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RECENT

BRITISH PHILOSOPHY.

CHAPTER I.

A SURVEY OF THIRTY YEARS.

Philosophy of

But what do I period? You

By recent British Philosophy I mean the this country during the last thirty years. mean by British Philosophy during that have all a general notion of what I mean. I mean the aggregate speculations during that period of some of our ablest British minds in what are vaguely called "the moral sciences"-their aggregate speculations on those questions of most deep and enduring interest to man which have occupied thoughtful minds in all ages of the world, which are handed on from age to age, and which each generation, however much of previous thought concerning them it may inherit and preserve, has to revolve over again for itself. It has been proclaimed among us, indeed, that Philosophy in this sense has at length happily ceased to exist-that great Pan is dead. I do

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not believe it; and, if I did, I should be sad. Whatever nation has given up Philosophy-I will be bolder, and, using a word very much out of favour at present, I will say whatever nation has given up Metaphysics—is in a state of intellectual insolvency. Though its granaries should be bursting, though its territories should be netted with railroads, though its mills and foundries should be the busiest in the world, the mark of the beast is upon it, and it is going the way of all brutality.

Britain, notwithstanding temporary misrepresentations of her, is not yet in this state. We have not, it is true, and we have not had for a long while, the reputation among our continental neighbours of being a nation caring much for Philosophy. The Germans, in particular, have long pitied us on this account. It is more than forty years since one of their greatest thinkers publicly denounced us by pointing out that England was the only country in Europe where the word Philosophy had become synonymous with natural science, where the barometer and thermometer were spoken of as "philosophical instruments," and where a so-called Philosophical Journal treated of agriculture, housekeeping, cookery, and the construction of fire-places.* Historically it might be shown that this very degradation of the word Philosophy among us arose from what was originally a philosophical conception, and may have been a good one. Not the less was the taunt well deserved. And, though we may have been recovering since then, our recovery, it must be admitted, has been very gradual. Exactly thirty years ago Mr. John Stuart Mill could * Hegel, as quoted by Mansel, Metaphysics, p. 4, note.

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write as follows: "England once stood at the head of "European Philosophy. Where stands she now? "Consult the general opinion of Europe. The "celebrity of England, in the present day, rests upon "her docks, her canals, her railroads. In intellect "she is distinguished only for a kind of sober good sense, free from extravagance, but also void of lofty aspirations. . . . Instead of the ardour of research, the eagerness for large and comprehensive inquiry, of the “educated part of the French and German youth, what "find we? Out of the narrow bounds of mathematical "and physical science, not a vestige of a reading and "thinking public engaged in the investigation of truth as "truth, in the prosecution of thought for the sake of "thought. Among few except sectarian religionists"and what they are we all know-is there any interest in "the great problem of man's nature and life; among still "fewer is there any curiosity respecting the nature and "principles of human society, the history or the philo"sophy of civilization, or any belief that from such "inquiries a single important practical consequence can "follow ? "* Even at the time when Mr. Mill wrote these words I cannot but think they described matters as somewhat worse than they really were. When I remember that Coleridge and Bentham and Mackintosh were then but recently dead, that Mr. Mill's own eminent father was yet alive, and that the poet Wordsworth, no less the philosophic sage than the poet, survived as an honoured recluse, I cannot think that the tradition of our national

* Review of Professor Sedgwick's Discourse on the Studies of Cambridge, 1835; reprinted in Mill's Dissertations.

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