18 AS REGARDS PROTOPLASM, ETC. 



Mills, etc.? to the old illumination or enlightenment of a 

 hundred years ago, in regard to the weakness and stupidity of 

 man's pretensions over the animality and materiality that limit 

 him. Of this revulsion, then, as said, a main feature, especially 

 in England, has been prostration before the vast bulk of Comte ; 

 and so it was that Mr Huxley's protest in this reference, con- 

 sidering the philosophy he professed, had that in it to surprise 

 at first. But if there was surprise, there was also pleasure ; for 

 Mr Huxley's estimate of Comte is undoubtedly the right one. 

 " So far as I am concerned," he says, " the most reverend pre- 

 late" (the Archbishop of York) "might dialectically hew M. 

 Comte in pieces as a modern Agag, and I should not attempt 

 to stay his hand ; for, so far as my study of what specially 

 characterises the Positive philosophy has led me, I find therein 

 little or nothing of any scientific value, and a great deal 

 which is as thoroughly antagonistic to the very essence of 

 science as anything in ultramontane Catholicism." "It was 

 enough," he says again, "to make David Hume turn in his 

 grave, that here, almost within earshot of his house, an in- 

 structed audience should have listened without a murmur while 

 his most characteristic doctrines were attributed to a French 

 writer of fifty years' later date, in whose dreary and verbose 

 pages we miss alike the vigour of thought and the exquisite 

 clearness of style of the man whom I make bold to term the 

 most acute thinker of the eighteenth century even though 

 that century produced Kant." 



Of the doctrines themselves which are alluded to here, I shall 

 say nothing now ; but of much else that is said, there is only to 

 be expressed a hearty and even gratified approval. I demur, 

 to be sure, to the exaltation of Hume over Kant high as I 

 place the former. Hume, with infinite fertility, surprised us, 

 it may be said, perhaps, into attention on a great variety of 

 points which had hitherto passed unquestioned; but, even on 

 these points, his success was of an interrupted, scattered, and 

 inconclusive nature. He set the world adrift, but he set man 

 too, reeling and miserable, adrift with it. Kant, again, with 

 gravity and reverence, desired to refix, but in purity and truth, 

 all those relations and institutions which alone give value to 

 existence which alone are humanity, in fact but which Hume, 

 with levity and mockery, had approached to shake. Kant built up 

 again an entire new world for us of knowledge and duty, and, in a 

 certain way, even belief; whereas Hume had sought to dispossess 

 us of every support that man as man could hope to cling to. In 

 a word, with at least equal fertility, Kant was, as compared with 

 Hume, a graver, deeper, and so to speak, a more consecutive, 

 more comprehensive spirit. Graces there were indeed, or even, 

 it may be, subtleties, in which Hume had the advantage perhaps. 



