city in matters of this nature, that he went too far-we speak of his logical works-in the direction of depth and apparent obscurity. Like the well-known Cambridge tutor whose profound and excellent book on Hydrostatics provoked the remark that no one could learn the subject from so hard a manual, and who replied that he did not write his book for fools, Mansel made no effort to gild the philosophical pill. And in this respect he afforded a marked contrast to the rival against whom he was pitted both at Oxford and elsewhere-Mr. John Stuart Mill. That author may be said to have taken for his motto virginibus puerisque canto. His plain and plausible Logic, intelligible to the meanest capacity, not only from its pellucid style, but because it makes such a flattering appeal to the 'experience' of its readers without troubling them with the attempt to realise anything which they cannot see or hear, soon drove Mansel's Prolegomena Logica out of the field, and became the text-book of philosophical students. The Schools of Oxford University, where philosophy receives more attention than elsewhere, have shown, if they are not very much misrepresented, or at any rate did for many years show, their favour in a marked manner to the seductive Mill.

Still further, Mansel had only himself to thank for giving his adversaries a gratuitous advantage in the controversies which occurred about his works. For want of a very simple change of phraseology in a crucial portion of his system, which he declined to make, and which would have deprived the objections taken to it of nine-tenths of their force, he weighted the scales against himself. This point will receive attention presently. Enough has been said to account for what we believe to be only the temporary neglect of a great leader, and to suggest that it may be worth while to place his position before the reader in an intelligible form. If it should appear that he has been unduly neglected, it may also follow that it is unsafe to depart from the lines which he has laid down, and that the best prospect for any success in building up a Christian Philosophy on points required by the special attacks of the present day will lie in strengthening and improving the foundations he has laid.

In the following sketch it must be premised that we wholly discard the idea of judging the philosopher by his Bampton Lectures, or by any one of his works taken separately. If we wish to form a just estimate of his position, we must take these works as a whole. His old pupil and friend, Lord Carnarvon, has lately afforded the world a great advantage in

this respect by the publication, with an excellent preface, of his Lectures from the Chair of Ecclesiastical History, which were chiefly philosophical; and Professor Chandler some years ago collected others of the more important additions to his original works. It may not be altogether out of place to mention that in the last of these will be found reprinted the famous Phrontisterion, the wittiest satire which the world: has seen since the days of the Anti-Jacobin, and which, assaulting, as it did, and covering with contempt, the very Alpha and Omega of the Liberal reformers of the Universities in those days, drew down upon its author no 'little of the literary persecution which he had to endure, and which, indeed, he had fairly challenged.

Mansel's Christian Philosophy can scarcely be said to have been brought before the general public till he preached his famous Bampton Lectures of 1858, but it was built on that elaborate system of Psychology which he had inherited from Reid and Sir William Hamilton, and which he had shaped anew for the Oxford Schools during his remarkable career as a tutor of St. John's and Prælector of Moral Philosophy at Magdalen College. These Bampton Lectures were not only perfectly consistent with that earlier work, but they were a part of it, a necessary part; so that it was impossible to accept one without the other. He made it his business in these eight discourses, founding chiefly upon Bishop Butler during the process, to show how the Schools of the German Rationalists and English Materialists failed to deal with the questions they had undertaken to answer, replying to his numerous assailants on a uniform principle, working, in short, to the last on the same lines as those on which he had set out when he began to teach.

It is interesting to contrast the reception of the earlier work with that of the later. While he was laying his foundations, while he was solving the difficulties of innate and experimental ideas, while, in assigning the form and matter of which every fact or phenomenon of consciousness consists, he was reconciling the jarring statements of Locke and his successors, while, with consummate skill, he was laying bare the materials of that human veil of which

'Time and Space are the warp and woof,'

as long as he was following the same track as that on which Kant and Hamilton had set out, his efforts, as far as they were known, were regarded with admiration, or at least complacency. It was a grand foundation, and few but the ini,

tiated knew what was coming. But when the architect began to raise his fabric above the ground, when he proceeded to point its spires and battlements towards the skies, it was then that we witnessed a different scene, Then began to be heard the shouts of horror, and the fainter notes of praise, which on the publication of the Bampton Lectures issued in pitched battle. If that strife has now found rest, it seems rather to have ceased for want of combatants than because it has been fought out.

It was, as many of our readers will remember, by Mansel's departure from the system of Kant that he first excited hostile attention. In the series of works published between 1853 and 1858, culminating in the Bampton Lectures, he had been gradually developing the same views; but those previous works were little known, and the Lectures came upon the world too suddenly and abruptly. His lectures as Prælector at Magdalen were only known to a few, and many of them were never published at all. Had thoughtful and unprejudiced minds enjoyed the opportunity of exploring with the lecturer the intricate windings of the philosophical chart, if they had traced with him in detail the rocks and shallows of the previous systems which had promised so much and performed so little, perhaps the verdict in numerous cases would have been different, and certainly some from whom milder treatment might have been expected would have hesitated ere they struck.

