means, the essential point seems to be to throw the brain into this abnormal state partly by keeping an unnatural strain on the attention, and partly by acting on it through the imagination. The experiments of Dr. Braid showed that the mesmeric sleep could be induced just as well by keeping the eye strained on a black wafer stuck on a white wall, as by the manipulations of an operator. This experiment disposes of a great deal of mysterious nonsense about magnetic fluids, overpowering wills, and other supposed attributes of professional mesmerizers, and reduces the question to the plain matter-of-fact level of the relations between the brain, will, imagination, and nervous system, which exist in natural and in artificial somnambulism. These are undoubtedly very curious, and open up a wide field for physiological and mental research. As far as I have seen or read, they seem to turn mainly on the reflex effects of an excited imagination on other organs and faculties. I do not believe that any one could be mesmerized who was absolutely ignorant of the subject and unconscious that any one was operating. On the other hand, any one who had frequently been mesmerized would fall into the sleep if led to believe that an operator was at work when there was really not one. And the peculiar effects shown in the mesmeric state are attributable mainly, if not entirely, to the imagination acting with morbid activity on the slightest hint or suggestion of what is expected. Thus the will disappears in the more powerful suggestion of the imagination that the patient has to obey the will of the operator, or do certain things which are in the programme. I can readily believe also that in this state the imagination can perform feats which would be impossible to it in a natural state when it is kept in check by other faculties, and that a good deal of what is called clairvoyance may be explained by the way in which the slightest hint from expression, involuntary muscular motion, or otherwise, is taken advantage of as a substitute for the ordinary modes of communication. Such a faculty may also doubtless be cultivated by practice, and thus explain many of the phenomena of what are called spiritual communications and thought-reading. But that impressions can be made on the brain, or that one mind can communicate with another, without some physical means of connection between object and subject, is absolutely unproved and remains altogether incredible.

Among the great writers who, without attempting to found sects, have profoundly influenced modern thought, Carlyle undoubtedly occupies the foremost place. With all his extravagances and eccentricities, he was essentially a Hebrew prophet in modern guise, preaching a true gospel-that of sincerity. To stand on fact and despise shams, to make one's life accord with the "eternal veracities," to strip off outward trappings and look at the ideas they clothe, to worship truth and abhor falsehood; these are the principles which Carlyle is never tired of enforcing in his vivid and picturesque language. The dignity of all faithful work, and the hollowness of mere show and pretence, is another theme on which he delights to dwell; and the maxim, "Do the nearest duty that lies to your hand and already the next duty will have become plainer," is his favorite rule for practical conduct. He insists much on "hero-worship," and pushes his conclusions to an extreme extent, dividing mankind too absolutely into two classes; on the one hand the heroes who discern facts and the followers who loyally obey them; on the other, the great mass of

foolish and chattering humanity. Human nature is not really all black or all white, but shaded off by innumerable half-hints and blended gradations. Nevertheless "hero-worship" contains a great truth, that loyal reverence for what we feel to be above us does not lower a man but elevates him; and that those really degrade themselves who have no respect for higher things, and try to drag everything down to their own level.

In insisting on looking through phrases to facts Carlyle touches one of the great dangers of the present day. The spread of education has given an extension to the influence of words which threatens to become excessive. People read until they have no time to think, and find it easier to borrow the thoughts of others. And a large and ever-increasing portion of the community have learnt, in Yankee phrase, to" orate," and use the new-found faculty incessantly and remorselessly. I do not refer so much to the obstruction of the Parliamentary machine by floods of talk, for that is an evil which will work its own cure, but to the undue influence which oratory tends to acquire in all constitutional countries, where the ultimate power is vested in what is essentially a debating society. A great orator is inevitably a great power in the State, but it does not necessarily follow that he is a great statesman.

The qualities which make an orator depend to a great extent on gifts of nature, such as a good voice and presence, and still more on the gift of a fervid temperament, which moves and convinces others because the speaker is himself moved and convinced. These may or may not coincide with the gifts of a great statesman, ripe experience, clear judgment, and calm courage. When they do coincide the State will be well ruled; when they do not, the statesman will lack motive power, and the orator will lack statesmanship; so that between the two the affairs of the nation will be apt to be mismanaged. Still, on the whole we must accept the inevitable, and trust that the public opinion which is formed by many speeches and many articles will give better average results than by attempting to find a hero who might just as readily turn out to be a Cleon as a Pericles. But the influence of Carlyle's teaching will always remain useful as a corrective, and as a warning to public opinion to measure public men by their solid qualities rather than by their oratorical talent.

