and the Baptists respectively; and, held in exclusive dominance, they lead in principle ultimately to Pantheistic Quietism on the His historical and theological writings are regarded as almost models of philosophical style, and in the opinion of some he shares with Luther the merit of moulding and perfecting the modern German language--he on the side of softness and pliancy, as Luther on that of vigour and firmness. Melancthon reproached him with want of judgment and knowledge, and called him indocte conditor historia. Even after Frank's death, Luther's violence could not restrain itself from speaking of him as that slauderer who has been the devil's own favourite mouthpiece.' They were contemporaries, and were inflamed-perhaps jaundiced-with strife. A man so extraordinary, so extravagant, so dangerous, could only be fairly judged by later generations. It must not be forgotten that his extravagance and his ability rendered him an object of deep dislike and resentment to his opponents; and Luther in particular, whom he did not hesitate to accuse of founding a new papacy, may be supposed to have been deeply irritated, not only at the discredit and peril he caused to the Reformation movement and party, but, as a matter of personal feeling, by his exposure of the inconsistency of the great Reformer's earlier and later views. In point of learning he is not to be compared to Melancthon, nor can he be acquitted of the charge of being somewhat uncritical; but he was certainly a man of extensive reading, honesty of purpose, faithfulness to his own convictions, and, for his age, of marvellous toleration. He has the merit of having been one of the first to employ the vernacular in the treatment of subjects hitherto discussed only in the language of the learned. In certain lines of thought he was far in advance of his time. Hagen,* in a somewhat exaggerated estimate of his doctrines, calls him, not without some show of reason, the forerunner of modern German philosophy.' Wherever he went, wherever his writings penetrated, he secured many both secret and declared friends, advocates and pupils; and it is to be observed that his influence was purely literary, for personally he possessed neither the rousing energy nor the winning attractiveness which favoured some of his more famous contemporaries. He never aimed at founding a sect or school; and it was only after a long interval that his leading principles were overtaken and embraced by the main current of the development of thought, for the most part with no adequate acknowledgment, not unfrequently, it may be, without knowledge of the anticipation. one hand, and to revolutionary Socialism and Communism on the other. It was Melancthon who, not perhaps with adequate by Frank of a Chronicle and Description of Turkey,' from the pen of a Transylvanian, who had passed twenty-two years in a Turkish prison. Even already, however, in these productions are to be found indications of what is called the Pantheism and thorough Subjectivism which so strongly characterized his subsequent writings. He held that matter is from the beginning in God, and is in an eternal circle of becoming and passing away; and that God, who produces the essence of everything, is thus in everything, and even works sin in the sinner for his punishment. It is, he maintained, only through darkness and vice that light and virtue come to be what they are. The peculiar property of things is possible only through contrasts, and so evil is necessary for the emergence of good. In fine, he asserted that it is only through our subjectivity that outward things appear as they do to 118. In this we have a foretaste of Fichte's Idealism-perhaps also a dim foreshadowing of later things-a matter which becomes still more apparent in what he says of the relation of man to nature, in his additions to his translation of Erasmus's 'Moriæ Encomium.' He maintained that it is only through men that anything is either good or bad to the pure all things are pure. The nature of each thing is God's power and essence in it. He is all in all. It is merely an accidental, not an essential, change which the creature undergoes in consequence of sin. So every natural thing may be said to be good or bad, according as it is taken in its essence or its accident. Man in his essence is still what he was before the Fall; only weaker in power, more averse to knowledge, more inclined to evil. Regeneration through Christ merely removes the false direction. To follow nature (which is equivalent to God) is the highest moral task-as was taught by Plato and many of the wise and God-instructed among the ancients. In order to restore this Divine Nature, the inner Word, to purity, God has given the outward Word. The inner Word, that is, the Holy Spirit, is the true Bible, and only according to that inner Word and Light can the external Scripture be understood. This inner Light of Nature or of Reason, which, in the language of theology, is called the Word, God's Seed, Mind and Son of God, has been possessed by the enlightened heathen it lurks in the bosom of all men. As all Nature is of God, and God even is Nature, so God helps our (accidentally) obscured Nature with His Grace, so that Nature sees more clearly, turns back from false Art to true Na ture, and in the inner voice (not in and for itself in the Scriptures) recognizes and seizes God's Word. He was born about the beginning of the sixteenth century, at Donauworth, in Swabia. His earlier years are clouded in obscurity. Our earliest information presents him in Nürnberg, These views drove Frank from Luther and where in 1528 he married Ottilie Behaim. The the Lutherans at Nürnberg. He went to Strassame year he published a translation, with an burg, where in 1531 he published his 'Zeitbuch