It would be a great gain, not for the history of Egypt only, but for the study of the Old Testament, if the dates of the ancient Egyptian dynasties could be fixed more certainly. The range of difference in the dates assigned by leading Egyptologists is at present enormous. Bockh, for example, gives the date of the reign of the first Pharaoh, Mena, as B.C. 5702, while Bunsen brings it down so low as B.C. 3623-a difference of 2079 years. It is, in Brugsch's words, as if one should hesitate whether to fix the date of the accession of Augustus at B.C. 207, or at A.D. 1872.

Is it possible that astronomy will, after all, be the means of resolving the difficulties, and ending the confusion? Mr. G. F. Hardy believes that it has done so already. He holds that the measurements which were carried out by Piazzi Smyth | upon the Great Pyramid, compared with the more recent measurements of Dr. Flinders Petrie on the trenches and other outworks, conclusively prove an astronomical knowledge and an astronomical intention on the part of the pyramid builders. So close is the correspondence of these independent measurements that, he says, "it is quite out of the question to regard it as accidental."

Many attempts have been made to draw an intelligible meaning out of that obscure but interesting historical text, Numbers xxi. 14. possible range of interpretation is well illustrated by the wide difference between the Authorised and Revised Versions. In the former it stands thus: "Wherefore it is said in the book of the wars of the Lord, What he did in the Red Sea, and in the brooks of Arnon;" while the latter gives us : "Wherefore it is said in the book of the Wars of the Lord,

Vaheb in Suphah,

And the valleys of Arnon"making the quotation part of a song or battle ode.

Quite recently, two new and notable efforts to find a satisfactory meaning have been made in the Academy. The first is by Mr. S. A. Binion. Catching a hint from the fact that the Septuagint gives "Zoob" for the otherwise utterly unknown word "Vaheb" of the Hebrew, Mr. Binion suggests a slightly different change. The LXX. read a Z for the V. That is all that was required to give them Zoob in the Greek for Vaheb in the Hebrew. He proposes to read an R for the V. Thus he gets Rahab instead of Vaheb. And he translates : "Wherefore it will be said in the book of the wars of the Lord, That which happened to Rahab in Supha, and that which has taken place at the brooks of Arnon." Now "Rahab" stands for Egypt; as in Isaiah xxx. 7, "For Egypt helpeth in vain, and to no purpose; therefore have I called her Rahab that sitteth still". a clearer passage, by the way, than any that Mr. Binion gives for proof. And Supha he takes to signify the Red Sea (in Hebrew, Yam Suph). Hence the meaning of the quotation from the book of the wars of the Lord will be that in all future history of Israel the miracles at the Red Sea and at the brooks of Arnon will be recounted side by side as equally marvellous.

The other interpretation comes from Professor Sayce. To some critics the first and the happiest part of their task is the demolishing of their

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This gives in And he trans

predecessor's theory. Professor Sayce also begins that way. But he spends few words upon it: "Mr. Binion's conjecture is not likely to satisfy any one except its author." He then goes direct to "that impossible word" Vaheb. He accepts the reading of the Septuagint, which merely changes the Vinto a Z, as we have seen. Hebrew "Zahab" (Greek, Zoob). lates: "Wherefore it is said in a book, The wars of Yahveh were at Zahab in Suphah, and at the brooks of Arnon." Now, we learn from Deut. i. 1 that Zahab was in Edom, not far from Suph or Suphah. And I Kings ix. 26 tells us that "the sea of Suph" was the Gulf of Aqaba. Consequently, one of the "wars of Yahveh" was in Edom, in the neighbourhood of the Yam Suph, or Gulf of Aqaba.

