20 DAIIWINIANISM. 



inferior lands or lands less advantageously placed ; and 

 that being so, no power in the universe can prevent 

 human cupidity offering rent for ike advantage, so long 

 as there is the advantage. 1 



But false abstractions are not limited to political 

 economy. It is to such influences that we have such 

 modern views as that there may be more dimensions 

 than three dimensions, that there is no such thing as 

 substance, for it can only be known by qualities, and no 

 such thing as freewill, for it can only be known by 

 motives. This, too, that it is only one's individual 

 motives that are to be respected ! that that is liberty ! 



Dr. Brown, nevertheless, after all that may be said, 

 was decidedly a metaphysician of merit ; a man born for 

 the trade, and who made the most of it in the material 

 which he knew of which perhaps alone he could know 

 of. His paper on Kant in the first volume of the 

 Edinburgh Revievj is delightfully illustrative here. The 

 writing in it is eminently excellent, and the tone all 

 through is perfectly measured, courteous, liberal, and fair. 

 Brown tells at once that he knows nothing of Kant in 

 original documents : what he has to do is simply to 

 review the French work on Kant of Charles Villers. 

 Runt's views, as they in this way appear at third hand 

 for the first time in English, have certainly a very 

 extraordinary look ; and one finds it only natural in the 

 kindly courteous reviewer, who knows that philosophy is 

 simply what comes within hail of John Locke and David 

 Hume, to regard these strange flittings which he can 

 alone see in what Villers describes to him, as the usual 

 merely well-meaning but wholly inapplicable fabrics of 

 an individual German inner consciousness monsters, 

 artefacts, reels in bottles, for a well-polished Humian smile ! 



1 The whole of Political Economy pretty well sums itself in the 

 single category the single question What will pay ? 