introduction, of a work by a Lutheran preacher und Geschichtsbibel,' a work in which he disof that town, on the harmony of doubtful pas-played a power and vivacity in the use of the sages of Scripture, and a composition of his own on the frightful vice of drunkenness. In these he appears generally at one with Luther, who, two years later, wrote a preface to a translation national language that raised him to the foremost rank among the prose writers of his time. The first part of it treats of ancient times; the second extends from Christ to Charles V., and is chiefly occupied with the history of social relations-Monarchy, Socage, Tolls, Tithes, Vassalage, Aristocracy, Towns; the third contains consciousness of its importance on his own part, broached the true doctrine in placing the idea of the good in the harmony of the a history of the Papacy, of Councils, of Heretics, of Ecclesiastical Orders, of Ceremonies, of Canonical Law, of Benefices and Ecclesiastical Revenues, of Antichrist, &c. The publication could not promote his establishment in Strasburg, and he withdrew to Esslingen. There he endeavoured to maintain himself by the manufacture of soap, an industry he probably learned during his stay in Nürnberg; but although he boasts that no one in all Germany could easily excel him in soap-boiling,' his trade turned out a losing concern, because the wives both of the citizens and of the nobles in Swabia were still accustomed to wash with lye only, instead of with soap.' We next find him at Geislingen, a little town situated in a narrow ravine at the foot of the Alp, near Ulm, where the chief occupation of the present day is turning and carving articles in bone. During the summer of 1533 he took his wares to the free weekly markets in Ulm, where they seem to have met with a better sale. This success, combined with his necessities and his liking for Ulm, induced him to apply for right of residence in Geislingen, and for freedom of the Ulm markets. He said he was willing to work, would entangle himself in no office, and hoped to be the means of reducing the price of soap; and cited in reference Cicero and his policy.' The Council of Ulm, where he found friends among the patrician classes, admitted him, and bestowed on him the right of citizenship. two-the harmony of the inner affection and the outer manifestation. His view embraces both and equally, as true counter ingenious commentaries, at Frankfort. The book has passed through many editions: the last was in 1831, also at Frankfort. He died in 1545 (some authorities say 1543), at Basel, where he was carrying on business as a printer and bookseller. Reference has been made to Frank's denial of external authority and exaltation of subjective faculty, and to his assertion of the Divine immanence in all things. These doctrines, broached in his earlier books, were carried out to more special developments in his later writings. He argued that as the proper and peculiar Word of God is the inner Word, the Law of God, as God's efflux, image, character, manifestation, in all His creatures, but especially in the human heart, so it is possible for a man to possess the living Word of God, though he does not have the Scriptures.' Since also God, that is, the Divine Word, is the efficient power in every creature, since He is all in all, He can have no definition,' can have no name, being in fact the substance, essence, and life of all visible and invisible things.' He is in himself nothing, -becomes something only in his creatures, and attains to volition and consciousness of Himself first in man. 'God is, or attains actuality, as He is realized in our being; He takes on human nature in all men ; in them He becomes grieved, wrathful, indignant at sin. This is the secret suffering of Christ, because the mourning over sin in every divine man ceases only at his grave.' He now lived by his writings, which he also For Frank, the freedom of the human will printed himself. His liberal patrons in Ulm exists only through the absence of will in God. barely upheld him against his opponents, and He becomes in us what we are, wills in us when about a year afterwards his Paradoxa,' what we will, works in us according as we prehis greatest work, appeared, the storm that had sent ourselves as instruments. If man wishes to been gathering broke over his head. Without be God, God consents, and lets him have his examination he was deprived of his burgher own way, and God becomes the (sinful) man, or privileges, and received notice to quit. He pro- Adam. But the (sinful) adoption of the private tested, and promised to lay down his pen and to will instead of God's is suspended by God as support himself by his printing alone, and to sub- evil, or a rod of correction, over man, and mit to any censorship. Bucer, then at the head turns to good because God guides sin to His own of the Ulm theologians, demanded a retractation; good ends. Inasmuch as this is so, sin properly but he manfully declared that his pen and his is nothing, and there is at bottom no sin against hand and all his members, except heart and con- God, but only against ourselves, seeing that we science, he was willing to subject to the council, injure ourselves most. The inner sin of the will even to death, but that his belief must be free, and is already condemned in the outward deed,-in bound by no oath.' One favour only he begged the external manifestation it hangs' already in -that he should not be expelled with his wife the noose of judgment. There is also, properly and child at the very beginning of winter. The speaking, no such thing as God's objective puncouncil, in whose midst he did not want de- ishment of sin. As thus God concurs with man, fenders, contented itself with his promise and as sin thereby dissipates