so exquisitely disguised in the lecture on the Protestant Episcopal Church as to have escaped the observation of those dignitaries who caused a large edition of the address to be reprinted from a newspaper report-to be circulated as a proselyting tract. Indeed it is no secret that some-not all--of said dignitaries, are too solemn and pachydermatous to be sensitive to the presence of anything so refined as irony upon a subject which in their view is so serious. It is reported even that a Diocesan Bishop-who is reputed to have formerly possessed some critical sensibility-addressed a letter of thanks to Mr. Beecher for the services rendered to his church by the lecture aforesaid. If this is true, it would have been fitting to date the letter on the Feast of St. Simon the Simple.

PHILOSOPHICAL.

HUXLEY'S LAY SERMONS.*- -Whatever Mr. Huxley may see fit to write and print will for the present command very general attention in England and America. There are several reasons for this. Among these may be named the high official position which he holds in the scientific world, the very able manner in which he knows how to present the strong points of the theories which he advocates, the very adroit manner in which he contrives to ignore the weak points of these theories and to dispose of the objections against them, the confident air with which he treats of subjects which lie out of his beat, and the dogmatic and yet good-natured manner in which he asserts whatever positions he chooses to maintain. His writings give tokens of many of those qualities which are essential to an able expositor and a skillful advocate, but of very few of the attributes of either a profound or candid inquirer after truth. He is positive, bold, sophistical even to self-entanglement, and contemptuous of all who dissent from him. He is so skillful in presenting one side of a case that he seems to deceive himself into the belief that there is no other. He is an attorney rather than a judge-an arguer rather than a witness-an advocate rather than, a juror. And yet there is a kind of gruff ingenuousness about him which induces us to conclude that his defects are owing to the one-sided education which he has received, rather than to any special narrowness or perversity of nature. The manifold ambiguities and hasty equivocations of his Physical Basis of

* Lay Sermons, Addresses, and Reviews. By THOMAS HENRY HUXLEY, LL.D., F.R.S.. etc. New York: D. Appleton & Co. 1870.

Life, which have been so effectually exposed and answered, could never have been allowed by a man whose early education in logic had not been sadly neglected. His very brilliant lecture on a Piece of Chalk could never have been deformed as it is by one or two utterances, had not his knowledge of history and literature been limited in childhood and narrowed in later years. All the earnestness and zeal with which he seeks to correct the one-sided neglect with which scientific studies are omitted in the liberal education of England, will be more than overborne by the single sentence in which he declares "I weigh my words well when I assert, that the man who should know the history of the bit of chalk which every carpenter carries about in his breeches-pocket, though ignorant of all other history, is likely, if he will think his knowledge out to its ultimate results, to have a truer, and therefore a better, conception of this wonderful universe, and of man's relation to it, than the most learned student who is deep-read in the records of humanity, and ignorant of those of nature."

The writer who does not know better than this, or who supposes that by the daring with which he utters this sentiment, he can carry the mind of England and America, is either singularly ignorant of the import of what he says, or strangely blind to the grounds on which others dissent from his views. The narrowness of those who would exclude the study of nature from liberal education, is no excuse for such extreme fanaticism.

Mr. Huxley occasionally ventures into the domain of philosophy, in which he succeeds perhaps as well as certainly no better than those of his critics, whom he calls "philosophers not very learned in either Biology or Microscopy." Whatever his own learning may be in either of these branches, his achievements in metaphysics evince no special amount of either learning or acuteness. For example, in his Essay on the Physical Basis of Life, after laboring with all manner of arguments and fetches to show that "vital action" is the result of " molecular forces," he proceeds to vindicate himself from the fancied charge of "gross and brutal materialism" and of "necessitarianism" also, by attempting to show in a half dozen sentences that the celebrated David Hume had demonstrated that all questions in respect to the nature of matter and of mind lie outside "the limits of philosophical inquiry." In other words, that inasmuch as we are entirely incompetent to define what either matter or mind are, therefore it is impossible that a man should be convicted of holding the doctrine of materialism. This is the same as to say, allow me to persuade you

that the phenomena of life and of spirit-of emotion and of conscience--are alike the resultants of the "molecular forces" of protoplasm, and I will secure you against the consequence of believing that these phenomena are to be ascribed to a material agent or material forces, by showing that the question of the existence of such an agent as matter or mind has been demonstrated by David Hume to "lie outside the limits of philosophical inquiry." He does not stay to hear the question which might have been asked, whether speculation about the nature of "protoplasm" or "molecular force" lies within or without these limits, but gathers up his papers and wishes his distinguished auditors good evening, leaving them in a muddle whether most to admire the demonstrations of the physiologist or the juggleries of the metaphysician.

On the 27th of March, 1870, Mr. Huxley was invited to deliver an address to the Cambridge Young Men's Christian Society, and he selects as his theme Descartes' Discourse on Method. The practical conclusion which he derives from this address is that inasmuch as it was very unchristian for the Jesuits and Calvinists to call Descartes an Atheist, therefore it is very unchristian at the present time for any body to be offended "at one or two living men," for the fancied dangerous tendencies of their doctrines. Who these men are the lecturer does not inform his audience. His modesty forbids him to suggest who one of them is, but he is altogether confident that "the twenty-first century will find that the Christianity of the 19th century recognized them as objects of vilification."

