LORD LINDSAY ON SCEPTICISM.* Tins is a very learned, amiable,

and eloquently written book, with a little too much fanciful imagery in style, and something of anxious feebleness in the substance of the thought; the book of a man who expects to convince people that they are wrong by so mapping out the world of thought as to give them a very one-sided place, instead of convincing them that they are one-sided by proving that they are wrong. We do not anticipate any success for the line of thought here developed for many reasons; mainly for this, that the spring of all deep convictions is much deeper than the eye for mere mental symmetry, and it is this to which Lord Lindsay makes his ap- peal. In fact, our conceptions of intellectual, moral, and spiritual symmetry are almost always secondary; determined by our grasp of spiritual truth not determining it. Lord Lindsay's argument amounts to this :—Imagination "and Reason are the two faculties by which we grasp spiritual realities, imagination taking them unanalyzed with absolute deference into the mind, reason raising all the questions as to the relative degrees and springs of authority; imagination being the authoritative or Ca- tholic, reason the disputative or Protestant, faculty. This being laid down, Lord Lindsay intimates that these principles being equally powerful and equally rooted in human nature, the true faith can only be attained by determining the curve of intersection of these two faculties on the sphere of objective religious thought. Find, he would say, the true line of descent of the imaginative or objective creeds and philosophies, resting on external authority and external evidence—the true line of descent of the rational or internal creeds and philosophies resting on internal authority and internal evidence,— and then the line of thought where these two regions intersect must be the line of progressive truth. We may give the substance of his argument by slightly reconstructing and modifying his own tabular statement thus :

Scepticism, or Heterodox Rational. Orthodox, Rational, and Internal.

True Mean.

Orthodox, Imaginative and External. Mysticism, or Tendency to Heterodox Imaginative.

Pyrrho.

New Academy. St. Thomas.

Arians and Nestorian.

Averrhoists. Ernesti. Pythagoras. Eleatic School.

Plato. St. Paul.

Greek and Eastern Church

Nominalists. Melancthon. Zwingle.

Conformist Puritans.

Latitudinarian Low Church.

.

Descartes } Reid Kant

Socrates. Christ.

Primitive { Church. Western & Eastern.

Anglo-Catholic Church.

Tholes and Ionic Physical Philosophy. Aristotle.

St. Peter. Latin Church.

Mediaeval Realists. Tridentine Romanists. Luther. Calvin.

Land's Episcopalians.

Nonjarors.

High Church of England.

Philosophy of Induction. (Bacon.) Butler.

Orders Cynics.

{ Stoics.

Neo- Platonism. St. John. Novatians. Monastic Fathers of the Desert. Theosophists. Quietists. Pietists. Moravians. Puritans. Cameronians and Quakers. Fifth Monarchy Men. Methodists. Shakers.

Irvingites. Revivalists.

( Neo-

1 Platonism at Cambridge. Socialism. Pseudo- Spiritualism.

Independents (Baptists.)

Neo-Arianism (Dr. Clarke.) Deists. Berkeley Spinoza Leibnitz Hegel Strauss We might make many criticisms on some of Lord Lindsay's classi- fications, some of which are not a little disputable : but this would be to leave the main question. The drift of his argument is that the extreme " right," or ultra-imaginative and externalist school, gives up all rational investigation, and accepts either authoritative statement or material facts and illusory revelations, without any intellectual justification; that the extreme left, or ultra-rational school, pushes rational investigation beyond all rational bounds, and will accept nothing as ultimate, while truth in theology and philosophy lies in the equipoise between these scales. We have left out in the above table Lord Lindsay's line of materialistic-rationalists, who, in fact, iiediate between his ultra-externalists, or extreme right, and his ultra- rationalists, or extreme left, comprehending the Atomic school, the Epicureans, having Judas Iscariot, according to Lord Lindsay's ami- able suggestion, for their Christian representative, and then descend- ing through the Nicolaitans, the Socinians, Machiavellian, Antino- mians, and Unitarians, to the present day, and boasting for their characteristic modern philosophers Hobbes, Locke, Conddlac, Volney, and Comte. Here, again, if we chose to criticize the classi-, • &catkin's: a Retrogressive Movement in Theology and Philosophy,--as con- trasted with the Church of England, Catholic (at once) and Protestant. Stable and Progressive :—Two Letters on Points of Present Interest, addressed to the Rev. W.

