DR. MARTINEAU.

DR. MARTINEAU,—who has this week retired from his duties as Principal of Manchester New College, after a laborious career, which 'has now passed the four-score years which are said to make the strength of man "labour and sorrow," though they certainly do not effect this in his case,— has been one of those brilliant teachers whom, if he had lectured in the University of Edinburgh, or of Cambridge, or of Oxford, or of Paris, or of Vienna, or of Heidelberg, or of Berlin, thinkers would have travelled thousands of miles to attend. As a matter of fact, he has been engaged, as Callicles said of Socrates, and as Dr. Martineau said of himseli on Wednesday, when referring to the famous passage in Plato's " Gorgias," in discoursing to "two or three boys in a corner," from a mind saturated with learning, kindled by genius, and curiously combining the subtlety of a great psychologist with an almost strategical apprehension and methodical projection of the moral and intellectual field which it was his duty to survey. The late Sir William Hamilton once described the late Professor De Morgan as "curiously deficient in architectonic power." • If it had ever come in his way to describe and criticise Dr. Martineau, he might perhaps have found fault with him for something like an excess of that of which he attributed a deficiency to the great mathematician. If there be any fault on either side, for instance, in the book reviewed at length in these columns, which has recently been issued from the Clarendon Press on "Types of Ethical Theory," it is certainly on

the side of too elaborate and scientific a mapping out of the province with which he had to deal. The, reader who only glances at the index is as likely to be Maimed by reading of "Idio-psychological " and " Hetero-psychological Ethics," as students of Hamilton were by the multitude of distinctions between Monists, Natural Dualists, Cosmothetic Idealists, ttc., with which his pages abounded. Amongst those who take pleasure in mapping human systems of thought almost for the sake of the maps themselves, Dr. Martineau may rank almost with Sir William Hamilton, though he does not devote so great an amount of effort to the task of classifying exhaustively the whole field of truth and error, as the great Edinburgh thinker. Still, he is certainly one of those who take real

pleasure even in arranging correctly the mho), varieties of human speculative effort.

What we have said on that subject, however, only comes to this, that Dr. Martineau is one of those who loves to command from afar the possible and actual divergences of human thought, and while he is working in one part of the field, to apprehend distinctly the relation which that part bears to the remainder.

If that were all, Dr. Martineau would never have been the great teacher he is. For the number of those thinkers who have had in them even a passion for wide classification and survey has not been small. But Dr. Martineau has combined this faculty of wide survey with a singular subtlety in interpreting the intellectual and spiritual significance of human experience,

and a singularly lofty strenuousness in pressing home that significance. on other minds. He is the impersonation of

"that severe, that earnest air," which Matthew Arnold tells us truly that mere Nature does not understand, and must even disavow :—

" There is no effort on my brow, I do not strive, I do not weep ; I rush with the swift spheres and glow In joy, and when I will, I sleep.

Yet that severe, that earnest air, I saw, I felt it once, but where ?"

That "severe, that earnest air," is felt in everything which Dr. Martineau says or writes. An ascetic he is not in his ethical theory ; but there is something of the glow of the ascetic in his pictures of duty. Indeed, there is a depth of sympathy in his delineation of the stoic's idol "hewn from the granite masses of spiritual strength" which you can hardly find in his picture of any other doctrine which he rejects. Those who know his sermons will find in them a vein of displeasure against the utilitarian or " hedonistic " theory of life far deeper even than his philosophical refutation of that theory would warrant. He insists that men who think them selves best when they are happiest, are "infected with the fever of self." He delights to show that it is those on whose gratitude God has the greatest claims who are most disposed, and that precisely in virtue of those claims, "to judge harshly of his government." "Where," be asks, in one of the finest passages which our modern pulpit has produced, where is it that God, in his searching of the hearts of his children, "hears the • tones of deepest love, and sees on the uplifted face the light of the most heartfelt gratitude P Not where his gifts are most profuse, but where they seem most meagre; not where the suppliant's worship glides forth from the cushion of luxury through lips satiated with plenty and rounded by health ; not within the halls of snccessful ambition, or even the dwellings of unbroken domestic peace ; but where the outcast, flying from persecution, kneels in the evening on the rock whereon he sleeps ; by the fresh grave, where, as the earth is opened, Heaven in answer opens too ; by the pillow of the wasted sufferer, where the sunken eye, denied sleep, converses with a silent star, and the hollow voice enumerates in low prayer, the scanty list of com forts, and the shortened tale of hopes." The theory that virtue, or even beauty of character, either generates, or is generated by, an affluence of enjoyments, is one wholly at variance, not merely with Dr. Martineau's ethical convictions, but with the deepest grain of his character. He is not an ascetic, because he does not believe in the regenerating power of self-inflicted suffering ; but he does embody in all his writings that deep belief in a morality above Nature, and able even to renounce Nature, of which Matthew Arnold has given us Nature's own view in the lines,—

" Ah ! child,' the cries, 'that strife divine, Whence was it, for it is not mine ?'"