The influence of Carlyle has been great on all the foremost minds of his generation, and may be distinctly traced in their writings. If Tennyson makes his Guinevere say:

Oh God! what might I have made of Thy fair earth
Had I but loved Thy highest creature in it!

We needs must love the highest when we see it.

This is genuine Carlylese condensed into noble poetry. The whole literature of fiction has been transformed. The fashionable novel, with its dandified coxcomb heroes and simpering fine lady heroines, has been superseded by works like those of Dickens, Thackeray, Trollope, and George Eliot, which satirize folly and pretension however highly placed, and aim at honest, earnest, simple and sincere ideals of true men and women. The whole tone of society has become more manly, and no one now thinks of acquiring fame by wearing a pea-green coat or getting a voucher for Almack's. Artificial distinctions have to a great extent disappeared, the sons of dukes think it no disgrace to earn an honest livelihood as stockbrokers, and self-made

men are received on an equal footing everywhere if they have the essential qualities of gentlemen. There is vastly more real equality and real fraternity among men, and every one recognizes, in theory at any rate, the dignity of honest labor, whether of the hand or head. The certain survival also, in the long run, of truth over falsehood, or in other words of the fittest, as being most in accordance with the laws of the universe, is universally recognized as a law in the moral as well as in the material world.

For these results, which have now become almost commonplaces, those who derived them in their youth direct from works like "Sartor Resartus" can best judge to what an extent modern thought has been indebted to Carlyle.

1

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CHAPTER VIII.

MIRACLES.

HEN men began to reason on the phenomena of the world around them, it was inevitable that they should begin by referring all striking occurrences to supernatural causes. Just as they measured space by feet and inches, and time by days and years, they referred unusual events to personal agencies. They knew by experience that certain effects were produced by their own wills, muscular energies, and passions; and when they saw effects which seemed to be of a like nature, they inferred that they must have been produced by like

causes.

To take the familiar instance of thunder. The first savage who thought about it must have said: "The sound is very like the roar with which I spring on a wild beast or an enemy; the flash of lightning is very like the flash of the arrow or javelin with which I strike him; the effect is often the same, that he is killed. Surely there must be some one in the clouds, very strong, very angry, very able to do me harm, unless I can propitiate him by prayers or offerings. But after long centuries, science steps in. An elderly gentleman at Philadelphia, Benjamin Franklin by name, sends up a silk kite during a thunderstorm, and behold! the lightning is drawn down from the skies, tamed, and made to emit harmless sparks, or to follow the course of a conducting wire, at our will and pleasure. There is no more room left for the supernatural in the fiercest tropical thunder-storm than there is in turning the handle of an electrical machine, or sending in a tender to light the streets of London by electric light. And the result is absolutely certain. In the contest between the natural and supernatural, the latter has not only been repulsed but annihilated. The most orthodox believer in miracles, if his faith were brought to the practical test of backing his opinions by his money, would rather insure a gin-palace or gambling saloon protected by a lightning conductor than a chapel protected by the prayers of a pious preacher.

This instance of thunder is a type of the revolution of thought which has been brought about by modern science in the whole manner of viewing the phenomena of the surrounding universe. Former ages saw miracles everywhere, the age in which we live sees them nowhere,

except possibly in the single instance of the miracles recorded in the Bible. In the annals of grave Roman historians,

In every page locutus bos.

Not a Cæsar or a Consul died, without an ox speaking, or a flaming sword in the skies predicting portents. If the moon happened to pass between the sun and the earth the dim eclipse

With fear of change perplexes monarchs.

If the winds blow it is because Eolus releases them from the cave; if the rains fall it is because Jupiter opens the windows of heaven, or Indra causes the cloud-cows to drop their milk on the parched earth. Perhaps no better proof can be afforded of the universal belief that miracles were considered matters of every-day occurrence than is given by the passage in St. Paul's Epistle to the Corinthians, in which he enumerates the principal Christian gifts, and assigns, as it were, their comparative order and the number of marks that should be given to each in a competitive examination.