B. Bryan, M.A., Rector of Rodington and the Honourable Colin Lindsay. BY Boni Lindsay. Murray.

fication, we should have much to say of the extremely questionable character of this line of descent, but this would be to obscure the general drift of the argument, the object of which is to prove to the new sceptical Oxford school of " 'Essays and Reviews" that they are pleading the cause not, in fact, of a progressive theology, but of one of those flank movements into extreme and exaggerated error which the extreme left, or rationalists of the preceding table have per- petuated from age to age. Lord Lindsay's general thesis will, after the above explanations, be best understood from the following

passage

" I think I may assume that I have stifficently vindicated by this approxi- mation of instances the accuracy and appliability of the rule as quoted at the beginiog of this Letter, and which I may here repeat= that, towards the expi- ration of every great struggle between Imagination and Reason in religion and philosophy, the Mystic or Spiritual element asserts itself in hostility to both, with a tendency to dissociation from the Church and a revival of religious piety and enthusiasm among the uncultured and the lower classes—while a counter reac- tion generally takes place among the Intellectual to infidelity'—a word which I would willingly throughout have softened to Scepticism' in dealing with the question of the new school at Oxford now before me, but that I dared not mince matters when the fate of souls was in the scale.

" Yon will acknowledge, I think, on this survey, that it is through the consti- tutional antagonism of the Imaginative Reasoning, the Catholic and Protestant elements of the consummate intellect that the chariot of human progress ad- vances to its goal—that they are the wings of Thales and Pythagoras, Plato and Aristotle, St. Peter and St. Paul, St. Thomas Aquinas and William of Occam, Bacon and Descartes, that elevate the human spirit, under the inspiration of Socrates and (to approximate the names with all reverence) of Christ to the gates of Heaven—that influence of Pyrrho and Arcesilaus, Arius, and Averrhoes, Vol- taire and Hume, and in a lower range, of Epicnrus, Machiavelli, Hobbes, and Comte, have merely clogged the wings, impeded the wheels of progress—and that the cynic, the stoic, the hermit of the desert, the monk of Catholicism, the pietiest of Protestantism, if they have not degraded humanity, have at least in no wise raised it above their own level."

Now, though we agree with Lord Lindsay in believing that the new Oxford Schools of Essayists and Reviewers are far to the left or rationalizing side of truth, we have little hope that Lord Lindsay's argument will do anything—we scarcely think it ought to do anything —to prove it. Lord Lindsay convinces us, by his own external line of proof, that he is himself on the right or externalizing side of his own centre; and it is from this tendency in his mind that we despair of any good result from his method. Our first objection to this method is, that supposing Lord Lindsay to be successful in convincing his opponents that he has pointed out the true mean line between the divergent schools, the ulterior ques- tion still remains whether the mean line is the line of truth. Not only might this be disputed, but it is certain to be disputed by any original thinker. It may be maintained with much more than plausi- bility—with something approaching to self-evident truth—that the purely external authority or evidence of theological teaching is in- tended to be replaced more and more by an equivalent internal autho- rity or evidence, as the mind of man is more and more thoroughly developed in the course of the ages ; in other words, that the line of truth does not uniformly keep the same relation to the imaginative and higher rational faculties in man, but bends in the direction of the latter, justifying itself more and more to the higher reason, and relying less on mere external authority as the centuries develop human powers. Lord Lindsay would scarcely himself deny that the largest grasp of Christian faith possible to an Englishman of the days of the Plantagenets must have been in a higher degree due to a child- like submission of the mind to external authority, and in a less degree to the full satisfaction of intellectual conviction, than the same quality of faith should be due now. But granting this is equivalent to nt- ing that the line of truth would not be obtained by always equalizing the moral weight of the imaginative with the moral weight of the higher rational faculties, but by attaching a larger proportionate weight to the latter as time developed them and gave them greater strength and clearer insight. In other words, the curve of truth would be bent away from what Lord Lindsay calls the imagination, and towards the moral reason, as time goes on, instead of always keeping the line of bisection between them. The "verifying" power of man's higher reason is very different in a Coleridge from what it is in a Tertullian, or even a St. Augustine. It is not, of course, that the whole character of men in modern times is stronger or weightier in moral elements than those of earlier ages. We have no right to suppose that it is so ; but his reason—taken in its largest sense—is certainly more cultivated, is a larger proportion of the whole mind of modern generations, and penetrates deeper through the other phases of human nature. The intellectual discoveries and accumulations of ages do not indeed help the reason to supersede the other faculties of man, but they help it to extract more aid out of them for its own processes and conclusions. Coleridge is far inferior to Plato ; but the reason of Coleridge in testing religious truth is much less liable to one-sided conclusions than the reason of Plato ; and hence we may fairly expect