"The war of Yahveh in this part of Edom," adds Professor Sayce, "is unrecorded in the Old Testament. We should not have heard of it at all had it not been alluded to in a book' in connexion with the war against the Amorites at the brooks of Arnon, of which we have an account. But it may be possible to bring it into relation with a campaign made by Ramses III. of the Twentieth Egyptian Dynasty against 'the Shasu of Mount Seir.' A discovery I was fortunate enough to make last winter has shown that the Israelites had not as yet settled in what was afterwards the territory of Judah when Ramses III. overran Southern Palestine and captured its chief cities; and it is further remarkable that he alone of Egyptian Pharaohs so far as we know ventured to lead an army into the fastnesses of Mount Seir. It is, therefore, by no improbable that 'the war of the Lord' referred to in the Book of Numbers was a war waged with the Egyptian king."

means

Under the title of "The New Ethical Movement in France," the Rev. Robert Latta, M.A., of St. Andrews, contributes an important article to the November issue of Guild Life and Work. Since

1830, he says, there have been two great literary movements in France - the Romantic and the Naturalistic. But now there is being born a third. "The Romantic movement may almost be said to have been lost in the Franco-German War, and out of the bitterness of defeat and humiliation there sprang the sad hopeless Naturalism that has reigned in France for twenty years, and is even yet, perhaps, dominant on the whole. It is essentially negative in all its ways, cynically careless about morality, and hopeless of spiritual progress, content to paint cleverly the darkest side of 'what is,' and laughing at the idea that anything 'ought to be.' But the generation born of the siege,' as a recent writer calls it, is awaking to hope and work, and seems likely to reject in scorn the weak despair of its fathers. Some of the most promising young writers of the day are protesting earnestly against the current views and methods, and their influence is evident even in the recent writings of the Naturalists themselves."

Mr. Latta specially Within the last few

Of these younger writers, names M. Paul Desjardins. months, M. Desjardins has published a little volume under the title of "Present Duty' (Le Devoir Present. Paris: A. Colin et Cie). It has been much discussed in Paris. For, as Mr. Latta most truly says, "there has always been in France a very close connexion between literature and life. Lamartine, Chateaubriand, Victor Hugo were not mere writers. They were all more or less politicians-national prophets. Ideas among the French rapidly take form, and are expressed in public acts. Playwrights can rouse excitement as easily as politicians, and a new literary movement in the theatres may split the people into bitterly contending factions. A new way of writing poetry and novels very often brings with it a new attitude towards everything in life—a new morality as well as a new fashion in hats and coats. The idea takes possession of men, and is wrought out to its extremest practical consequences. Partly to this may be due the interest which, a year or

two ago, Paris felt in M. Paul Bourget's Le Disciple, a book in which, with wonderfully subtle analysis, there is written the story of a young man who applies literally and rigidly in practice the principles of a negative philosopher, and who, in consequence, is guilty of a dreadful crime. This quick interchange of ideas and practice gives to French literary movements a strong ethical interest."

Now in this little work on "Present Duty," M. Desjardins says that the question which most sharply divides men at present is not a speculative question, or a question of religious doctrine, such as that of the divinity of Christ, but a question regarding the foundations of morality. "Are slavery to animal instincts, selfishness, lying, absolutely evil, or are they merely bad form '— things deprecated just now, perhaps, but which, when they have been made pretty and graceful, may after a time smile upon us, satisfy us, give us a type of life equivalent to that of the sages and the saints, since there is really nothing to show that the one is worth more than the other? Are justice and love certainly good, an absolute law and a safe haven; or are they probably illusions, possibly vanities? Have we a destiny, an ideal, a duty; or do we busy ourselves without a reason and without an aim for the amusement of some malicious demiurge, according to the absurd caprice of great Pan? That is the question which divides men."

So M. Desjardins puts it. One would venture to say that the answer must be near at hand. Not so in France. That is but one view. There is another. And between these two views there must be war to the teeth-"the strife of the Negatives with the Positives," as M. Edouard Rod expresses it, "of those whose tendency is destructive with those whose tendency is constructive." And meanwhile, by the count of heads in literary France, "the Noes have it," as M. Desjardins admits. If not in words, certainly in life, the majority is on the negative side of the

question; and it includes such names as Renan [surely one gone to the other side now, M. Desjardins ?], Leconte de Lisle, Edmond Scherer, Zola, and Taine. And one has only to open one's eyes in Paris to see the extent to which a negative influence prevails. "The life of society, from the highest to the lowest, is one continuous pursuit of pleasant sensations. The various social ranks differ only according to the quality of the sensations they seek. The less educated are content with drinking and lust; the better educated are intellectual epicures and mystics. Even honourable men are degraded, almost unconsciously, by contact with the corruption that surrounds them."

