July 27, 1888.] 



SCIENCE. 



43 



unanimily, universality, and certainty. But this dream of unanimity 

 is now surely dissolved. Under the name of Liberalism we see 

 now what different, hostile views were confused together. The 

 Utopia of a world governed by a consensus among all rational 

 civilized people, where force would be scarcely ;needed except to 

 control a few obstinately perverse representatives of the older state 

 of things, surely this is gone. And if so, all the difficulty, all the 

 bewilderment, comes back upon us. We must seek some other 

 note of truth, now that the old Catholic one, — qiiod semper, quod 

 ubiqite, quod ab omnibus, — in its modern paraphrase, the agree- 

 ment of the civilized world, has failed us. What can we do then ? 

 What else in political questions but what we do in questions of an- 

 other kind ? If we would know the truth about a subject, we 

 study it. If, then, we would know the truth about politics, let us 

 devote ourselves to the impartial study of political questions. 



For, after all, politics may be looked at in another, in quite a 

 different way. Instead of an arena of contest, in which Tories, 

 Whigs, and Radicals are marshalled against each other, in which 

 the same old watchwords are eternally repeated, the same reckless 

 popular arguments continually furbished up anew, — an arena, in 

 short, of action and adventure, — we may speak of politics as a 

 department of study, if not of science. We may talk of political 

 science, or political philosophy. There is no difference of opinion 

 about this. All parties have what they call their principles, profess 

 to assert certain political truths, refer to great writers who are sup- 

 posed to have established the doctrines which it is their business 

 to reduce to practice. These principles, these doctrines, must 

 clearly be matter of study. If they are erroneous, the party that 

 founds on them must needs go wrong; so too if they have been 

 misconceived or misapplied. How is it, then, that we hear so little 

 of politics as a matter of study? How is it that they are not 

 taught in schools or at universities .' 



Well, this is the way of the world. It is the fate of all great 

 doctrines which have momentous practical applications to be lost 

 in their applications, to fall into the hands of practical men who 

 troubled themselves but little about their abstract truth, and think 

 exclusively of making them prevail, and themselves prevail with 

 them. Of the immense crowd that in a country like this take part in 

 politics, only an individual here and there has any taste for the 

 theoretic side of them. To the majority the principles are mere 

 solemn platitudes which give dignity and respectability to the pur- 

 suit. For them the real business begins when the personil ele- 

 ment enters, when elections take place, when A wins «nd B loses; 

 or when an institution is attacked and a grand fray takes place, 

 exciting all the emotions of battle and ending in a distribution of 

 spoils. Not that they could do without the principles. No ; half 

 the pleasure of the fray consists in the proud sense of fighting for 

 something great and high. They like immensely to feel themselves 

 champions of the truth, crusaders. But their own business is with 

 the fighting ; the principles they take more or less on trust. Some 

 one else, no doubt, has inquired and philosophized ; they are con- 

 tent with the results. A grand war-cry is the main thing ; this, 

 and a short argument to save appearances, will suffice for the 

 theoretical part. 'And so they plunge into the fray, not suspecting 

 that in many cases the measure they support does not really em- 

 body the principle they profess, that sometimes the so-called prin- 

 ciple is a mere ambiguity which sounds so grand just because it is 

 hollow, and that sometimes when it is most solemn and most im- 

 pressive it is nevertheless entirely untrue. 



I wish people could understand that it is not enough to have 

 principles, — they must have true principles. We talk sometimes 

 as if principles were grand things in themselves : we admire great 

 historical struggles, on the ground that it is a proof of a noble 

 energy when people are found ready to make sacrifices for prin- 

 ciple. Better, no doubt, is energy than mere stagnant indifference ; 

 but I often think we forget, or do not sufficiently consider, how 

 great is the instinctive, almost automatic love of fighting in the 

 human animal. Sacrifices for principle ! Well, but was the prin- 

 ciple true .' Did the combatant, before he entered the fray, ponder 

 conscientiously, methodically, the principle on which he acted .' 

