314 



PHILOSOPHICAL THOUGHT. 



hiimously published ' Essays on Keligion,' revealed a 

 continued search after a reasoned creed which, however, 

 led to nothing really convincing. Much more decided 

 was the position taken up by George Henry Lewes,^ 

 through whom, as also through Hamilton, Herbert 



creed, a philosophy, a religion " 

 (' Autobiography,' p. 67). At the 

 age of twenty he came to the 

 conclusion that the direction of 

 his thought had become too ana- 

 lytical ; he had lost, as it were, the 

 substance of things over an attempt 

 to dissect them ; though he never 

 " ceased to consider the power and 

 practice of analysis as an essential 

 condition of improvement," he 

 "thought that it had consequences 

 which required to be corrected " 

 (p. 143). Under this "sense of 

 want" the cultivation of the feel- 

 ings became ..." a cardinal point 

 in his ethical and philosophical 

 creed" (ibid.). This led him 

 to an appreciation of poetry and 

 art, and through the love of music, 

 such as that of Weber and Mozart, 

 and a disappointment with Byron's 

 pessimism, he accidentally came 

 upon the ' Miscellaneous Poems ' 

 of Wordsworth, which "proved to 

 be the precise thing for [his] 

 mental wants at that particular 

 juncture" (p. 147). From Words- 

 worth he " seemed to learn what 

 would be the perennial sources of 

 happiness, when all the greater 

 evils of life shall have been re- 

 moved " (as the utilitarian philos- 

 ophy was hopeful of removing them) 

 ". . . and the delight which 

 these poems gave [him] proved 

 that with culture of this sort, 

 there was nothing to dread from 

 the most confirmed habit of an- 

 alysis" (p. 148). 



■' In 1874 and 1875 G. H. Lewes 

 (1817 - 1878) pubHshed the first 

 series of his ' Problems of Life and 

 Mind,' with the sub-title, 'The 



Foundations of a Creed,' With 

 much less caution but with a 

 vastly superior knowledge of the 

 natural, especially the biological 

 sciences, than Mill possessed, Lewes 

 came to the conclusion that a re- 

 conciliation of knowledge and belief 

 in a " creed " founded upon scien- 

 tific methods of thought could be 

 elaborated. He, as well as Spencer, 

 and probably largely through the 

 influence of the latter, entertained 

 an exaggerated belief in the power 

 of the genetic view to solve the 

 fundamental problems of life and 

 mind. This view had been estab- 

 lished in Spencer's mind before 

 Darwin gave to it convincing 

 strength through his ' Principle of 

 Natural Selection.' But beyond 

 collecting much material, interest- 

 ing especially to the psychologist, 

 Lewes did not advance far in his 

 original design, nor did he really 

 tackle the main difficulty as Re- 

 nouvier had done before him in 

 France. He did indeed realise 

 the necessity of dealing with the 

 problem of certitude, but did not 

 advance to a "science of mor- 

 ality " like that which Renouvier 

 had put forth already in 1869. It 

 is interesting to note that one of 

 the weakest points of Spencer's 

 system lies likewise in his Ethics, 

 as fully explained by Henry Sidg- 

 wick, but that Spencer, unlike 

 Lewes, propounded the doctrine 

 of the Unknowable, thus closing 

 this search for a reasoned creed by 

 that Agnosticism with which, two 

 generations earlier, James Mill 

 had, according to the testimony of 

 his son, already started. 