The strenuousness, the arduous endeavour, the exalted sense at once of the infinite difficulty of the higher moral tasks and of the infinite generosity of help by which they are rendered possible, pervade almost all Dr. Martineau's writings, 01 one could fancy that Mr. Arnold had had Dr. Martineau in his mind in the lines which were, we suspect, actually inspired by memories of his father.

As an ethical teacher, Bishop Butler has had no more original and brilliant follower than. Dr. Martineau. Bishop Butler's doctrine that passive impressions grow less and less efficient with repetition, while active habits grow more and more efficient, is one that Dr. Martineau has illustrated with great variety of power and pushed further than Butlerhimself. Perhaps nothing more solid has been added of late years to the principles of ethics than his analysis of sentimentality, and his teaching that, while the direct affections inspired by human character have the highest claims upon us, the wish to feel affections which we do not feel, is relatively a thoroughly spurious desire, which has no such claim upon us at all. Action, he insists, as Butler had insisted, "is the proper school of affection; and Christianity values not the pure heart as the tool for producing serviceable deeds, but the good deeds as at once the expression and the nourishment of that greatest of possessions, a good mind." "Indeed, no one can have a true idea of right, until he does it ; any genuine reverence for it till he does it often and with cost ; any peace ineffable in it, till he does it always and with alacrity."

Doubtless, however, Dr. Martineau's teaching has been at once strongest and most subtle in exposing the various expedients by which intellectual theorists have tried to persuade men that their will is an illusion, and that they are really the mere creatures woven from an eternal web of evolution. Throughout the almost interminable controversy between the devotees of causality on the one hand, and the believers in true volition on the other, he has travelled with a patience and a candour, a power of appreciating the full strength of his opponents, and a power of confronting them with the actual asseverations of consciousness, which no philosophical teacher in any age has surpassed. As an illustration of his thoroughness, we may adduce the fact that in dealing with the argument that the perfect prescience of God seems to many thinkers to imply the absolute determinateness of all future events, since according to their view there can be no knowledge of that which is not already determinate, Dr. Martineau has not shrank from saying that, even if foreknowledge and freedom could be absolutely proved to be mutually contradictory,—which is not to be admitted,—we should be bound rather to insist on what consciousness asserts, namely, our real power of anti-impulsive effort, our real power of resisting the spontaneous drift of our own nature, than to surrender that positive assertion of our consciousness, in deference to an abstract conviction concerning the character of the divine omniscience which, after all, cannot be known to us at first-hand. Moreover, he has shown that divine providence in the highest sense might exist without absolute fore-knowledge, since providence, so far from being confined to the cases of absolute prescience, might range over all the possible alternatives of human free-will, and provide for all alike. We only refer to this deep matter by way of showing how • thoroughly, and with what profound candour, Dr. Martineau has treated some of the favourite dilemmas of neeessarian psychologists and divines.

Take Dr. Martinean's teaching as a whole, and we should call it by far the ablest vindication of the philosophy implicitly assumed in Christianity which our age has produced, though it has resulted in his case in his acceptance of the Christian faith under one of the least powerful and least effective of its actual forms,—a spiritual and Christian type of Theism. In philosophy Dr. Martineau is to the roots of his being Christian. In exegetical criticism, and in his excessive sympathy with the practical scepticism of science on the subject of physical miracle, he finds the separating film dividing him from the theological creed by which, for nearly all the centuries of her life, the Christian Church has been penetrated. He leads others to conclusions into which he cannot follow them, and occasionally watches, with a mingled feeling of sympathy and wonder, the conquests made by revelation over the minds which his own teaching had prepared to receive it. He watches, too, with less sympathy, and perhaps also less wonder, the not unfrequent passing-over to agnosticism of those who have felt the force of his sceptical criticism more keenly than they have felt the force of his spiritual philosophy.

Mr. Watts's great portrait of Dr. Martineau, exhibited some years ago in the Academy,—an embodiment of melancholy wonder and almost ghostly speculation,—is, no doubt, in some respects, a caricature. It does not give any adequate impression of Dr. Martineau's keen and penetrating vision which almost suggests the glance of a commander in the field, and which perfectly expresses the well-marked definition of his aims,—and it does not even suggest the lucidity of his method and the capacity for a firm engineering of the possibilities of life, by which he has been distinguished. Mr. Watts's wonderful portrait, striking as it is, is too much the portrait of a dreamer. Dr. Martineau has dreamt his dreams like other men, and they have been loftier than those of other men. But his foot has always been firmly planted on the real earth ; and few men have known better than he that without realism idealism is impotent, just as without idealism realism itself is only a shifting cloud of dust.