time to continue-and though we think it a bad system, we shall not deny that within the year the policy and conduct of Lord Kimberley has proved it to be an accidental goodwe trust the government of the island may be always confided to men who know its wants and appreciate its sentiments. Lord Russell's selection is beyond censure; indeed, the present Chief Secretary for Ireland gives promise of being a successful minister-but this important office not very lately was intrusted to a quite different per

sonage.

For the rest, real courtesy and kindliness, and a genuine sympathy with the feelings of Ireland, expressed by those who direct her destinies, will go further than is supposed in soothing Irish ill-will and passion. If the Irish gentry, who often complain that they are not trusted, and are treated with contempt, were to receive a little more attention from authority, -if the observations of those who represent the wants and wishes of many Irishmen, had obtained of late, as they now obtain, respectful consideration and notice,-perhaps government in Ireland would be an easier thing than it is at present. Let us say, at least, that an attitude of this kind is especially incumbent on the rulers of Ireland; for it is idle to deny that the tone and manner of Englishmen generally towards their Irish equals is somewhat contemptuous and offensive, and no mere social influence has done more to divide and irritate.

In conclusion, we would only remind our readers of the gravity of the subject. We may abandon our colonial empire, and give up the allegiance of the nations who are subjects of England all over the earth, without any loss of our real greatness. But Ireland is a part of ourselves, it is an essential member

of Great Britain; its destiny and our own must be united, if England is to be a great power in the world. Then is Ireland always to be as she is, ruled by the sword, and not by the sympathy of her people with their institutions and laws-her government at once disliked and weak, the nation ever poor and discontented ? Is Ireland, in this age of civilisation and of England's overwhelming prosperity, to be pointed at as the Poland of the west, the standing disgrace of British Government? We would appeal, not to the fears of Englishmen, though seventy years ago a mere accident prevented Ireland from becoming the appanage of the French Republic; though fifty years ago Napoleon's legions would have been hailed in Ireland as deliverers, had Villeneuve been equal to his mission;-though at this moment, when British statesmen are involved in controversy with America, the thought of Ireland must affect their counsels. We appeal to their sense of their country's destiny, and ask, Is history to record hereafter that after many centuries of rule England could not win the allegiance of an island which is the necessary complement of herself, and that Ireland was always her reproach and dishonour? The policy we have endeavoured to advocate would prevent such an unhappy consummation; would gradually cause the ills of Ireland to diminish at least, if not to disappear; would ultimately reconcile the Irish race to their natural brethren the English people. That policy, or a policy of the kind, may be opposed to prejudice and ignorance, may have to await for its accomplishment the tardy ripening of public opinion, and the tedious action of parliamentary government, but it is founded in reason, in truth, and in justice, and we do not fear for its ultimate triumph. The great party which, after many

SAID, that Superstition was the child of Fear, and Fear the child of Ignorance; and you might expect me to say antithetically, that Science was the child of Courage, and Courage the child of Knowledge.

But these genealogies-like most metaphors do not fit exactly, as you may see for yourselves.

If fear be the child of ignorance, ignorance is also the child of fear; the two react on, and produce each other. The more men dread Nature, the less they wish to know about her. Why pry into her awful secrets? It is dangerous-perhaps impious. She says to them, as in the Egyptian temple of old- I am Isis, and veil no my mortal yet hath lifted.' And why should they try or wish to lift it? If she will leave them in peace, they will leave her in peace. It is enough that she does not destroy them. So as ignorance bred fear, fear breeds fresh and willing ignorance.

And courage? We may sayand truly-that courage is the child of knowledge. But we may say as truly, that knowledge is the child of courage. Those Egyptian priests in the temple of Isis would have told you that knowledge was the child of mystery, of special illumination, of reverence, and what not; hiding under grand words their purpose of keeping the masses ignorant, that they might be their slaves. Reverence? I will yield to none in reverence for reverence. I will all but agree with the wise man who said that reverence is the root of all virtues. But which child reverences his father most ? He who comes joyfully and trustfully to meet him, that he may learn his father's mind, and do his will: or

VOL. LXXIV.-NO. CCCCXXXIX.

he who at his father's coming runs away and hides, lest he should be beaten for he knows not what? There is a scientific reverence--a reverence of courage-which is surely one of the highest forms of reverence. That, namely, which so reveres every fact, that it dare not overlook or falsify it, seem it never so minute; which feels that because it is a fact, it cannot be minute, cannot be unimportant; that it must be a fact of God; a message from God; a voice of God, as Bacon has it, revealed in things: and which therefore, just because it stands in solemn awe of such paltry facts as the scolopax feather in a snipe's pinion, or the jagged leaves which appear capriciously in certain honeysuckles, believes that there is likely to be some deep and wide secret underlying them, which is worth years of thought to solve. That is reverence. A reverence which is growing, thank God, more and more common; which will produce, as it grows more common still, fruit which generations yet unborn shall bless.