into nothing, so neither to speak, write, nor print, against the the historical Christ melts away into the Divine preachers or the constitution of Ulm, nor any- Word,-into the Divine element of light which thing without the knowledge of the council. rules in all men. Christ according to the flesh He was thus left in peace till 1538. is only the external director to the knowledge of that which was already written in the heart. Through the death of Christ forgiveness, which in itself is eternal, rises into consciousness. Christ in the flesh is in Himself of no use. must become in us the incarnate Word. His essence is love, and if we receive the love in us we receive both God and Christ in us. In the mean time Ulm had not escaped the disturbing influence of Schwenkfeld; and Frank neither could nor would avoid offence with his free doctrines. The preacher Frecht succeeded in getting Frank judicially deprived of his citizen rights, and no protestation was now of any avail,-not even an appeal to his recently-composed Annals of Ulm, by which, in rescuing the history of the city from long-continued obscurity, he might have been held to have earned some consideration. Frank now led an unsettled life, and moved hither and thither about the south of Germany. In 1541 he published his Sprichwörter,' with He Just as the Bible and the historical Christ, so are the sacraments, the Church, and all ceremonies, indifferent to Frank. In opposition to their objective reality, as well as in opposition to the outwardly violent asceticism of the Anabaptists, he insists on the inward piety, the feeling, the faith, which can exist only through the op parts, the opera externa and the internos | something merely external, while in Morality cordis motus-the bonum affectum et ejus affectus fructum.* May we not dimly trace in these three movements something like an historical exemplification of the Hegelian notion of Abstract Right or Legality, Morality, and Sittlichkeit or Ethicality or Observance, as it has been called? What appears as it were prelusively, unconsciously, and imperfectly in the one (the historical development), is in the other (the philosophical development) modified and expanded, under the dominating principle of the Begriff, by a reflective and self-conscious process. Under the abstract right, the requisite is only to do the right, no matter whether you agree with it or not, and no matter what your motives, intentions, or general spirit may be. But morality is plainly an internalization of such a standpoint, of such a material. While the standard under Law was without, it is now under Morality within-it has become What Hegel means by Sittlichkeit again, is a still higher advance in There is an abstractness, a one-sidedness, observable in Will, whether as manifested in Right or as manifested in Morality; whereas in Observance Will is concrete, and any such defect disappears. In Right, for example, Will is realized in conscience. concretion. eration of love. He desires only that unsectarian, unbiassed Christianity which stands free in the Spirit on God's (inner) Word, and whose piety is bound neither to sect nor time, place, law, person, nor element. The Church is only a spiritual invisible body of Christ, the assembly of all true, godly, pious, and right-minded men in all the world, even among the heathen. I,' he adds, am in that Church, wherever I may be, and therefore I seek for it and Christ neither here nor there.' Thoroughly tolerant towards others, Frank made no claim for himself, but that one should bear with him, and pardon his error if he had erred. Only against the worldly-holy, the universally accredited, the worldly-wise and learned, as against the oppression of princes, the usury and the voluptuousness of the rich, is he inexorable. The more that gold, property, and worldly honour became indifferent to him, and the mere necessaries of life satisfying to him, the more did he like to oppose to the historical rights, which bear so unjustly and unrighteously on the poor people, the rights of reason; and to the overgrown wealth and luxury of his time, the old Christian community of goods based on love and indifference towards possession. He never attempted to impose his principles in a practical way on others, or with any violence to enforce their application. In his aspirations and efforts he was harmless, as he was without blame alike in his private and public relations. -His doctrines, along with Schwenkfeld's, were condemned at the convention of Schmalkalden, under the presidency of Melancthon, in 1540. *Loci Communes,' Augs. edit. pp. 14, 110; Schenkel's Wesen des Protestantismus,' bd. ii. buch iii, abs. 1. again it is realized only internally in the contingent individual subject. This is not so, however, in regard to the Sittlich, the Observational, where what is inner is also outer, and what is outer is also inner. Take filial obedience, for example. There is a Sitte, a sacred usage, a civil custom, a substantial observance, and we can see it to be no less real as an outward act than as an inward sentiment, and no less real as an inward sentiment than as an outward act. Societary usage that is as well that is as well societary usage, -that, then, is societary sentiment, or societary sentiment Sittlichkeit, that, then, is Observance. In such usage we see society to be in enjoyment of what we may call the second or higher nature. Such usage, or the system of such usages, we substance of free will, a substance which each can see also to be capable of being named the individual free will, each member of the society, knows to be that individual member's own proper substance. He then possesses virtue, ethical personality, whose whole nature is permeated and pervaded by this substantial life, who regards accordingly his particular place in the system as not negative to him, but peacefully accepts it, sacrifice himself to it; and this is so, not as trusting implicitly in the whole, and ready to regards the State only, but as regards every one of its subordinate particular institutions.