 Did he impartially consider the question .' For if not, and this is 

 the commoner case, the struggle, war. or revolution was not really 

 for principle : it was only an outbreak of the combativeness which 



is our besetting sin, and principle was not really the motive of it, 

 but only the pretext. History is full of these sham wars of prin- 

 ciple, of which the main result is to bring the principle itself into 

 discredit. In religion and in politics the noblest doctrines grad- 

 ually lose their sacredness through being turned into the war-cries 

 of hypocritical parties, — parties which professed to have been 

 moved by these principles to take up arms, when in fact they took 

 up arms for the fun of it, and then sheltered themselves under the 

 principle. 



No one has any right to talk of principles, either in politics or any 

 other great subject, who has not made a methodical study of the 

 subject. Principles of this sort do not come to us by inspiration. 

 At this time in the world's history, when on every subject such 

 stores of information have been collected, when method has been 

 so carefully considered, and so many false methods have been ex- 

 posed and renounced, we must cease to confound principles with 

 party cries, or to imagine that any high-flown sentiment or jingling 

 phrase is true enough to fight for or good enough to hold a party 

 together. We must be serious. In other departments we have 

 long been impatient of hollow phrases. In scientific investigation, 

 for instance, the phrase, the swelling oracular maxim, is utterly 

 discredited ; it is scouted as mediasval, as belonging to an obsolete 

 system. Principles of quite a different sort reign now in that de- 

 partment, — principles slowly arrived at, provisionally admitted, 

 until a prodigious weight of experience confirms them, and if ac- 

 cepted at last, liable even then to disappear in further develop- 

 ments and higher generalizations. But it is still quite otherwise in 

 the political world. There it seems that no corresponding advance 

 has been made. There the old watchwords still reign ; there 

 the old, vague, blustering terms — liberty, equality, and the rest of 

 them — and the old maxims, traditional commonplaces of party 

 rhetoric, live on in a world where all else is changed. Surely, in 

 these days we want words less pompous and more carefully defined, 

 principles better tested and better suited to the modes of thinking 

 of the age. 



I do not know but that you may be disposed to regard me as 

 something of a sceptic in politics. Not so, if it is scepticism to 

 doubt whether truth in politics can possibly be attained, for 1 have 

 more belief than most people m the possibility of giving precision 

 and certainty to our knowledge in this department. But I am a 

 great sceptic about the current political system. For, in the midst of 

 all our party divisions, there has grown up a sort of accepted polit- 

 ical creed, a doctrine which is held to be almost beyond controversy, 

 the settled result of civilization and progress. It is supposed that 

 all enlightened men are agreed upon this doctrine, and that by it 

 all the principal questions of government are settled, so that really 

 not much now remains open to question. I am indeed a g^eat 

 sceptic about this supposed creed of civilization. I believe it will 

 not bear examination, and that scarcely any article in it is final. 

 I believe that of those principles 'upon which all enlightened men 

 are suposed to be agreed, many are not even true. That imposing 

 semblance of a final agreement, in which before long all controversy 

 will be merged, appears to me a complete illusion, an illusion of a verj' 

 ordinary kind. The appearance of agreement is only the result of 

 vagueness in the use of language ; the fabric looks solid only be- 

 cause we are not allowed to come very near it ; the propositions 

 sound satisfactory only because they have never yet been analyzed. 



How, indeed, can this system be true ? Where, how, and by 

 whom was it framed ? It did not grow out of an impartial study 

 of political questions. It sprang up in the midst of parly contro- 

 versy, in minds heated with opposition and contending for interests. 

 Party conflict may be necessary, and for certain purposes good, but 

 it is not a school for the discovery of truth. To discover truth re- 

 quires impartiality firjt : next, contempt for mere popular success ; 

 then continuous, patient, often difficult trains of reasoning. .AU 

 these are necessarily wanting in the party-strife, where votes must 

 be obtained at whatever cost, and where it is vain to urge any thing, 

 however essential to the demonstration, which is not popular, im- 

 mediately intelligible, obvious to the meanest capacity. In those con- 

 flicts truth may be propagated, when it has been discovered by other 

 means ; but it can be neither discovered nor proved, and the most 

 splendid triumph at the polling-booths leaves the question of truth 

 precisely where it was. We could imagine a great and final system 