Alongside of this, however, there is an intense sadness, a dreary feeling of weakness and of the vanity of things. People, says Mr. Latta, must inevitably come to see that the selfish, self-seeking way of life is a cul-de-sac, that there is "no road this way," and that if we would continue to live and move, we must turn back.

Surely "the night is far spent, the day is at hand." If these young and hopeful writers in France to-day would but go more fairly out into the open! But they fight against terrible odds when they stand by the mere idea of duty. They do not, it is true, reject religion; they even claim the sympathy and assistance of all men of religious profession and life. But they will have nothing to do with religious doctrine. Their one word is "Duty." It is a great word, certainly. But how much more powerful for good, how much more able to cleanse the stuffed bosom of France of that perilous stuff which weighs upon her heart. to-day, if it were moved and inspired by faith in God! And it will be so. For France, like England, "is looking with interest and hope towards Africa, and to the far-off lands of gloom, realising that she has a work to do there, and dimly feeling that out of the darkest places the new dawn must come."

It is only by diligent study of his works, and by a comparison of them with the writings of other thinkers of our time, that we become aware of the unique greatness of Professor Green. At a time when the various physical and biological sciences have made so great an advance that they attached to them and to the study of them some of the brightest and keenest intellects of the age; when the methods and results of these sciences tended to make men forget the existence of facts which cannot be explained by physical or biological law, Professor Green was able to vindicate with unique power and success the necessity of metaphysic, and its claim to be the only synthetic method by which human knowledge can be unified. He knew the history of philosophy as few people did. He knew the various forms which the problem of knowledge had assumed from the time of Greek philosophy downward. He saw and could state with clearness the inevitable advance from one form of the problem to another until we arrive at the present state of the question. His Introductions to Hume have a dramatic sort of completeness about them. He starts with an account of Locke's problem and his method; shows how, from his conception of the problem, he was led to an inadequate and one-sided solution. He shows next how Locke's system was inevitably followed by Berkeley, and Berkeley gave rise to the system of Hume. The filiation of one system of philosophy to another was never shown so well, nor was the inevitable tendency of human thought to work out its logical results across the ages ever demonstrated so dramatically. In Green's hands every step in the process is brought to light, and every step is seen to be inevitable, and after Hume there is nothing further to be accomplished on that line. Hume has exhausted the possibilities of the problem of philosophy as it had been set by Locke. But British philosophy has not yet seen that Hume has spoken the last word on the old lines. We find, indeed, that many are still writing and still working on the old lines just as if Hume had not written, and had not shown that from the premises

assumed by Hume, Hume's conclusion must inevitably follow.

The first great service to philosophy which Green did was to set forth in clear terms the connection between Locke and Hume. He made it clear to all who would take the trouble to read, and who were competent to understand, that the problem of philosophy had to be stated anew. We must ask the question in another way if we are to obtain an answer. While Green shows that Hume brought philosophy to a deadlock, and his efforts were therefore so far a failure, yet the failure of the system which culminated in Hume was one "which brought out a new truth, and compelled a step forward in the progress of thought." Hume took a system of thought, consisting of what were then and are still commonplaces with educated Englishmen, and thought them out to their logical issues, with the consequence that thought itself was destroyed. One is almost sorry as he follows Green paragraph by paragraph, from Locke to Berkeley, and from Berkeley to Hume, to find the fabric which he had perhaps been brought up to respect torn asunder, and to find there how baseless are these notions which are still current amongst men. For the scheme of Locke is still dominant, and many men write as if they could continue to affirm Hume's premises and deny his conclusion. For example, here is a paragraph from one of the latest, and certainly one of the ablest, of recent writers on what he calls science, but is really metaphysic. Any student of philosophy will at once see that he assumes the premises of Hume. "To begin with, I receive certain impressions of size and shape and colour by means of my organs of sight, and these enable me to pronounce with very considerable certainty that the object is a black board made of wood and coated with paint even before I have touched or measured it. I infer that I shall find it hard and heavy, that I could if I pleased saw it up, and that I should find it to possess various other properties which I have learnt to associate with wood and paint" (Professor Karl Pearson, Grammar of

