tion, then: Does the course of human mental development, as represented in either the individual or the race, follow a definite and essentially continuous course, or is it a discontinuous broken development, whose effect is to make each stage of life inharmonious with the others?

The question at once suggests itself as to the usefulness of investigating this point. It appears at first of little consequence whether our lives are steady and regular in evolution, or unsteady and broken. It seems as if the whole thing were rather a matter of accident at any rate. Some lives are harmonious, and some are inharmonious. Circumstances apparently determine. So, too, in the historical development of the race, there have been periods of steady progress, and there have been times of sudden revolution. It would appear impossible to say whether the one or the other has been the rule, and it is at all events of not very much consequence to determine the truth in the matter. But we shall endeavor in what follows to make plain that in the history of humanity there is always an undercurrent flowing steadily onward, undisturbed by the violent surface action of events; that in the history of the individual, unless artificial restraints or stimulants are introduced into life, there is a similar unity underlying the diversity of time and circumstances; and, still further, that an appreciation of this fact is necessary to a true appreciation of life, whether in personal experience or in history.

We can make plainer what is meant by harmonious development in life by considering what we mean by it in nat

But

activities is introduced, as is the case in the metamorphosis of insects. throughout all there runs a certain unity. There is a relation that can be traced, step by step, from the highest organism to the cell out of which it came.

The whole evolution is harmonious. Now is this fact true of mental growth? Is mind under the same law in this particular as the rest of nature? If so, wherein lies the harmony? What is the nature of the unity underlying the diversity?

The great philosopher, Hegel (with whose works we do not, by the way, profess any extended acquaintance, and whose remark we introduce here merely because it is a plain statement of one view on the subject), has expressed his belief that there is a striking contrast between development in inanimate nature and development in spirit. Nature, he says, advances steadily and continuously. Spirit, on the other hand, progresses only by very dint of conflict. Every step onward must involve a struggle in which the destruction of the old and the introduction of the new is involved. Spirit must destroy itself in order that it may live a higher life. Its great movements are times when in self-immolation it gives itself to the flames to arise anew out of its own ashes. And so there is nothing in inanimate nature which can parallel the tremendous convulsions of human history.

If the displays of the one are greater, the facts of the other have an unsurpassable depth and power of experience involved in them.

Of course, such a view as this precludes any idea of harmony or of unity in the development of the mind of man. This self-conflict is the very negation of harmony, and this self-immolation destroys the possibility of unity. Grand as Hegel's thought is, we can not but think it one-sided. The conflicts of the soul are facts, but they are not alone.

The mind of man is not a comet wandering from system to system in orbits of incalculable eccentricity. If it does not revolve in the fixed paths of the bound slaves of inanimate nature, it yet neither wishes nor has the power to do more than pass from member to member of the same system, at every change attaining a better and nobler position, but never forsaking its great objects. But we have not to go so far away from home as to enter the domains of German philosophy in order to find held the opinion that we are controverting. It is one of the commonest, and, from our point of view, one of most injurious of opinions held among a certain class of historians in our own time.

When as historians or as critics men extol highly the present time at the expense of preceding times-when they make great point of the ignorance, or the superstition, or the blindness of the middle ages as a contrast to set off the grandeur of the nineteenth centurywhen in doing this they entirely overlook the tendencies which may be common to the two, or else only mention those few isolated instances where some modern doctrine was upheld by an eccentric but sagacious man of that time, forgetful of the small social significance in history of such eccentric but sagacious men when all this is done, we say, as it so commonly is done, by contemporary writers, then the idea of the essential unity and harmony of mental development is wanting in the minds of those who do it. With Hegel, they believe that progress is a succession of conflicts and revolutions, in each of which all but identity is destroyed. Conceiving themselves to stand in a position immediately following the last one of these revolutions, they look upon preceding times as essentially different and immensely inferior to their own. Reverence for antiquity is next to im

possible with them. The most that they can do for it is to excuse faults on the plea of ignorance, and pity ignorance on the score of antiquity. All this is, we believe, opposed to every true principle of historical justice. It prevents men from deriving the benefit they should from historical study. It blinds their eyes to the true value of the conception of humanity. As the Greek made the mistake of writing history from a purely national stand-point, regarding all men as either Greeks or barbarians, and estimating them accordingly, so the modern historian too often writes history, especially if it be the history of civilization, purely from a class stand-point, placing on one side the scientists and illuminati of the present century, together with a few noble astronomical souls, of whom the world was not worthy, in former ages, and on the other the vast mass of the unlettered and the unscientific. And as in history it is, as Ewald remarks in the introduction to his great work, just at those times when regard for their future destiny and respect for ancestral tradition and reminiscence are perfectly balanced that nations are the most prosperous, so it must be that not until this eager enthusiasm for the present and the future is in a greater degree tempered by respect for the past will the present intellectual activity attain its complete power.

