Part 6 (1/2)
Carlyle's Letters, Caroline Fox's Memoirs, and many other sources of information, make this clear. On the literary side he will be variously estimated, as we survey him from one or other aspect of his many-sided career. As a stimulator of public opinion the work he did was enormous.
This is not the place to discuss the value of this or that movement a.s.sociated with his name; but there can be no doubt that many questions, like the reform of the land laws, were initiated by him. In the seventies his philosophy dominated Oxford. It is of no account to-day.
On the philosophical side Mill's position is weakened by his ignorance of the more simple sciences, which we now know to be of the greatest moment in the study of intellectual problems. Mill knew little of physics, and of biology still less. His education in this respect belonged to the old-fas.h.i.+oned type. His work in logic is all but unshaken, although his book has been superseded for school and college use. His psychology, however, his ethics, much of his economics, and above all, his metaphysics, must be corrected by later ideas. Doubtless Mill's readjustments in mental science are most valuable, especially his rehandling of the old doctrines; but fundamentally these are Hume's.
Mill's chief philosophical work was destructive. He utterly routed the remnants of a still earlier philosophy, furbished up with all the knowledge and all the acuteness of Sir William Hamilton. But the great generalizations which have changed the whole drift of our philosophy are the Conservation of Energy, and Evolution, including as the latter does the laws and conditions of life, and in particular the doctrine of Heredity. For adequate philosophical guidance on these subjects we must turn to Herbert Spencer.
But first let me point to the number of political economists who have followed Mill in the discussion of the relation of society to the ”wealth” it produces. Mill's ”Political Economy” was more of a systematic summary of the prevailing doctrines than an original work. It long formed, however, the basis of ordinary English knowledge on the subject, and by its adhesion to the Wages Fund and other erroneous theories, it did not a little harm as well as good to Economic Science.
Mill's most enthusiastic disciple in economics, =Henry Fawcett (1833-1884)=, went far beyond his master in his acceptance of the main doctrines of the Ricardo school. Many of the positions maintained in his ”Political Economy” were abandoned by Mill before his death, particularly the Wages Fund theory; and in his ”Autobiography” he traced his own progress to views which, as he said, would cla.s.s him ”under the general designation of Socialist.” He declared himself in favour of ”the common owners.h.i.+p in the raw material of the globe, and an equal partic.i.p.ation of all in the benefits of combined labour.”[18]
Professor Fawcett, who published his ”Manual of Political Economy” in 1863, continued to the last to hold to the old views, and especially to favour as little as possible the intervention of the State. As member of Parliament, first for Brighton and afterwards for Hackney, he did great service by his criticisms of Indian finance. For more than four years (1880-1884) he held the position of Postmaster-General, and introduced many valuable reforms into the department under his administration.
Other economists of importance, =John Elliott Cairnes (1824-1875)= and =William Stanley Jevons (1835-1882)=, have differed from Mill in many theoretic principles; but the fairest survey of the later developments of Mill's economics is given by =Henry Sidgwick (1838- )=, Knightbridge Professor of Moral Philosophy at Cambridge, and by Alfred Marshall (born 1842). In his ”Principles of Political Economy” (1883) Sidgwick attempts, with great clearness, to criticise the conflicting views of the older economists in the light of the modern and more socialist views. He also attempts in his ”Methods of Ethics” (1874) a compromise between the Utilitarian and the Intuitionist schools, and he does this also in his ”Elements of Politics” (1891), a comprehensive survey of political science. Mr Marshall, who holds the Chair of Political Economy at Cambridge, has written ”Economics of Industry”
(1879), and ”Principles of Economics” (1890). A writer who did much to make foreign economists known in England, and who seemed at one time destined to be the able leader of a new school, was =Thomas Edward Cliffe Leslie (1827-1882)=, whose ”Essays” are full of terse and suggestive criticism. Cliffe Leslie died, however, without writing any work of first-rate importance. He did something, however, following the line of writers like Richard Jones (1790-1855), to bring academic theory to the test of actual facts.
