevail with the busy mind of man to be more cautious in meddling with things exceeding its comprehension; to stop when it is at the utmost extent of its tether; and to sit down in a quiet ignorance of those things which, upon examination, are proved to be beyond the reach of our capacities." "The candle that is set up in us, shines bright enough for all our purposes. The discoveries we can make with this ought to satisfy us. And we shall then use our Understandings aright, when we entertain all objects in that way and proportion that they are suited to our faculties, and upon those grounds they are capable of being proposed to us." "It is of great use for the sailor to know the length of his line, though he cannot fathom with it all the depths of the ocean."

The course of physical science was preparing the same salutary lesson. Locke's great contemporary and friend, Isaac Newton, was his fellow-worker in this tutorial undertaking; nor should Bacon be forgotten, although there is dispute as to the extent and character of his influence. The combined operation of these great leaders of thought was apparent in the altered views of scientific inquirers as to what is competent in research—what is the proper aim of inquiry. There arose a disposition to abandon the pursuit of mysterious essences and grand pervading unities, and ascertain with precision the facts and the laws of natural phenomena. The study of astronomy was inaugurated in Greenwich Observatory. The experiments of Priestley and of Franklin farther exemplified the eighteenth-century key to the secrets of the universe.

The lesson imparted by Newton and Locke and their successors still remains to be carried out and embodied in the subtler inquiries. The bearing upon what constitutes a Mystery, and what constitutes Explanation, or the accounting for appearances, may be expressed thus:—

In the first place, the Understanding can never pass out of its own experience—its acquired knowledge, whether of body or of mind. What we obtain by our various sensibilities to the world about us, and by our self-consciousness, are the foundation, the ABC of everything that we are capable of knowing. We know colours, and we know sound; we know pleasure and pain, and the various emotions of wonder, fear, love, anger. If there be any being endowed with senses different from ours, with that being we can have no communion. If there be any phenomena that escape our limited sensibilities, they transcend the possibility of our knowledge.

It is necessary, however, to take account of the combining or constructive aptitudes of the mind. We can go a certain length in putting together our alphabet of sensation and experience into many various compounds. We can imagine a paradise or a pandemonium; but only as made up of our own knowledge of things good and evil. The limits of this constructive power are soon reached. We are baffled to enter into the feelings of our own kindred, when they are far removed in character and circumstances from ourselves. The youth at twenty cannot approximate to the feelings of men of middle age. The healthy are unable to comprehend the life of the invalid.

[TIME AND SPACE RELATIVE TO OUR FACULTIES.]

To come to the practical applications. The great leading notions called Time and Space are known to us only under the conditions of our own sensibility. Time is made known by all our actions, all our senses, all our feelings, and by the succession of our thoughts; it is experienced as a continuance and a repetition of movement, sight, sound, fear, or any other state of feeling, or of thinking. One motion or sensation is continued longer than another; or it is more frequently repeated after intermission, giving the numerical estimate of time, as in the beats of the pendulum. In these ways we form estimates of seconds, minutes, hours, days. And our constructive faculty can be brought into play to conceive the larger tracts of duration—a century, or a hundred centuries. Nay, by our arithmetical powers we can put down in cipher, or conceive symbolically (which is the meagrest of all conceptions) millions of millions of centuries; these being after all but compounds of our alphabet of enduring or repeated sensations and thoughts. We can suppose this arithmetical process to operate upon past duration or upon future duration, and there is no limit to the numbers that we can write down. But there is one thing that we cannot do; we cannot fix upon a point when Time or succession began, or upon a point when it will cease. That is an operation not in keeping with our faculties; the very supposition is impracticable. We cannot entertain the notion of a state of things wherein the fact of continuance had no place; the effort belies itself. Time is inseparable from our mental nature; whatever we imagine, we must imagine as enduring. Some philosophers have supposed that we must be endowed by nature with the conception of Time, before we begin to exercise our senses; but the difficulty would be to deprive us of that adjunct without extinguishing our mental nature. Give us sensibility, and you cannot withhold the element of Time. The supposition of Kant and others, that it is implanted in us as an empty form, before we begin to employ our senses upon things, is needless; for as soon as we move, see, hear, think, are pleased or pained, we create time. And our notion of Time in general is exactly what these sensibilities make it, only enlarged by our constructive power already spoken of.

[MATTER AND VOID SUPPLEMENTARY.]