that the Christian faith of the nineteenth century will address itself more to the higher reason of man, and less to the faculty which acquiesces in external authority, than the Christian faith of the early centuries. This, then, is our first objection to Lord Lindsay's method—that he is not likely to be right in demanding the same law of equipoise between imagination—as he calls it—and reason, in the nineteenth century as in the first. And our second objection is, that even if we grant that the appre- hension of truth is perfect only at the point where these opposite faculties are exactly equally weighted, every different mind will determine differently as to where this point falls. It is, in fact, not a point which external facts can decide; the conception of intellectual symmetry which it demands varies with the prejudices of every diffe- rent intellectual observer. Lord Lindsay thinks the Anglo-Catholic Church hal given with unerring judgment an equal weight to imagi-

nation and to reason, and that, if anything, the rational scale is the heavier. Mr. Jewett would reply that the Imaginative scale decidedly preponderates, and that you must shift a great deal more conviction from the scale of authority to that of demonstration before the equi- poise can be true ; while Father Newman would tell us that in the Roman Church alone is the balance exact. So that at the end of his demonstration Lord Lindsay leaves us just where he began: the historical argument has done nothing ; an appeal to the individual apprehension of truth remains to be made, and this would have been made with as much effect without the historical argument as with it.

Again, there is another defect. Lord Lindsay is satisfied with his analysis of the faculties which determine the phases of religious conviction into these two—Imagination and Reason. But, in fact, the analysis is very incomplete, and results in very imperfect classifi- cation. For example, Lord Lindsay, while putting Plato and St. Paul into the line of Orthodox Rationalists, or thinkers relying mainlyon internal evidence, puts Aristotle, St. Augustine, and Luther into the line of Orthodox Externalists. Any classification which puts St. Augustine and Luther into the line of religious descent from St. Peter rather than from St. Paul, is certainly, prima facie, paradoxical. Lord Lindsay's paradox, however, arises from Isis narrow principle of classification. No doubt Luther and St. Augustine were both to sonic extent biblical dogmatists—disposed to swallow their pre- mises whole, instead of discussing and sifting them with the argu- mentative subtlety of St. Paul. If the tendency to take your reli- gious premises unquestioned from an external authority is the only principle of classification, these great prophets may belong to the religious lineage of the great Jewish, rather than that of the great Gentile, apostle. But this only shows how imperfect Lord Lindsay's principle is. The type of the Augustinian and Lutheran faith is de- termined a great deal more by the tumultuous strife of ve- hement impulses and affections demanding a spiritual and personal Christ to tranquillize and subdue them, than by either Reason or Imagination. And in this respect Augustine and Luther are true followers of St. Paul rather than of St. Peter. The introspective gaze which drove both of them into despair with their own hearts, was far more Pauline than Petrine. Besides, therefore, what Lord Lindsay calls (somewhat oddly) Imagination and Reason, another spiritual force —which may be called moral emotion—is at least as important as those which he has given. It is the absence of this last which dis- tinguishes the austere rational Pelagian type of Romauism, from the mystic type of a St. Theresa or a lenelon. It is the presence of it which brings St. Augustine and Luther far closer to St. Paul than to St. Peter. But once introduce a third great element, and all Lord Lindsay's system goes to wreck, which is, indeed, the most desirable fate for religious systematizing in general. There is no trap which is more druigerous to thoughtful minds, or more likely to lead them to misjudge history and their fellow men.

Sympathizing to a considerable extent with Lord Lindsay's aims, we must say we have no sympathy with his method, and would a thousand times rather see him show one root of his own personal faith than develop this kind of external historical argument through elo- quent volumes.