The elucidation of Descartes is in its way as brilliant and as modest as the exposition of the metaphysics of Hume. More exactly, it is an attempt to find that the philosophical conceptions of both mind and matter, which he found so convenient in Hume, might be justified after sundry dextrous eliminations and corrections from the Discourse of Descartes. In a passing comment upon the "I think therefore I am," he dogmatically informs us that the only position of Descartes that can stand is the reality of thought, or a state of consciousness; the existence of the I, and of the activity of the I having been questioned, and deserving therefore to be set aside.

He had previously analyzed our conceptions of matter, in the example of a piece of marble, and had reached the luminously stated conclusion "that, whatever our marble may be in itself, all that we can know of it is under the shape of a bundle of our own consciousness." It was in order to square Descartes' cogito ergo

sum with this conclusion reached by himself, that he had dogmatically resolved mental phenomena into successive states of consciousness.

Having demonstrated that matter is resolvable into "bundles" of consciousness, and states of consciousness are resolvable into thought, by the same jugglery by which he had dispelled the charge of materialism on the authority of Hume, he hoped to adduce Descartes as sustaining the materialistic psychology of the present, and the indifference of spirit and matter; both of which doctrines are in direct antagonism to the fundamental principles of Descartes' philosophy.

Mr. Huxley says in his preface-"My unlucky Lay Sermon has been attacked by microscopists, ignorant alike of Biology and Philosophy; by philosophers, not very learned in either Biology or Microscopy; by clergymen of several denominations; and by some few writers who have taken the trouble to understand the subject." His allusion to clergymen is intended to be annihilating. We happen to have at hand one of these letters from a clergyman, in which there is no allusion to the Bible at all, but simply an earnest exhortation to Mr. Huxley to submit himself to a rigid course of school logic, under competent teachers, for a sufficient number of years, in order that he may learn to avoid "such conveniently grandiloquent expressions as matter and spirit are but names for the imaginary substrata of groups of natural phenomena.' 'In itself it is but of little moment whether we express the phenomena of matter in terms of spirit, or the phenomena of spirit in terms of matter.' 'The extension of the province of what we call matter and causation, and the concomitant gradual banishment from all regions of human thought, of what we call spirit and spontaneity.""

After reading this correspondence, we do not wonder that Mr. Huxley was disposed to pass over very slightingly his "letters from clergymen."

PROFESSOR GOODWIN'S PLUTARCH.*-Professor Goodwin undertook no light task when he set about the work of correcting the old English translation of Plutarch by a careful comparison of it with the original. Yet the labor he has bestowed is well spent.

*Plutarch's Morals. Translated from the Greek by several hands. Corrected and Revised by William W. Goodwin, Ph.D., Professor of Greek Literature in Harvard University. With an introduction by Ralph Waldo Emerson. 5 vols. 8vo. Boston: Little, Brown & Co. 1870.

Like so many of the earlier translations from the Greek and Latin authors, like our version of the Scriptures,-there belong to the English Plutarch a freshness and an idiomatic force which are missed in most of the more modern renderings of the ancient authors. The racy quality of the style is often positively startling, and in the widest contrast with the colorless, lifeless character of most translations of a later date. Every reader of the English Bible is sensible of this transcendent merit; and this is an argument-not against a revision-but against every attempt to supplant the English Scriptures by a totally new version. The old translators lived into the sense of the Book, and reproduced the thought, instead of merely transferring it to another language. This rare, inimitable vitality covers a multitude of sins. The progress of philology, however, even in the case of the Scriptures and much more in regard to most of the earlier translations of the classics, imperatively calls for such revision as will eliminate ascertained errors. This service Professor Goodwin has done for the singularly faulty translations of Plutarch, which were first published in London between 1684-1694; and for this laborious service he is entitled to the thanks of all scholars and of all who, though not scholars, still desire to read one of the most charming, as well as instructive, of ancient writers. The "Morals" is the name given to the miscellaneous writings of Plutarch,-to all of his writings except the "Lives." In the "Morals," besides the discussion of various topics of interest to thoughtful men, by a genial, gifted mind, there is introduced incidentally information of all sorts respecting ancient life and opinions. These essays are a mirror in which are pictured many features of the intellectual and moral life of the age in which Plutarch lived; the opinions and manners of the cultivated people of antiquity. Mr. Emerson in his brief introduction has well described the popularity of Plutarch among eminent persons of different periods, and has pointed out his attractive qualities. We should consider Plutarch a more decided sectarian in philosophy than he is here represented. His polemics against the philosophical parties to which he is opposed, especially the Stoics, are of a trenchant kind, and give proof of his earnest devotion to the tenets of his school. Plutarch was a sincerely devout man, in a period of decaying faith, when belief in the supernatural and in a moral order was dying out of the minds of the educated class in heathen society. This is one of the most interesting aspects of his character. He makes an honest, however unavailing, effort to stay the progress of skepticism and to