SCIENCE AND MORALITY. 767 



eloquently avowed, thinks the first Napoleon about the greatest ene- 

 my of his kind who ever lived. Yet in which of the attributes of 

 perfect evolution did Napoleon fall short ? "Were not his actions as 

 admirably adjusted as possible to their evil ends ? Was he not in the 

 highest degree " punctual," methodical, and exact ? Was any man 

 ever more multiform in his activities or heterogeneous in the parts 

 which he enacted? Did any man ever keep his eye more steadily 

 fixed on remote objects or play a longer game ? No one can question 

 the vastness of his brain-power, and his historian boasts that his head 

 was the largest and the best-formed ever submitted to the investiga- 

 tion of science. History can not pretend to say anything about his 

 " rhythm," but during a considerable part of his life, at all events, he 

 may be said to have been in moving equilibrium, for he was always 

 on horseback, and had so loose a seat in his saddle that he rode merely 

 by balance, and when the horse stumbled was apt to be canted over 

 its head, though the powers of evil always preserved his neck. He is 

 a figure to be noted by agnostics, for, though he lived before posi- 

 tivism, he was a perfect positivist. He had, as he tells us himself, 

 shut all religious ideas out of his mind as hindrances to action ; he 

 had learned to discard metaphysics and philosophy altogether as the 

 dreams of ideologues ; he insisted on positive education, and he took 

 his own propensities as the parts of his nature which were to deter- 

 mine his conduct without respect for any moral conventions. There 

 is a curious jeu (Vesprit (such, no doubt, it is) which connects, across 

 the gulf of centuries, Bonaparte with that other great positivist be- 

 fore positivism, Machiavelli. It is a copy of " The Prince," supposed 

 to have been found in the Emperor's carriage at Waterloo, with a 

 running commentary by his hand, showing the correspondence of his 

 own policy with Machiavellism ; and the likeness is very striking. 



Are not " punctuality " and whatever it denotes as much shown in 

 keeping a guilty assignation or a rendezvous of crime as in appearing 

 at the hour fixed for a charity meeting ? Was '* the adjustment of an 

 action to its end " ever more exact, were the qualities which adjust 

 actions to their ends ever more signally displayed, than when Ravail- 

 lac, having marked his opportunity and chosen his position well, drove 

 the knife, which he had chosen with care and thoroughly sharpened, 

 at a single stroke into the heart of a king whose life was the hope of 

 the world? 



Mr. Spencer, in his present, work, wisely forbears touching the 

 question of moral necessity. So far as the " Data of Ethics " is con- 

 cerned, therefore, he avoids the reef marked by the wreck of the 

 automaton man. The reasonings by which automatism is supported, 

 it may be noted by-the-way, are simply a reproduction of those of 

 Jonathan Edwards, who was not in quest of truth, but of a philosophic 

 basis for his Stygian dogma, and was himself half conscious that he 

 had reduced his own argument to an absurdity when he found himself 