"First

The power of "working miracles" comes low in the list. apostles, secondarily prophets, thirdly teachers, after that miracles, then gifts of healings, helps, governments, diversities of tongues." And he goes on to say, in words that come home to every heart in all centuries, that all those things are worthless as compared with that true Christian charity which "suffereth long, and is kind; envieth not; vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up, doth not bebave itself unseemly, seeketh not her own, is not easily provoked, thinketh no evil; rejoiceth not in inquity, but rejoiceth in the truth; beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things."

This is in the true spirit of modern thought, which, when the externals of religion fail, strives to look below them at its essence, and to retain what is eternally true and beautiful as the ideal of a spiritual and the guide of a practical life, while rejecting all the outward apparatus of metaphysical creeds and incredible miracles, which had only a temporary value, and can no longer be believed without shutting one's eyes to facts and becoming guilty of conscious or unconscious insincerity.

But to return to miracles. Almost the entire world of the supernatural fades away of itself with an extension of our knowledge of the laws of Nature, as surely as the mists melt from the valley before the rays of the morning sun. We have seen how, throughout the wide domains of space, time, and matter, law, uniform, universal, and inexorable, reigns supreme; and there is absolutely no room for the interference of any outside personal agency to suspend its operations. The last remnant of supernaturalism, therefore, apart from the Christian miracles which we shall presently consider, has shrunk into that doubtful and shady border-land of ghosts, spiritualism and mesmerism, where vision and fact, and partly real partly imaginary effects of abnormal nervous conditions, are mixed up in a nebulous haze with a large dose of imposture and credulity.

Even this region is being contracted every day by every fresh revelation in a police-court, and every fresh discovery of the laws which really regulate the transmission of nervous energy to and from the brain, in the abnormal state which constitutes epilepsy and somnambulism, and enables an excited imagination to produce physical effects, such as those of drastic drugs on a patient who has actually taken nothing but pills of harmless paste.

The question of Christian miracles, however, rests on a different and more serious ground. They have been accepted for ages as the foundation and proof of a religion which has been for nineteen centuries that of the highest civilization and purest morality, and for this reason alone they deserve the most reverent treatment and the most careful consideration.

Of a large class of these miracles it may be said that there is no reason to doubt them, but none to consider them as violations of law, or anything but the expression, in the language of the time, of natural effects and natural causes. When a large class of maladies were universally attributed to the agency of evil spirits which had taken possession of the patient's body, it was inevitable that many cures would be effected, and that these cures would be set down as the casting out of devils. In many cases also a strong impulse communicated to the brain may send a current along a nerve which may temporarily, or even permanently, restore motion to a paralyzed limb, or give fresh vitality to a paralyzed nerve. Thus, the lame may walk, the dumb speak, and the blind see, with no more occasion to invoke supernatural agency than if the same effects had been produced by a current of electricity from a voltaic battery. There is no reason to doubt that miracles of this sort have been frequently wrought by saints and relics, and that even at the present day they may possibly be wrought at Lourdes and other shrines of Catholic faith. Only at the present day we scrutinize the evidence and count the failures, and admit nothing to be supernatural which can be explained as within a fair average result of exceptional cases under the operation of natural laws. In like manner we set down all visions or apparitions as having no objective reality if they can be explained by the known laws of dreams or other vivid revivals of impressions on the brain of the person who perceives them.

There remains the class of really supernatural miracles, or miracles which could by no possibility have occurred as they are described, unless some outward agency had suspended or reversed the laws of Nature. As regards such miracles, a knowledge of these laws enormously increases the difficulty in believing in them as actual facts. Take for instance the conversion of water into wine. When nothing was known of the constitution of water or of wine, except that they were both fluids, it was comparatively easy to accept the statement that such a conversion really took place. But now we know that water consists of oxygen and hydrogen combined in a certain simple proportion, and of these and nothing else; while wine contains in addition nitrogen, carbon, and other elements combined in very complicated proportions. If the water was not really changed into wine, but only seemed to be so, it was a mere juggling trick, such as the Wizard of the North can show us any day for a shilling. But if it was really changed, something must have been created out of nothing to supply the elements which were not in the original water and were not put into it from without.

Again, those who have followed the question of spontaneous generation, and witnessed the failure of the ablest chemists to produce the lowest forms of protoplasmic life from inorganic elements, will hardly believe that such a highly organized form of life as a serpent could have been really produced from a wooden rod. And this, be it observed, not only by Moses the prophet of God, but by the jugglers