that the Hegelian is not alone in putting them forward. They are the common inheritance of idealist thinkers, from Plato to Spinoza and from Spinoza to Lotze. Whether they can be justified to the reason is a question we have, of course, a perfect right to ask. But perhaps, after all, the best justification of a doctrine is the life of its professors. Philosophy, like wisdom, of which it is a species, is justified of its children, and in the great line of those who have thus justified her, by living consistently in the region of high thoughts, daring to be himself, and never allowing himself (to use his own words) "to be dismayed from his own unique responsibility," thinking, as has well been said of him, with his whole soul, Wallace undoubtedly will occupy a high place.

But lest the reader should go away with the impression that the philosophy which he professed moves proudly in a rare atmosphere of transcendental thoughts, weaving a dogmatic system about an ultimate reality beyond our experience, let me quote in conclusion some more homely words as to its true sphere. They occur in a passage1 where he is expounding, after Hegel, the Greek idea of philosophy, but where, as so often in Wallace, the comment is only a transparent veil for his own thoughts.

"Philosophy, in other words, mistakes its place when it sets itself up as a dogmatic system of life. Its function is to comprehend, and from comprehension to criticise, and through criticising to unify. It has no positive and additional teaching of its own; no addition to the burden of life and experience. And experience it must respect. Its work is to maintain the organic or super-organic interconnection between all the spheres of life and all the forms of 1 Hegel's Philosophy of Mind, p. cxxxviii.

reality. It has to prevent stagnation and absorption of departments to keep each in its proper place, but not more than its place, and yet to show how each is not independent of the others. And this is what the philosopher or ancient sage would be. If he is passionless, it is not that he has no passions, but that they no longer perturb and mislead. If his controlling spirit be reason, it is not the reason of the so-called 'rationalist,' but the reason which seeks in patience to comprehend and be at home in a world it at first finds strange. And if he is critical of others, he is still more critical of himself; critical, however, not for criticism's sake (which is but a poor thing), but because through criticism the faith of reason may be more fully justified. To the last, if he is true to his mission and faithful to his loyalty to reality, he will have the simplicity of the child."

THR

III.

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON'S

PHILOSOPHY OF LIFE.

HE title of this paper may seem to some not a particularly hopeful one. Stevenson, the romancist, we all know and rejoice in. Stevenson, the moral philosopher, to say the least of it, does not sound promising. So little are we apt to find of moral theory in the books we love best that we should be sorry to be set to seek even for morals. His best characters have few enough of the copy-book virtues; his worst are as bad as they are made; yet we find something admirable in them all, and Stevenson seems to intend that we should. What an admirable character, for instance, is Alan Breck! Yet to the eye of cauld morality what is he but a brand plucked from the burning-well described by Professor Raleigh as insolent, revengeful, implacable, a condoner of murder, a cattle-lifter, a confirmed gambler, and internally as vain as a peacock? As for John Silver, we all know him for the arch-scoundrel that he is. Yet for once, at least, Silver speaks the words of truth and soberness when in the fable, Persons of the Tale, he steps out of the book for half an hour between the chapters to enjoy a pipe and a chat with the virtuous Smollett. "What

I know is this-If there's sich a thing as a author, I'm his favourite character. He does me fathoms

better'n he does you, fathoms, he does, and he likes doing me. He keeps me on deck mostly all the time, crutches and all! and he leaves you measling in the hold where nobody can't see you, nor wants to, and you may lay to that! If there's a author, by thunder, but he's on my side, and you may lay to it." It is in vain that Smollett protests that the author is on the side of good, and that Silver has to mind his eye, because he is not through the story yet. Silver is right. The author's imagination, and with it the reader's-if not his heart also-is engaged to Silver, and there's an end to it.

This being so, it might seem as though a critic had little to do who goes in search of moral teaching in these bright books, hunting, so to speak, for the owl of philosophy among the seagulls and birds of paradise that circle and float through their pages. But we all know there is another side to Stevenson's work. Stevenson was a Scotsman, and he would have been no true Scotsman had he not been something of a moralist and theologian as well as writer of romance. You can keep no man long," he writes in his Essay on Burns, "nor Scotchman at all off moral or theological discussion." Besides the Stevenson of Treasure Island, Kidnapped, and the Master of Ballantrae accordingly we have the Stevenson of Virginibus Puerisque, of Men and Books, of Memories and Portraits, of The Fables, and of Lay Morals.

Some critics, indeed, while recognising this side of his literary work, seem to deplore it as ranking him with Montaigne and Pepys rather than with Scott, Victor Hugo, and Nathaniel Hawthorne, his proper kindred. They would therefore fain hustle it out of sight as secondary and subordinate to his true character

as irresponsible poet and romancer. This, however, has always seemed to the present writer not only to misrepresent the character of the man, but to be a preliminary to misunderstanding the whole scope of his work as an artist. What follows is an attempt to do justice to the moral ideas which are not only his stockin-trade in his essays, but underlie even his lighter studies, while they are the soul and essence of his greatest.

If we were to try to indicate in a word the central feature that distinguishes the poetry and fiction of our own time from that of the earlier part of the century just past, we should find it probably in a certain note of sadness, we might almost say disillusionment, that marks the former. It is not only that we live in a period of religious unsettlement, the old order changing, yielding place to new; but the social revolution that inspired Burns and Shelley, and even stirred the colder blood of Wordsworth at the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth century with hopes of a new heaven and a new earth, have ended in settling upon us a form of civilisation which by many, who ought to know, has been judged to be one of the prosiest and most disheartening the world has yet seen. The question whether→ life is worth living, and if so, what makes it, has been put with a new seriousness of purpose, and the value to their generation of the poet and artist is more and more coming to be measured by the answer to it which they have to give-the force and energy with which they can inspire or reinspire our wills-the courage with which they themselves can keep on "the