But as for that other reverence, which shuts its eyes and ears in pious awe--what is it but cowardice decked out in state robes, putting on the sacred Urim and Thummim, not that men may ask counsel of the Deity, but that they may not? What is it but cowardice; very pitiable when unmasked: and what is its child but ignorance as pitiable, which would be ludicrous were it not so injurious? If a man comes up to nature as to a parrot or a monkey, with this prevailing thought in his head, Will it bite me? will he not be pretty certain to make up his mind

C

that it may bite him, and had therefore best be left alone? It is only the man of courage-few and far between-who will stand the chance of a first bite, in the hope of teaching the parrot to talk or the monkey to fire off a gun. And it is only the man of courage-few

and far between-who will stand the chance of a first bite from nature, which may kill him for aught he knows (for her teeth, though clumsy, are very strong), in order that he may tame her and break her in to his use by the very same method by which that admirable inductive philosopher, Mr. Rarey, breaks in his horses. First, by not being afraid of them; and next, by trying to find out what they are thinking of. But after all, as with animals so with nature; cowardice is dangerous. The surest method of getting bitten by an animal is to be afraid of it; and the surest method of being injured by nature is to be afraid of her. Only as far as we understand nature are we safe from her; and those who in any age counsel mankind not to pry into the secrets of the universe, counsel them not to provide for their own life and well-being, or for their children after them.

But how few there have been in any age who have not been afraid of nature. How few who have set themselves, like Rarey, to tame her by finding out what she is thinking of. The mass are glad to have the results of science, as they are to buy Mr. Rarey's horses after they are tamed: but, for want of courage or of wit, they had rather leave the taming process to some one else. And therefore we may say that what knowledge of nature we have (and we have very little) we owe to the courage of those men (and they have been very few) who have been inspired to face nature boldly; and say-or, what is better, act as if they were saying I find something in me which I do not find in you; which

gives me the hope that I can grow to understand you, though you may not understand me; that I may become your master, and not as now, you mine. And if not, I will know, or die in the search.'

It is to those men, the few and far between, in a very few ages and very few countries, who have thus risen in rebellion against Nature, and looked her in the face with an unquailing glance, that we Owe what we call Physical Science.

There have been four races-or rather a very few men of each of four races-who have faced nature after this gallant wise.

First, the old Jews. I speak of them, be it remembered, exclusively from an historical and not a religious point of view.

These people, at a very remote epoch, emerged from a country highly civilised, but sunk in the superstitions of nature worship. They invaded and mingled with tribes whose superstitions were even more debased, silly and foul than those of the Egyptians from whom they escaped. Their own masses were for centuries given up to nature-worship. Now among those Jews arose men-a very few -sages-prophets-call them what you will, the men were inspired heroes and philosophers-who assumed toward nature an attitude utterly different from the rest of their countrymen and the rest of the then world; who denounced superstition and the dread of nature as the parent of all manner of vice and misery; who for themselves said boldly that they discerned in the universe an order, a unity, a permanence of law, which gave them courage instead of fear. They found delight and not dread in the thought that the universe obeyed a law which could not be broken; that all things continued to that day according to a certain ordinance. They took a view of nature totally new in that age; healthy, human,

cheerful, loving, trustful, and yet reverent-identical with that which happily is beginning to prevail in our own day. They defied those very volcanic and meteoric phenomena of their land, to which their countrymen were slaying their own children in the clefts of the rocks, and (like Theophrastus' superstitious man) pouring their drink-offerings on the smooth stones of the valley; and declared that for their part they would not fear, though the earth was moved, and though the hills were carried into the midst of the sea; though the waters raged and swelled, and the mountains shook at the tempest.

The fact is indisputable. And you must pardon me if I express my belief that these men, if they had felt it their business to found a school of inductive physical science, would, owing to that temper of mind, have achieved a very signal success. I ground that opinion on the remarkable, but equally indisputable fact, that no nation has ever succeeded in perpetuating a school of inductive physical science, save those whose minds have been saturated with this same view of nature, which they have (as an historic fact) slowly but thoroughly learnt from the writings of these Jewish sages. Such is the fact. The founders of inductive physical science were not the Jews: but first the Chaldæans, next the Greeks, next their pupils the Romans-or rather a few sages among each race. But what success had they? The Chaldæan astronomers made a few discoveries concerning the motions of the heavenly bodies, which (rudimentary as they were) prove them to have been men of rare intellect for a great and a patient genius must he have been, who first distinguished the planets from the fixed stars, or worked out the earliest astronomical calculation. But they seem to have been crushed, as it were, by their own discoveries. They stopped

short. They gave way again to the primæval fear of nature. They sank into planet-worship. They invented (it would seem) that fantastic pseudoscience of astrology, which lay for ages after as an incubus on the human intellect and conscience. They became the magicians and quacks of the old world; and mankind owed them thenceforth nothing but evil. Among the Greeks and Romans, again, those sages who dared face nature like reasonable men, were accused by the superstitious mob as irreverent, impious, atheists. The wisest of them all, Socrates, was actually put to death on that charge; and finally, they failed. School after school, in Greece and Rome, struggled to discover, and to get a hearing for, some theory of the universe which was founded on something like experience, reason, common sense. They were not allowed to prosecute their attempt. The mud-ocean of ignorance and fear of nature in which they struggled so manfully were too strong for them; the mud-waves closed over their heads finally, as the age of the Antonines expired; and the last effort of Græco-Roman thought to explain the universe was Neoplatonism— the muddiest of the mud-an attempt to apologise for, and organise into a system, all the naturedreading superstitions of the Roman world. Porphyry, Plotinus, Proclus, poor Hypatia herself, and all her school-they may have had themselves no bodily fear of nature; for they were noble souls. Yet they spent their time in justifying those who had; in apologising for the superstitions of the very mob which they despised-as (it sometimes seems to me) some folk in these days are like to end in doing; begging that the masses may be allowed to believe in anything, however false, lest they should believe in nothing at all: as if believing in lies could do anything

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