In the lectures above mentioned Mansel devoted himself to the task of refuting Kant's famous position that Time and Space had merely a subjective existence:-'Kant thought he stood before the curtain which concealed the true object from his view; he never suspected that it might be a fixture.' It was in these that he annihilated Kant's distinction, which, under the patronage of Coleridge, had taken some root in England, between the reason and the understanding, between the ego thinking and the ego thought about, and in which he proved that we might justly hold the possibility of creation while we were forced to avow the impossibility of conceiving it. In 1856 he published the Lecture on Kant, which concluded the series, and sufficiently expounded his own method. In this little work he laid bare the mine which gaped under the feet of Kant, and was to overthrow the whole fabric of 'Speculative and Practical Reason,' 'the paradox that our thoughts might be regulated by that of which we do not think,'

'the old serpent of Metaphysics, whose ghost, the ghost of the

Unconditioned, still hovered about the spot where the body was lain, shortly to be once more united to it, and endowed with a vampire vitality, to suck blood and life, thought and sense, reverence and faith, from the victims it haunted. Thus, from a philosophy which set out with the purpose of exhibiting the narrow limits of human reason, there sprang up in the end a gigantic scheme of intellectual Pantheism, the system of Schelling, the logic of Hegel, a philosophy of the Absolute and the Infinite, the most systematic and consistent (even in absurdity) that has ever been given to the world.' 2

It was necessary to attack these gigantic Rationalistic systems at their root. It was a masterful and trenchant attack. It has never been forgiven. It was necessary to prove that there could be no demonstration of any truth relating to things without the mind, that thought could not create its own object, nor the Finite measure the Infinite; that the function of thought is in all cases the same, viz. to represent reflectively what is presented intuitively; and, in short, that the supposed intuition of the Absolute and Infinite involves the annihilation of consciousness itself. Man was not a measure of all things, as certain of the Sophists had said of old, and many a modern Sophist was saying anew. It was not a question whether such and such systems were logical: Logic was incapable of dealing with the subject at all. The proof was very generally admitted. Like a mimic house built of cards, the fabrics which had been reared in defiance of these principles came down to the ground: the 'Philosophy of the Conditioned,' not indeed all at once, but gradually and surely, took their place. This work had indeed been performed in part by Hamilton, and even by his predecessors of the Scottish School; but it was completed by Mansel.

With these so-called intuitions of the Absolute and the Infinite, these thought-created abstractions, fell also the criticism of Revelation. It was no longer open to Rationalists to declare that their intuitive knowledge of God gave them a title to criticise the methods by which He had made Himself known to man, no longer open to them to accept this portion of Holy Scripture and reject that, to deal with miracles, with prophecy, with Divine commands, at the bidding of what they called their moral consciousness. Indeed, no sooner were these pretensions exposed by the hand of the master than a very marked change took place in English opinion. The destructive portion of Mansel's work has certainly had a considerable effect. So-called Rational Religion, at least in its technical sense, no longer takes a prominent place amongst us.

1 Letters, Lectures, and Reviews, p. 175.

2 Ibid. p. 182.

But no one knew better than Mansel that, after making all deductions for the limitations of the human intellect, it was more than ever necessary to account for the religious instincts of mankind, and to explain the capacity of man for receiving a Divine Revelation. If our powers of thought, conception, understanding, were relative, and not absolute, if we were forced to admit that we cannot know God as He is by any light derived from nature, what common ground was left upon which Natural and Revealed Religion might meet? The foundation of this inquiry lies in the doctrine of Personality and Freedom of the Will. The consciousness of our own Personality necessarily involves and carries with it the intuition of the Personality of God. Beyond this Reason cannot go. We must look elsewhere for, and patiently analyse, the other constituents of our nature, the feelings and innate convictions which no progress of science can eliminate, and which approve themselves by their universality. When we have found out what we cannot reach by Reason, and what we can, what is left behind after the most rigorous exclusion of the Unconditioned, and what is required for the state of life in which we find ourselves, we are in a position to examine the claims of Revelation, and to accept Christianity on the testimonial it produces that it is, as Butler showed, in language suited especially to his own times, not only a republication of Natural Religion, but an authoritative republication, such as we might expect to be attested by the supernatural evidences of which we have the historical account.

But this scheme of Christian Philosophy has been so much controverted that it is hardly fair to place it before the reader in any but the author's own words, and we shall make no apology for some rather copious extracts, premising that it is impossible from such disconnected passages to do more than indicate the general line of argument. The references will enable the reader to study the context :

'If, from an examination of the laws and limits of human consciousness, we can show that thought is not, and cannot be, the measure of existence, if it can be shown that the contradictions which arise in the attempt to conceive the Infinite have their origin, not in the nature of that which we would conceive, but in the constitution of the mind conceiving, that they are such as must necessarily accompany every form of religion and every renunciation of religion, we may thus prepare the way for a recognition of the separate provinces of Reason and Faith. So far is human reason from being able to construct a scientific theology, independent of and superior to Revelation, that it cannot even read the alphabet out of which that