* In reviewing the conceptions of evil and of conscience, by which the one is reduced to incongruity of character with environment, and the other resolved into an effect on the nerves of a manifold experience of benefit and injury, our animadversions have for the most part, if not altogether, been directed against these views considered generally in themselves. But when account is taken of their special position in Mr. Spencer's scheme, in relation to other views which also claim a place in that scheme, the case against them becomes aggravated. They are not consistently maintained. While in one sense this may be a merit, as implying a subjection of mere system-making to a recognition of truth, however it may tell, it renders Mr. Spencer's position So long still more and specially untenable. as evil is primarily the object in view, and, indeed, generally, his conception is rigidly preserved; but when attention is engaged with other considerations, and the subject is indirectly encountered, it is not always so; and under the exigencies of some parts of his teaching his scheme becomes incoherent and self-contradictory. We shall not now, at the end of a paper already long, aim at a full or minute examination of these irreconcilable statements, nor, criticising the * Lectures on the Philosophy of Law.' By Jas. Hutchison Stirling, LL.D., pp. 34, 35. doctrine itself, as we have attempted to do, | termination, are declared to be the sort of is there much need for it. We shall content ourselves with indicating one or two in stances. In discussing the influences of the predatory instinct on the progress of civilization, Mr. Spencer writes : That phase of civilization during which forcible supplantings of the weak by the strong, and systems of savage coercion are on the whole advantageous, is a phase which spontaneously and necessarily gives birth to these things. As soon, however, as there arises a perception that these subjugations and tyrannies are not right-as soon as the sentiment to which they are repugnant becomes sufficiently powerful to suppress them, it is time for them to cease. The question altogether hinges on the amount of moral sense possessed by men; or, in other words, upon the degree of adaptation to the social state they have undergone. Unconsciousness that there is anything wrong in exterminating inferior races, or in reducing them to bondage, presupposes an almost rudimentary state of men's sympathies, and their sense of human rights. The oppressions they then inflict and submit to, are not, therefore, detrimental to their characters do not retard in them the growth of the social sentiments, for these have not yet reached a development great enough to be offended by such doings. And hence the aids given to civilization by clearing the earth of its least advanced inhabitants, and by forcibly compelling the rest to acquire industrial habits, are given without moral adaptation receiving any corresponding check. Quite otherwise is it, however, when the flagitiousness of these gross forms of injustice begins to be recognized. Then the times give proof that the old régime is no longer fit. Further progress cannot be made until the newly felt wrong has been done away or diminished. Were it possible under such circumstances to uphold past institutions and practices (which, happily, it is not), it would be at the expense of a continued searing of men's consciences. The feelings whose predominance gives possibility to an advanced social state would be constantly repressed-kept down on a level with the old arrangements, to the stoppings of all further progress; and be.fore those who have grown beyond one of these probationary states could reinstitute it, they must resume that inferior character to which it was natural. Whilst the injustice of conquests and enslavings is not perceived, they are on the whole beneficial; but as soon as they are felt to be at variance with the moral law, the continuance of them retards adaptation in one direction more than it advances it in another. There are statements here which seem to conflict at more than one point with the general system. In the first place, according to that system, tyranny, violence, ex qualities fitted for man's original state; that in fact they are necessary for his circumstances and position; consequently that they are right, moral-because adapted to conditions. But in the above quotation i is admitted that a time comes when they should cease,-when they are not right; and this time depends on the amount of moral sense possessed by men.' In other words, objective right depends on subjective faculty. Such acts, it would appear, become wrong when their injustice begins to be recognized. Evil then in this view is no longer the result of non-adaptation of constitution to conditions, but of conduct to a faculty, whose function is to form ethical judgments, and thus to erect a standard of right. The prevalent doctrine of Mr. Spencer's philosophy makes fitness to conditions right, and refers conscience to a gradual organization of metamorphosed experiences of benefit and injury; places, therefore, the standard outside, and accounts for the faculty as the growth of the experienced quality of actions. Here, on the contrary, it is asserted that the law finds voice from within, and the quality of actions is the result of its utterance. Either the injustice must exist independently of its recognition, or it exists merely in or by being perceived. In the one case, it