113 
and that notable and noble parts of it are chiefly intellectual 
buttresses, thrown up to keep safe and intact the outworks of 
the Moral Law. He has examined all the intellectual anti- 
nomies, which Kant raised, but never solved, — he has com- 
bined them all in one conception, magnificent in its sweep, 
startling in its originality — the Law of the Conditioned — 
and any one who accepts that law has provided for him a for- 
tress of incalculable strength, within which the doctrines of 
moral liberty and moral obligation may be defended against all 
assailants. John Stuart Mill attacked that Law of the Con- 
ditioned in what may honestly be described as a ferocious 
style, for he saw how invincible it made the Theistic position ; 
but his poor little sophisms are now treated with the contempt 
they deserve. Mr. Spencer can be shown to have accepted as 
valid the main arguments which lead up to the Law of the 
Conditioned,^^ and it needs nothing more than a slight re- 
setting of the Hamiltonian thesis in order to make it invin- 
cible against all attacks. 
Kant and Hamilton are by this time almost proved to be of 
the prophetic order of men, for what they asserted to be a 
logical necessity has now actually come to pass. We just saw 
that they declared moral liberty and moral obligation to be 
indissolubly united, and that the denial to man of liberty 
must lead to the denial to him of moral obligation. Mr. 
Spencer’s whole Philosophy is a startling commentary on this 
thesis ; he denies liberty to man, and there is in his system 
no trace of moral obligation. He has lately proclaimed 
that the sense of duty or moral obligation is transi- 
tory,”* and that as civilisation progresses, man’s nature 
will become more perfectly co-ordinated, needing no moral 
directions. No one who watches the currents of thought 
ill our day which deny to man Freedom of Will can 
question that denial of moral obligation accompanies them 
to no small extent. The advocates of Determinism and Auto- 
matism can see instinctively that our moral instincts are op- 
posed to them, and that if these instincts remain in full force 
their theories cannot prevail ; as the doctrine of their school 
sinks into Materialism, its antagonism to all moral principle, 
all sense of right, all authority of conscience, is at once more 
constant and more vehement ; and in the lowest stages it 
reaches a point where man is made to be only a helpless 
mechanism, all future retribution is derided as an old w’orld 
dream, and the worst impulses of his sensual nature are un- 
blushingly defended. Thus, surveying the matter along the 
* Spencer, Data of Ethics, p. 127. 
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VOL. XVI. 