During the last twenty years of the century, economic study has taken increasingly the direction of elaborate investigation of the circ.u.mstances of industrial life. On the one hand, a school of economic historians,--Arnold Toynbee, with a brilliant _aperau_ on ”The Industrial Revolution,” Thorold Rogers in his monumental ”History of Agriculture and Prices,” Dr Cunningham, in the ”Growth of English History and Commerce,” and Professor W. J. Ashley in ”Economic History and Theory,” have greatly extended our knowledge of past industry. On the other, we have the colossal work undertaken at his own expense by Mr Charles Booth, a.s.sisted by a group of zealous students--including H.
Llewellyn Smith, D. F. Schloss, and Miss Clara Collet, now all filling official posts at the Labor Department of the Board of Trade; and Miss Beatrice Potter (now Mrs Sidney Webb)--a complete survey of London life, statistical, economic, industrial, and social. The nine volumes of this ”Life and Labor of the People,” already issued, const.i.tute one of the most important statistical works ever undertaken by a private person. Mr and Mrs Sidney Webb wrote together another valuable contribution to economic science in ”The History of Trade Unionism” (1894).
But political economy is merely a branch of the larger science of sociology, and for the first general treatment of the whole science, since Comte, we turn to the most characteristic philosopher of the century. =Herbert Spencer (1820- )= was born at Derby, where his father was a teacher of mathematics. From his father and uncle, the latter a Congregational minister, he received his early education.
Articled at seventeen years of age to a civil engineer, he followed that profession with some success for seven or eight years, when he gradually drifted into literature--a series of letters by him ”On the Proper Sphere of Government” appearing in the _Nonconformist_ for 1842. A few years later, he wrote for the _Westminster Review_, at the house of the editor of which magazine he met George Eliot in 1851, and began the most famous friends.h.i.+p of his life. It was also in 1851 that he published his first work, ”Social Statics,” and four years later his ”Principles of Psychology.” In 1861 he published his work on ”Education,” and the following year his ”First Principles.” Between that time and 1896 he has slowly built up a system of synthetic philosophy, in a dozen bulky volumes, which has secured him a very large following not only in England, but throughout the Continent and America. His ”Descriptive Sociology” is the production of many writers, who have worked under his direction, collecting facts from travellers and scientists all over the world.
To have placed Psychology and Ethics on a scientific basis in harmony with the discoveries of the century is a truly great achievement. Many years have now pa.s.sed away since Herbert Spencer claimed the whole domain of knowledge as his own, and undertook to revise, in accordance with the latest lights, the whole sphere of philosophy. What must have seemed intolerable presumption in 1860 became in 1896 a completed task.
In universality of knowledge he rivals Aristotle and Bacon at a time when the sphere of learning is immensely larger than in their epochs. It is not within the province of this survey of literature to go through the twelve large volumes of his works in detail. We would rather point out that, to the unphilosophical reader, who would willingly know something of Spencer's literary powers, the ”Study of Sociology,” which he wrote for the ”International Scientific Series,” and the treatise on ”Education” are books which all who read must enjoy.
To him, with Mill, belongs the glory of restoring to Great Britain the old supremacy in philosophy given to her by Bacon, continued by Locke, Hume, and Berkeley, but temporarily interrupted by Kant and Hegel.
Another writer who has attempted to combine psychology with physiology is =Alexander Bain (1818- )=, who was for many years Professor of Logic in the University of Aberdeen, and twice Lord Rector. Bain a.s.sisted Mill in the preparation of his ”Logic,” and has himself written a treatise on that science, also lengthy works on ”The Senses and the Intellect,” and ”The Emotions and the Will.” Perhaps his work on ”Mental and Moral Science” is his best-known contribution to student literature.
Although he is the author of books on grammar and composition, Professor Bain's style is always oppressively heavy and unattractive. As Spencer and Bain combined psychology with physiology, so it was the effort of Boole and De Morgan to extend the scope of logic by an ingenious application of mathematics.