We have mentioned the Greek, and his erroneous ideas as to the value of the history of his own nation as compared with that of the nations about him. We think that, by a similar process to the one that we should have used had we been present to convince him of his injustice toward foreign nations, we can do something to show wherein lies the injustice of history. which we have just been noticing. For there is something very analogous in the way in which he spoke of barbarians and the way in which a historian

like Buckle speaks of the middle ages. To the mind of the former the world as it stood was made up of widely separated ranks, bound by no common link of humanity, and culminating in his own nation. In the thoughts of the other, history, as it has progressed, has been a succession of stages, divided by times of great change, united by not more than a semblance of common characteristics, culminating in his own age. The two errors, for errors we conceive them alike to be, can be reasoned with on the same principles.

If we were about to engage in a discussion with an Athenian of the age of Pericles on the relative importance of peoples, and the value of the idea of humanity, we would have before us two great lines of possible argument. We could first show him that he was essentially the same as many of those he call ed barbarians in religious observances and in customary regulations. By this means we should hope to convince him that, far from being such a unique and peculiar being as he supposed, he was in fact the possessor of ceremonial forms and legal traditions which were in all fundamental points identical with the forms and laws of nations much lower in the social scale than himself. Thus we should have some expectation of bringing him to realize the existence of a vast whole humanity, of which he was but a part, and with which he was inseparably bound up. But this method would not probably prove very effective. Many of the facts we would bring forward were always familiar to him. Perhaps he was never conscious of their full force as we should hope to make him conscious of it. But still the whole formed a sort of evidence of kinship which he does not seem to have cared much for. He was too proudly conscious of his intellectual and spiritual superiority to notice it. His works of art would be enough to make him feel

that there was something in the distinction of Greek and barbarian which could not be affected by trifling coincidences of custom.

But now, if we were still anxious to make one more effort to bring him into sympathy with us, and to arouse within him the consciousness of one humanity, there would be another and far more effective way left open to us. It might be of comparatively little use to let him see identity of custom or of law, but if we could make him feel identity of soul as expressed in poetry or in any form of art, we should have done much to accomplish our end. Suppose, taking advantage of some moment of peculiar impressibility, we should translate for him into good clear Attic Greek the Book of Job. What a revelation it would be to him, if only we did not prejudice him with hints as to its origin until we had once read it to him. And suppose, going still farther from home, we should bring to him and lay before him the Vedas, and the great poems of the epic age in India, and, still farther, the early poetry of the Buddhists; for all these, the accomplishments of his far-away cousins, were in existence at the time of which we speak, and yet he knew it not. But we would not stop with these. We would collect all the vast poetic treasures in which the race has left its truest records, the songs and epics of the childhood of nations, the lamentations that human sorrow has given voice to, the peals of joy which have celebrated victory and given new happiness to prosperity, and best of all the sublime outpourings of that aspiration for the true and the beautiful which alone is entitled to the sacred name of religionall this wealth of emotion, all this precious harvest of life, we would bring and lay at his feet. He might neglect other evidence, he might be unmoved by other tokens, but he could not become acquainted with this and be unaffected.

It is certain that when he once grasped all its meaning, he too with us would rejoice in his new-found kinship of humanity.

In other words, we would argue that the strongest tie that can be mentioned as binding together the race is the fact of common sensibilities and common emotions, and the most certain and universally intelligible proof of this is found in art, and especially in poetry. And now we wish further to claim that this same province of emotion is that wherein lies the bond of common union among the successive ages of progress in history. We wish to show that, while intellectual progress is sure to be more or less discordant with itself from the very fact that it is rapid, emotional development is of a regular and persistent character, so that, notwithstanding the science of one time becomes the fable of another, the art of any age remains art for all succeeding ages. By the examination of this subject something may be done toward showing wherein the harmony of mental development lies.