Science, p. 48). Professor Pearson thus describes consciousness: "Thus what we term consciousness is largely, if not wholly, due to the stock of stored sense-impresses, and to the manner in which these condition the messages given to the motor nerves when a sensory nerve has conveyed a message to the brain. The measure of consciousness will thus largely depend on (1) the extent and variety of past sense-impressions, or what might be termed the complexity and plasticity of the brain" (Grammar of Science, p. 48). Professor Pearson is simply a typical instance, one of many who write from the same point of view and to the same effect. He attempts to build up a consciousness from stored up sense-impressions, and he has not seen that the course of philosophy from Locke to Hume is a demonstration that he has attempted an impossible task. The existence of such thinkers as Professor Pearson shows what a needful task was undertaken by Professor Green when he set himself to write the Introductions to Hume.

Green has shown that experience is possible only when a thinking subject is presupposed. In truth this is the presupposition of Professor Pearson also. For in the passage quoted above, he says: "I receive certain impressions," "I have touched," "I infer," and really refers all his experience to the conscious self. It is difficult to suppose that he has really read Green and the various statements which Green repeats almost to weariness on this important point, and it is equally difficult to suppose that Professor Pearson can really mean by consciousness what he has appeared to say. How mere sense-impresses could store themselves up, and how by storing themselves up they could form a consciousness, is a hopeless puzzle. But in truth every statement he makes involves such references to the conscious self that he cannot even get the statement made except by such a reference. We may quote one extract from Professor Green. "It is evident that the ground on which we make this statement, that mere sensation from the matter of experience warrants us in making it, if at all, only as a statement in regard to the mental history of the individual. Even in this reference it can scarcely be accepted. There is no positive basis for it but the fact that, so far as memory goes, we always find ourselves manipulating some data of consciousness, themselves independent of any intellectual manipulation which we can remember applying to them. But on the strength

of this to assume that there are such data in the history of our experience, consisting of mere sensations, antecedently to any action of our intellect, is not really an intelligible inference from the fact stated. It is an abstraction which may be put into words, but to which no real meaning can be attached. For a sensation can only form an object of experience in being determined by an intelligent subject which distinguishes it from itself and contemplates it in relation to other sensations; so that to suppose a primary datum or matter of the individual's experience, wholly void of intellectual determination, is to suppose such experience to begin with what could not belong to or be an object of experience at all" (Prolegomena to Ethics, P. 47).

It is part of Professor Green's service to his generation to show that for experience you need a self to begin with, and that you cannot build up a self by sense-impressions, or by any manipulation. or multiplication of them. His historical study of Hume and his predecessors had landed him in the very midst of current psychological controversies. Some, indeed, had apprehended the significance of Hume, and saw that they must make a new departure if philosophy were to continue. The Scottish philosophy had sought to go back to first principles and to turn the flank of Hume's movement, and with a creditable result; how creditable may be seen from the able work of Professor Seth on the Scottish philosophy. But on this significant section of the history of philosophy we may not dwell. Nor can we dwell on the German answer to Hume, except in so far as it relates to Professor Green. But Hume and his significance had been completely ignored by English psychologists, and particularly by those who approached the study of mind from the side of physiology and of physical and biological science. To Professor Green it seemed that "current English psychology ignored the metaphysical question raised by Hume." He had expressed this conviction in the Introduction, and he found that he was bound to make it good. He set himself to study the psychological works of Mr. Herbert Spencer and of Mr. George H. Lewes. These writers occupied the foremost place among their fellows, and Mr. Spencer, in particular, was held up as the man who had elaborated a system of philosophy of the highest importance. Evolutionists called him "our philosopher." It