The leader for many years of the ”Hegelian” school of philosophy at Oxford, which has long held the field against Mill on the one hand and Spencer on the other, was =Thomas Hill Green (1838-1882)=, who was appointed Whyte Professor of Moral Philosophy in 1877, and who published the same year a series of articles in the _Contemporary Review_, on ”Mr Herbert Spencer and Mr G. H. Lewes: their Application of the Doctrine of Evolution to Thought.” He was preparing for publication his ”Prolegomena to Ethics” at the time of his death, and the work was finally edited by Professor A. C. Bradley, who has himself written a treatise on logic, and whose Hegelian work, ent.i.tled ”Ethical Studies,”
is of the highest interest. Green was a moral force in Oxford, quite apart from his philosophical speculation, as the following extract from one of his lectures will indicate:--”I confess to hoping for a time when the phrase, 'the education of a gentleman,' will have lost its meaning, because the sort of education which alone makes the gentleman in any true sense will be within the reach of all. As it was the aspiration of Moses that all the Lord's people should be prophets, so with all seriousness and reverence we may hope and pray for a condition of English society in which all honest citizens will recognize themselves and be recognized by each other as gentlemen.”
=George Henry Lewes (1817-1878)=, whose name is frequently joined with that of Spencer by his a.s.sociation of biology with ethics and psychology, was the son of Charles Lee Lewes, the actor, and was one of the most versatile writers of our times. His first important work was the ”Biographical History of Philosophy,” originally published in 1845 in Knight's s.h.i.+lling Library, but amplified without improvement into two substantial volumes in 1867. Lewes's distaste for the ordinary metaphysics, and the severity of his criticism on Hegel, have rendered this work the _bete noir_ of all transcendental students; but it remains the one English ”History of Philosophy” of any pretension. More unqualified praise may be given to the ”Life of Goethe,” which Lewes published in 1855. Perhaps no other man then living could have shown himself competent to deal with Goethe's many-sidedness--to discuss ”Faust” and ”Ta.s.so,” ”Hermann und Dorothea” at one moment, the poet's biological and botanical discoveries the next, and to estimate at their true worth the speculations on colours, which Goethe held to be more calculated than his poems to secure him immortality. The book remains the standard life of the great Weimar sage in this country, and is popular in Germany, in spite of a vast Goethe literature which has been published since its appearance. In addition to these great works Lewes wrote two novels, one of which, ”Ranthorpe,” Charlotte Bronte praised enthusiastically. He edited the _Fortnightly Review_, and also initiated a craze for aquaria, by his ”Seaside Studies;” he endeavoured, indeed, to popularise many of the sciences, particularly physiology. His last years were devoted to philosophical questions, and his ”Problems of Life and Mind” were published in fragments, the concluding volume, under George Eliot's editors.h.i.+p, after his death.
The earliest writer of the era to popularise science was =Sir David Brewster (1781-1868)=, an eminent physicist, in whose _Edinburgh Cyclopaedia_ Carlyle commenced his literary career. His ”Life of Newton,”
”Martyrs of Science,” and ”More Worlds than One” are still widely read.
=Michael Faraday (1791-1867)=, another famous physicist, is still better remembered by our own generation, princ.i.p.ally for his popular lectures at the Royal Inst.i.tution, where he was superintendent of the laboratory for forty-eight years. He was a blacksmith's son, and was originally apprenticed to a bookbinder. After his discovery of magneto-electricity, he had, he told Tyndall, a hard struggle to decide whether he should make wealth or science the pursuit of his life.
Tyndall calculates that Faraday could easily have realised 150,000; but he declared for science and died a poor man.
