We asked them slyly what was the cause of this remarkable change. "Oh," they replied, "why do you remember what we said in our fear of you? Neither our oldest people nor their fathers before them ever saw or heard of such things as these," pointing to the steamers. THE CONDITIONS OF ENGLISH THOUGHT. GEORGE S. MORRIS. [America, like England, has few thinkers of a philosophical turn of mind,-if we accept the word "philosophy" in its metaphysical interpretation. We are too practical a people for that, and by no means inclined, like so many of the Germans, to evolve a universe out of the purely ideal,-very pretty to look at, but with no more solid substratum than the tail of a comet. Yet we are not quite without writers of a metaphysical turn of thought, and our present extract is from one of these, Mr. G. S. Morris, late professor of philosophy in Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, author of "British Thought and Thinkers," and editor of an American edition of the works of the principal German philosophers, now in course of publication.] SCHOPENHAUER made a familiar thought famous by putting it in a simple but striking and epigrammatic form. Die Welt ist meine Vorstellung, said he. The world is for me an idea. It is a representation in my mind. To how many of us has not this thought occurred, with something of a dazing, dreamy effect, as we have mused on the complete dependence of our idea of the universe, or all that therein may be, on our own minds! I can remember how, as a mere boy, more than once, in an evening revery, an experience somewhat in this vein came to me. All my boyish ideas of things seemed, as pure crea tions of my own fancy, to melt away, and there remained, as the whole sum and substance of the universe, only the abstract, but otherwise empty and uninstructive, and, by any law of sufficient reason, inexplicable, necessity of being, plus a dull, confused, and yet thoroughly unique, and for this reason indescribable, sensation, as of a chaos of shapeless elements, moving noiselessly among each other,—a plenum of scarcely greater value than an absolute vacuum. Then came the return to what is termed the literal fact of experience, or, better, to the world such as, under the influence of a dawning mental activity, guided by sensitive experience and by instruction, it had actually shaped itself in my imagination,-the earth, with its green fields and forest-covered mountains, the world-inhabited heavens, the changing seasons, man and his past history and unrevealed earthly destiny, not to mention the myriad little and familiar things which would necessarily crowd the foreground of such a picture in a boy's mind. The view which a moment before had demonstrated so signally its capability of dissolving, recovered its relative consistency and became again a slowly-changing panorama of a world, or of "the world," as it was for me. It was into such a conception of a world-a conception kaleidoscopic, apparently half arbitrary, half accidental-that I, following unwittingly a bent common to the universal mind of man, was more or less blindly seeking to introduce order and permanence. What must be? Why must anything be? Why must all things be? Such a rock of rational necessity as a successful answer to these questions would have furnished I was (though unconscious of the full significance of my striving) seeking, in order to arrest and fix the quicksands of a Vorstellung, or idea of the universe, of which I only knew (with Schopenhauer) that it was mine. I need hardly say that the immediate result of my reflec tions was tolerably negative. I have indicated, however, in the narration of this experience, the elements of a problem which presents itself to mankind in all climes and ages. It is, if I may so express it, to effectuate a sort of rational anatomy of existence, or, at least, of our ideas of it. The sea itself would not move in billowy motions if it had no fixed boundaries. The blood flows in tracks marked out in veins and arteries. The soft and yielding flesh adheres to a firm framework of bone. So man would find in his whole conception of things the skeleton of rational necessity, about which the multifarious or apparently fortuitous elements of that conception may group themselves, or the rather by which the order of their grouping is determined. The "idea" which was but a changing picture in the imagination-a representation— must change to an idea which shall be a rational type, a self-evidencing law, an all-sufficient, all-explaining, allnecessitating reason. The varying and inexplicable element furnished in sense and sensuous imagination must crystallize in the majestic forms of eternal thought, of reason divine. It is this mental work which Goethe, in noble lines, attributes to the angels who constitute the "heavenly hosts." The gracious benediction and command which the Divine Being addresses to them runs thus: "Das Werdende, das ewig wirkt und lebt, Umfass' euch mit der Liebe holden Schranken, Prolog im Himmel: Faust. Thus the world which was "my idea" (in Schopenhauer's phrase) is to be transformed, in its measure, into the image, or rather into a participation, of the divine idea of the world. The evanescent is to give way to the permanent. The passive reception of appearances is to give place to an active apprehension of realities. I have thus stated, in outline, the grand and comprehensive motive which underlies all finite thought as such, and which therefore reveals itself, clearly or obscurely, in all the thought of man. It were easy to show, in detail, how it governs at once the systematic inquiries of philosophical speculation, the exact inquiries of physical science, and the freer intuitions of poetic fancy, as well as, also, the sober contemplations of history. Nor would it be more difficult to show that in this presupposed ideal of stable Truth-believed to be attainable for man: else why and how strive after it?-moral and æsthetic elements are intrinsically involved. But to attempt this here would be to go aside from the purpose of our present inquiry, as well as to repeat a labor already well performed by others. My object now is only to direct attention to the universally observable fact that men, finding themselves in, or in possession of, a mental world, which is at first (as regards their own insight) so largely, or exclusively, subjective, variable, phenomenal (and so, to use Kant's metaphor, like a restless ocean), believe in a continent of objective, stable Truth, think that they have glimpses of it, seek to approach it and set up way-marks (in their literature and institutions) of their progress toward it, and by their notion (or knowledge) of it form their judgments as to the significance and value of human life and history, and of the physical universe itself. And it is through the different notions which the men, the thinkers, of an epoch, a race, a clime, a great nation, form and express concerning the geography of this continent, through the spiritual colors of which they profess to have caught glimpses, the maxims of hope, of conviction, or of despair, sorrowful, reckless, or even blasphemous, which they have inscribed upon the guide-posts set up by them,—it is through all these, and through other signs flowing from, or otherwise necessarily connected with, these, that the peculiar complexion, the special attitude or tendency, of the thought of a particular epoch or nation is known and judged. I say, then, that the question as to the peculiar complextion or tendency of a nation's thought is a question as to the peculiar stripe of its idealism. A materialistic habit of thought is not native to the human or to any other full-grown mind, for mind is simply deceived when it thinks it sees and understands in or concerning matter anything but the reflection (however dim) of its own perfections. Further, a nation's, like an individual's, thought is judged by the conceptions current in it concerning the world, life, and man. Without the interest, perennial, inexhaustible, which attaches to such conceptions, imagination itself would lose its glow, and the subtler hues of thought and feeling would become fitful, fatuous, unmeaning, or rather would sink into a dull and leaden monotone of lifeless color. Nor does it make matters any clearer— the rather it confuses them-to disguise, or seek to disguise, the fact that the questions which revolve about these conceptions are strictly philosophical ones, and that every characteristically spiritual activity of man, in its products in literature, art, polity, social organism, civilization, strictly imply, and in their measure exhibit, a philosophy of human life and of the whole universe of human thought or knowledge. At the same time I scarcely need to say that the individual men, or even nations, in whose thought and works the foregoing truths are illustrated, may have no definite consciousness of the fact that they are virtually philosophizing. They may even feel and |