While all our senses and feelings give us time, it is our experience of Motion and Resistance—the energetic or active side of our nature alone—that gives us Space. The simplest feature of Space is the alternation of Resistance and Non-Resistance, of obstructed motion and freedom to move. The hand presses dead upon an obstacle; the obstacle gives way and allows free motion; these two contrasting experiences are the elements of the two contrasting facts—Matter and Space. By none of the five senses, in their pure and proper character as senses, can we obtain these experiences; and hence at an earlier stage of inquiry into the mind, when our knowledge-giving sensibilities were referred to the five senses, there was no adequate account of the notion of Space or Extension. Space includes more than this simple contrast of the resisting and the non-resisting; it includes what we call the Co-existing or Contemporaneous, the great aggregate of the outspread world, as existing at any moment, a somewhat complicated attainment, which I am not now specially concerned with. It sufficiently illustrates the limitation of our knowledge by our sensibilities, from the nature of space, to fasten attention on the double and mutually supplementing experience of Matter and Void; the one resisting movement, and giving the consciousness of resistance, or dead strain, the other permitting movement, and giving the consciousness of the unobstructed sweep of the limbs or members. Whatever else may be in space, this freedom to move, to soar, to expatiate (in contrast to being hemmed in, obstructed, held fast), is an essential part of the conception, and is formed out of our active or moving sensibilities. Now, as far as movement is concerned, we must be in one of two states;—we must be putting forth energy without effecting movement, being met by obstacles called matter; or we must be putting forth energy unresisted and effecting movement, which is what we mean by empty space. There is no third position in the matter of putting forth our active energy. Where resistance ends and freedom begins, there is space; where freedom ends, and obstruction begins, there is matter. We find our sentient life to be made up, as regards movement, of a certain number and range of these two alternations; in other words, free spaces and resisting barriers. And we can, by the constructive power already mentioned, imagine other proportions of the two experiences; we can imagine the scope for movement, the absence of obstruction, to be enlarged more and more, to be counted by thousands and millions of miles; but the only terminus or boundary that we can imagine is resistance, a dead obstacle. We are able to conceive the starry spaces widened and prolonged from galaxy to galaxy through enormous strides of increasing amplitude, but when we try to think an end to this career, we can think only of a dead wall. There is no other end of space within the grasp of our faculties; and that termination is not an end of extension; for we know that solid matter, viewed in other ways than as obstructing movement, has the same property of the extended belonging to the empty void. The inference is, that the limitation of our means of knowledge renders altogether incompetent the imagination of an end to either Time or Space. The greatest efforts of our combining faculty cannot exceed the elements presented to it, and these elements contain nothing that would set forth the situation of space ending, and obstruction not beginning.

[ARE TIME AND SPACE INFINITE?]

Under these circumstances, it is an irrevelant enquiry, to ask, Are Time and Space finite or infinite? Many philosophers have put the question, and even answered it. They say Time has no beginning and no end, and Space has no boundaries; or, as otherwise expressed—Time and Space are Infinite: an answer of such vagueness as to mean anything, from a harmless and proper assertion of the limits of our faculties, up to the verge of extravagance and self-contradiction.

When, in fact, people talk of the Infinite in Time and Space, they can point to one intelligible signification; as to the rest, this word is not a subject for scientific propositions, and the attempt at such can lead only to contradictions. The Infinite is a phrase most various in its purport: it is for the most part an emotional word, expressing human desire and aspiration; a word of poetry, imagination, and preaching, not a word to be discussed under science; no intellectual definition would exhibit its emotional force.

The second property of our intelligence is, that we can generalise many facts into one. Tracing agreement among the multifarious appearances of things, we can comprehend in one statement a vast number of details. The single law of gravity expresses the fall of a stone, the flow of rivers, the retention of the moon in her circuit round the earth. Now, this generalising sweep is a real advance in our knowledge, an ascent in the matter of intelligence, a step towards centralising the empire of science. What is more, this is the only real meaning of EXPLANATION. A difficulty is solved, a mystery unriddled; when it can be shown to resemble something else; to be an example of a fact already known. Mystery is isolation, exception, or, it may be, apparent contradiction; the resolution of the mystery is found in assimilation, identity, fraternity. When all things are assimilated, so far as assimilation can go, so far as likeness holds, there is an end to explanation; there is an end to what the mind can do, or can intelligently desire.

[GRAVITY NOT A MYSTERY.]

Thus, when Gravity was generalised, by assimilating the terrestrial attraction seen in falling bodies with the celestial attraction of the sun and planets; and when, by fair presumption, the same power was extended to the remote stars; when, also, the law was ascertained, so that the movements of the various bodies could be computed and predicted, there was nothing further to be done; explanation was exhausted. Unless we can find some other force to fraternise with gravity, so that the two might become a still more comprehensive unity, we must rest in gravity as the ultimatum of our faculties. There is no conceivable modification, or substitute, that would better our position. Before Newton, it was a mystery what kept the moon and the planets in their places; the assimilation with falling bodies was the solution. But, say many persons, is not gravity itself a mystery? We say No; gravity has passed through all the stages of legitimate and possible explanation; it is the most highly generalised of all physical facts, and by no assignable transformation could it be made more intelligible than it is. It is singularly easy of comprehension; its law is exactly known; and, excepting the details of calculation, in its more complex workings, there is nothing to complain of, nothing to rectify, nothing to pretend ignorance about; it is the very pattern, the model, the consummation of knowledge. The path of science, as exhibited in modern times, is towards generality, wider and wider, until we reach the highest, the widest laws of every department of things; there explanation is finished, mystery ends, perfect vision is gained.