would seem to be maintained that at one stage men were obliged to act, ought to act, were morally right in acting, in violation of justice or abstract morality; that is, were morally right in doing what was in itself morally wrong. the other, evil does not consist in non-adaptation of faculty to conditions, but has only that subjective kind of existence called Idealism, which is dependent on the perceiving mind, and so far from affording any ground of experience for the generation of a faculty, to which it has no priority, is itself the result of that faculty's operation. In Again, it is asserted in the above extract, that could the past institutions and practices be upheld after they were recognized to be wrong, it would be at the expense of a continual searing of men's consciences.' Now, be it observed, so long as these institutions and practices were truly fitted to the circumstances, they could not be wrong : on the adaptation theory they were right and beneficial,-they were necessary. When in course of time they came to be unfitted to the conditions, either their flagitious character must have been recognized so soon as they became such, or they must have been for a time unfit and injurious without their injustice being detected. The latter alternative admits the existence of evil before it was seen and known, and it cannot on that supposition be maintained that whilst the injustice of actions is not perceived they are on the whole beneficial,'-it cannot be that the question [of their rightness] hangs altogether upon the amount of moral sense possessed by men.' On the former alternative, that so soon as they became detrimental they were seen to be evil, it is impossible to account for the faculty by which they were so recognized, as the result of long inherited experiences of benefit and injury. For the moral sense to have sprung from such a source, time-admittedly very long time-is required. If it perceived the wrongness so soon as it arose, so soon as the action ceased to be adapted and beneficial, and became hurtful, it must clearly have had some other origin than consolidated and organized experiences of the changed relation. Nor is it easy to understand how an organ could become seared by a continuance of the same process to which its organization is due. If the conscience could be seared by such a continuance, it must have regard to a different standard than could be generalized or organized from the very course of experience in the past, which is now supposed to be inimical to it. Again, when discussing the connection of hero worship with the aggressive qualities, Mr. Spencer says: which he has proposed to base right, and, when convenient, to have found the proper object of the moral sense in something fixed and contrary to whatever is anti-social. Once more, in his Derivation of a First Principle,' there occurs the following dis tinction: The giving of pain may have two causes. Either the abnormally constituted man may do something displeasing to the normal feelings of his neighbours, in which case he acts wrongly; or the behaviour of the normally constituted man may irritate the abnormal feelings of his neighbours, in which case it is not his behaviour that is wrong, but their characters that are so. But how do we come to know what is normal and what is abnormal in man? The true and only norm must, on the principle of this system, be the conditions under which he finds himself. But so far as each man is concerned, other men are external to him, and form a part of these conditions; so that it is hard to see how it could be in ferred, when a painful jar occurs between him and his neighbours, whether it is his behaviour or their character that is wrong. In so far as they and their characters go to define the norm for him, he is at fault; but inasmuch as he is an element in those external conditions that prescribe law for them, the reverse. In such a complex interaction it would seem impossible to deterIn proportion as the members of a commu- mine what the normally constituted man nity are barbarous, that is, in proportion as they show a lack of moral sense by seeking least no longer be said that constitution is. And if it were possible, it could at gratification at each other's expense, in the same proportion will they show depth of revshould always conform to conditions, but erence for authority. What, now, are the sometimes the contrary; for whichever several indications of deficient moral sense? character is abnormal, and has therefore to First on the list stands disregard of human be changed, it must be on the side of conlife; next, habitual violation of personal lib-stitution' for its owner, but a factor in the erty; next to that, theft, and the dishonesty akin to it. This seems to place the moral sense in positive antithesis to barbarity and the search after gratification at each other's expense. But on the main principle of the Social Statics,' these are opposed only under certain circumstances. At one time, in fact, anti-social sentiments and conduct were perfectly right, and alone right. In man's primitive condition, we have been assured disregard of human life and habitual violation of personal liberty' were at once his duty and his necessity. If the moral sense means a sense related to what is moral,-to what is right, then the moral sense could not be lacking, but the reverse, when it prompted men to do that very thing which was needful and fitted to their circumstances. Mr. Spencer would seem to have forgot the shifting foundation on conditions' for every one else. Here, again, in fact, it would seem, the alleged. ground of right has slipped out of view, and the existence and possible knowledge of a norm independent of reciprocal attrition is acquiesced in, if not asserted. |