148 



PHILOSOPHICAL THOUGHT. 



have had frequent occasion to remark, its first expres- 

 sion in the philosophy of Plato, from which it has 

 descended in various forms into all the more important 

 subsequent systems of thought. And it is only to 

 superficial observers and readers that it does not ap- 

 pear as prominently in the writings of many moralists 

 in this country. As a matter of fact it existed, as I 

 stated above, almost without exception in the minds of 

 most British moralists as an underlying conviction, not 

 always explicitly stated, of the existence of a natural, 

 moral, or divine order. The reason why it is more 

 explicitly dwelt on in those schools of thought which 

 had their origin in the speculations of Kant, has to be 

 looked for in two circumstances. First, all these 

 thinkers felt, that owing to the spirit of scepticism and 

 flippancy as well as through social anarchy and sub- 

 version, the higher or spiritual view was in danger of 

 being lost, that an effort must be made to preserve or 

 restore it. The second was, the contemporary appear- 

 ance in Germany of a creative spirit in the realms of 

 literature, poetry, and art, opening as it were, the view 

 into a higher world. This was reflected in the philo- 

 sophical thought of the period. 1 



1 It is interesting to see how 

 similar considerations led J. S. Mill 

 to modify to a considerable extent 

 the democratic principles with 

 which he started and which are 

 usually stigmatised as those of the 

 philosophical Radicals. This later 

 phase of his own thought has 

 found expression in what he him- 

 self declared the most carefully 

 written of all his treatises, ' On 

 Liberty,' 1859. He " had become 

 heretical . . . ; he had been alarmed 



by the brutality and ignorance of 

 the lowest classes, and had come to 

 doubt whether liberty, as under- 

 stood by his masters, could not 

 mean the despotic rule of the 

 ignorant. The doubts which he 

 felt were shared by many who had 

 set out with the same political 

 creed" (Leslie Stephen : 'The Eng- 

 lish Utilitarians,' vol. iii. p. 246). 

 And Mill goes on to deplore, per- 

 haps in an exaggerated way, the 

 absence, in his time, of that in- 