In investigating the subject we shall first assume, what would take some time to prove at length, that the essential purpose of all art is not to imitate nature in any form, nor yet even primarily to imitate the beautiful in nature, but to give expression to the stronger emotions of the soul. In fact, were this not true, it is difficult to see how ancient art could ever have survived so long a time and had this very power of which we speak. For art in which the crudest notions of external nature are made fundamental, as is the case in all ancient poetry, is not at all injured in our estimation by the fact; a thing which shows the object of such art to be something very different from imitation. This being so, the continuance of art for so long a time is a proof of a general continuity of emotional progress in our race. And this is still more clearly shown by the fact VOL. 15.-11.

that art designed for special ends is still esteemed for its own sake, although the end for which it was produced is no longer thought of.

A prominent illustration of such a survival may be found in religious poetry. This in every case where it is true poetry survives the downfall of the religion in whose service it was written. And why? Simply because religious emotion is distinct from religious dogma, and hence the poetry which expresses the former is the property of the race, and continues to exist whatever may become of the latter. And so in the legends of Arthur we to-day enjoy and are made better by poetry whose foundation lies far back in the region of the great primeval solar myths. So, too, in Greek tragedy the world has listened for centuries to grand thoughts first inspired by the devout worship of gods who passed into the region of fable ages ago.

We have now progressed far enough to have given indication of what we meant by the undercurrent running steadily onward beneath the violent surface action of history. We would maintain that there is a continuous element existing throughout all the sudden changes of progress. And this element is the emotional one, and art in all its forms is its representative. We do not believe what an ancient believed, but we feel very much what he felt. And this is not only true of the transient joys and sorrows of life, but also and to a much greater extent is it true of the deeper emotions of the soul. And by virtue of these we can, as it were, annihilate time, and bring ourselves into sympathy with every sincere human heart of whatever age. And because throughout all the varied fortunes of the race, in spite of the repeated revolutions that convulse it, there is, as we view it, a constant and slow evolution of the emotional nature, and because it is in the emotions that

life truly consists, we have called this grand fact in history the life-harmony, and we would oppose it to all those sudden and violent changes that characterize intellectual progress, as being the foundation of an essential unity in the spirit of all times.

Before going on to show what has been the course of this slow evolution, and what are the proofs to be given of it, we may as well here stop to consider what effect such a fact as this is should have on our view of history. We think it must be admitted that with this fact in view, any looking down upon preceding ages as immeasurably inferior is impossible. Although knowledge may increase indefinitely, yet, if feeling remains essentially the same, the men of successive ages are still brothers, although those who come last may be somewhat the wiser. If we can rise but a little higher in the scale of experience than could former times, it amounts to but little that we can determine the chemical constitution of the sun. And if, as is too often the case, in gaining intellectually we permit ourselves to lose emotionally, we lower ourselves instead of being raised. If full, free, all-embracing sympathy with human kind was the characteristic of the best thought of a former age, and if our age should sacrifice this quality for the sake of mere advance of knowledge, then, were we to have all knowledge, were we to speak with the tongues of men and angels, and not have charity, we should become as sounding brass and a tinkling cymbal. Whatever was emotionally grand and sublime in former times must be lived up to now if we would be even on a level with former times. Reason can discover truth, but it can not unaided make life.

But we believe there is little danger that men ever will, in the long run, mistake the power and the value of their emotional nature. For awhile it may

be obscured by some sudden advance in science or in industrial art. But it ever remains as a foundation of existence. It will in the end vindicate itself. Try to hide it as much as you can, call it a delusion, nickname it moonshine, crush it beneath a load of burdens, bind it down with the galling bands of intellect, and after all you can not make it remain where you seek to put it, or if you do, it will be to your own injury. Discover as much as you will, acquire as much as you will, and after all he who once feels purely, nobly, generously, has discovered more and acquired more than have you by all your labor. He truly lives, you barely exist. He is in sympathy with the race, with the humanity that has ever been content to suffer that it might grow nobler, to be lonely that it might find love, to long that it might be satisfied; you can do no better than to sneer at all this emotion because you can not share it, and to be puffed up with pride at your knowledge which some future time will despise as superficial, merely because you have nothing else to be proud of.

Are we wrong, then, in claiming that the emotional nature lies at the foundation of life, and that if, as we claim, it merely meets with a slow progressive change as time goes on, it is the true link binding mankind in a common brotherhood? Whatever be the elements of discord which divide the life of one time from the life of another, this element of unity is enough to neutralize them all. As we have learned the brotherhood of races, let us learn the brotherhood of the ages also.

But now, since it is plain that emotion does not remain exactly the same throughout all time, since it undergoes at least a slight change, it remains to show what this change consists in—that is to say, what is the course of the evolution of feeling. We believe that the change consists mainly in the direction