=John Tyndall (1820-1893)=, who once said that it was his great ambition to play the part of Schiller to this Goethe, succeeded Faraday at the Royal Inst.i.tution, and wrote about him eloquently in his ”Faraday as a Discoverer.” Tyndall was born at Leighlin Bridge, Carlow, Ireland, in 1820. His father was a member of the Irish constabulary. His services to many branches of science were great; but he concerns us here not so much by his treatises on electricity, sound, light, and heat, or by his discoveries in diamagnetism, as by his ”Lectures on Science for Unscientific People,” which, Huxley said, was the most scientific book he had ever read, and which has yet the transcendent merit of giving enjoyment as well as instruction, even to the readers of three-volume novels. In 1856 Tyndall made a journey to Switzerland, in company with Professor Huxley, and the friends afterwards wrote a treatise ”On the Structure and Motion of Glaciers.” Geological treatises may be said to have given the fullest play to the literary side of science. The work of Robert Bentley and Sir Joseph Hooker in botany, of Michael Foster, St George Mivart, and Francis Maitland Balfour in biology, is, it may be, equal or superior to that of the bulk of the writers whose achievements we have chronicled; but it is not a part of literature. Burdon Sanderson, Balfour Stewart, and a host of other men, have done incalculable service in the Victorian era--service, it is to be feared, which scarcely obtains as generous recognition as the cheap generalisations of smaller men; but scientific text-books, however important, are scarcely within the scope of these chapters. Geology, on the other hand, is, as it were, a conglomerate of the sciences, and lends itself readily to the most eloquent literary expression. Few writers have been more widely read than =Hugh Miller (1802-1856)=, a Cromarty stone-mason, whose first enthusiasm for study of the rocks arose from following his trade, but whose life was mainly devoted to journalism, and to editing _The Witness_. His ”Old Red Sandstone,”
”Footprints of the Creator,” and ”The Testimony of the Rocks” were effective in kindling a taste for natural science.
The special study which Miller gave to the Red Sandstone rocks was extended by =Sir Roderick Impey Murchison (1792-1871)= to the Silurian System, and his work ent.i.tled ”Siluria” has pa.s.sed through many editions. Scotland seems to have been the nursery of geologists, for Miller and Murchison, Lyell and the brothers Geikie, were all born north of the Tweed. =Sir Charles Lyell (1797-1875)= was born at Kinnordy, in Forfars.h.i.+re, and educated at Midhurst, and at Exeter College, Oxford.
Called to the bar, he went the Western Circuit for two years, but, when attending some of Dr Buckland's lectures, he became attached to geology.
His ”Principles of Geology,” first published in 1830, caused a revolution in the science. Never before had there been presented such a connected ill.u.s.tration of the influences which had caused the earth's changes in the unresting distribution of land and water areas. Much of Lyell's great work reads like a fairy tale; much might have been thought the fruit of an imaginative rather than of a scientific mind. Lyell's smaller book, the ”Student's Elements of Geology,” was injured in literary merit by the progressive study of the science of which he had been the second father. The constant addition of fresh knowledge, and his conversion to Darwin's views, necessitated the continual rewriting of parts and further revision by other hands after the author's death.
”The Antiquity of Man” (in defence of Darwin's theory) is of more value from a literary standpoint. Before the beginning of the reign =William Buckland (1784-1856)=, Dean of Westminster, by whose lectures Lyell had so much profited, had written his famous Bridgewater Treatise on ”Geology and Mineralogy considered with reference to Natural Theology.”
His son, =Frank Buckland (1826-1880)=, wrote clever and readable books on ”Natural History,” and had genuine enthusiasm for the study of animal life; but he was charged with having vulgarised the studies in which he took so keen an interest. The most distinguished living geologist is Sir Archibald Geikie, who is now director-general of the Geological Survey of the United Kingdom. His ”Text Book,” which was first published in 1882, is a model of lucid writing, and his essays are among the most pleasant literary products of the age. His brother, James Geikie, has written an important work on glaciation, ent.i.tled ”The Great Ice Age.”
But the scientific literature of the past sixty years might almost be said to be summarised in the work of =Charles Darwin (1809-1882)=. A funeral in Westminster Abbey, amid the mourning of many nations, closed the career of one whose life-work had often been greeted with scorn.