What is always reckoned the mystery by pre-eminence is the union of BODY and MIND. How, then, should we treat this Mystery according to the spirit of modern thought, according to the modern laws of explanation? The course is to conceive the elements according to the only possible plan, our own sensibility or consciousness; which gives us matter as one class of facts—extension, inertness, weight, and so on; and mind as another class of facts—pleasures, pains, volitions, ideas. The difference between these two is total, diametrical, complete; there is really nothing common to the experience of pleasure and the experience of a tree; difference has here reached its acme; agreement is eliminated; there is no higher genus to include these two in one; as the ultimate, the highest elements of knowledge, they admit of 110 fusion, no resolution, no unity. Our utmost flight of generality leaves us in possession of a double, a couple of absolutely heterogeneous elements. Matter cannot be resolved into mind; mind cannot be resolved into matter; each has its own definition; each negatives the other.

This being the fact, we accept it, and acquiesce. There is surely nothing to be dissatisfied with, to complain of, in the circumstance that the elements of our experience are, in the last resort, two, and not one. If we had been provided with fifty ultimate experiences, none of them having a single property in common with any other; and if we had only our present limited intellects, we might be entitled to complain of the world's mysteriousness in the one proper acceptation of mystery—namely, as overpowering our means of comprehension, as loading us with unassimilable facts. As it is, matter, in its commoner aspects and properties, is perfectly intelligible; in the great number and variety of its endowments or properties, it is revealed to us slowly and with much difficulty, and these subtle properties—the deep affinities and molecular arrangements— are the mysteries rightly so called. Mind in itself is also intelligible; a pleasure is as intelligible as would be any transmutation of it into the inscrutable essence that people often desiderate. It is one of the facts of our sensibility, and has a great many facts of its own kindred, which makes it all the more intelligible.

The varieties of pleasure, pain, and emotion are very numerous; and to know, remember, and classify them, is a work of labour, a legitimate mystery. The subtle links of thought are also very various, although probably all reducible to a small number; and the ascertaining and following out of these has been a work of labour and time; they have, therefore, been mysterious; mystery and intellectual toil being the real correlatives. The complications of matter and the complications of mind are genuine mysteries; the reducing or simplifying of these complications, by the exertions of thinking men, is the way, and the only way out of the darkness into light.

[UNION OF MIND AND BODY.]

But what now of the mysterious union of the two great ultimate facts of human experience? What should the followers of Newton and Locke say to this crowning instance of deep and awful mystery? Only one answer can be given. Accept the union, and generalise it. Find out the fewest number of simple laws, such as will express all the phenomena of this conjoint life. Resolve into the highest possible generalities the connections of pleasure and pain, with all the physical stimulants of the senses—food, tastes, odours, sounds, lights—with all the play of feature and of gesture, and all the resulting movements and bodily changes; and when you have done that, you have so far truly, fully, finally explained the union of body and mind. Extend your generalities to the course of the thoughts; determine what physical changes accompany the memory, the reason, the imagination, and express those changes in the most general, comprehensive laws, and you have explained the how and the why brain causes thought, and thought works in brain. There is no other explanation needful, no other competent, no other that would be explanation. Instead of our being "unfortunate," as is sometimes said, in not being able to know the essence of either matter or mind—in not comprehending their union; our misfortune would be to have to know anything different from what we do or may know. If there be still much mystery attaching to this linking of the two extreme facts of our experience, it is simply this: that we have made so little way in ascertaining what in one goes with what in the other. We know a good deal about the feelings and their alliances, some of which are open and palpable to all mankind; and we have obtained some important generalities in these alliances. Of the connections of thought with physical changes we know very little: these connections, therefore, are truly and properly mysterious; but they are not intrinsically or hopelessly so. The advancing study of the physical organs, on the one hand, and of the mental functions, on the other, may gradually abate this mystery. And if a day arrive when the links that unite our intellectual workings with the workings of the nervous system and the other bodily organs shall be fully ascertained and adequately generalised, no one thoroughly educated in the scientific spirit of the last two centuries will call the union of mind and body any longer inscrutable or mysterious.

FOOTNOTES:

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