old modes of thought and feeling amidst an environment fatal to their real vitality. Walpole's performance begins that business of buff-jerkins and mediæval costumery which offends us in the inferior parts of Scott's writings. Romanticism has, however, its better side in its tendency to produce a true historical sense; and Percy's Ballads were more suggestive of the genuine lesson to be learnt from history. The study might suggest the propriety of falling back upon natural simplicity, instead of attempting to revive the external trappings of extinct social forms. The interest produced by Chevy Chase' and Childe Morice' was the interest of finding that our ancestors had been genuine human beings, capable of exploring manly emotions in a straightforward way, instead of an interest in their modes of dressing and swearing. 128. Macpherson's poem is a more singular performance. Its extraordinary effect upon the minds of contemporaries has often been noticed. The fate of a poem which excited the enthusiasm of Goethe and Napoleon, and which nobody can read at the present day, certainly suggests some curious problems. Briefly, we may assume that its vague and gigantesque scenery, its pompous mouthing of sham heroics, its crude attempts to represent a social state when great men stalked through the world in haughty superiority to the narrow conventions of modern life, were congenial to men growing weary of an effete formalism. Men had been talking under their breath and in a mincing dialect so long that they were easily gratified, and easily imposed upon, by an affectation of vigorous and natural sentiment. 129. But what is 'natural?' The question leads us to the third phase of the reaction. The 'return to nature' expresses a sentiment which underlies to some extent both the sentimental and the romantic movements, and which was more distinctly embodied in writers of a higher order. J To return to nature is, in one sense, to find a new expression for emotions which have been repressed by existing conventions; or, in another, to return to some simpler social order which had not yet suffered from those conventions. The artificiality attributed to the eighteenth century seems to mean that men were content to regulate their thoughts and lives by rules not traceable to first principles, but dependent upon a set of special and exceptional conditions; and, again, that in the imaginative sphere the accepted symbols did not express the deepest and most permanent emotions, but were an arbitrary compromise between traditional assumptions and the new philosophical tenets. To get out of the ruts, or cast off the obsolete shackles, two methods might be adopted. The intellectual horizon might be widened by including a greater number of ages and countries; or men might try to fall back upon the thoughts and emotions common to all times and races, and so cast off the superficial incrustation. The first method, that of the romanticists, aims at increasing our knowledge; the second, that of the naturalistic school, at basing our philosophy on deeper principles. 130. Two great poets at the end of the century gave an English version of the cry for a 'return to nature.' Burns and Cowper sounded a new note in our poetry, which was echoed by various writers of inferior power or influence. What was the significance of their appeal? The word 'nature,' as I have often had occasion to remark, is singularly ambiguous. The whole significance of the early controversies of the century may be described by saying that they represent the struggle between the religion of nature and the traditional religion. The result in England was a kind of compromise. The transitional creed won a doubtful victory by concessions which destroyed its own efficacy. The doctrine which emerged was thus Deism, or a religion of nature disguised by traditional phraseology. And yet the revolt against it took again the form of an appeal to nature. Obviously nature was used in different and almost opposite senses. Wordsworth seemed to himself to be the antithesis to Pope, and yet Pope, like Wordsworth, preaches in one sense a worship of nature. I must endeavour, therefore, to define more precisely the difference of conception which led to so vast a discord in practice. 131. The great revolution which was approaching had its social, its æsthetic, its political, and its philosophical aspects. The social movement seems to exhibit most distinctly the efficient causes of the changes, and the meaning of the new war-cry is there the least ambiguous. Briefly, we may say that the social revolution was an attempt to cast off the ossified crust of effete social organs which had become incapable of discharging their functions. To return to nature was with Rousseau and his followers to get rid of kings, nobles, and priests, who could no longer rule or teach. By sweeping away the accumulated rubbish of obsolete institutions, whose authority rested upon blind instinct instead of reason, we should come upon a pure, simple, reasonable, or 'natural' state of society. The state was vaguely conceived as having possibly existed in some remote past; as being preserved in certain primitive and uncorrupted societies of Alpine peasants, or even savage tribes; or as being that purely ideal state which would be made actual if every political or social institution rested upon pure reason, instead of including an arbitrary traditional element. The old doctrine of the social contract fell in with this theory; the contract being regarded as the embodiment of pure reason. In this sense, the return to nature meant little more with Rousseau than the immediate application to human affairs of the abstract theories which Locke had managed to interpret into harmony with the British Constitution. The metaphysical doctrine touched with passion, and applied to actual affairs, was suddenly endowed with destructive power; but there was no direct speculative advance. The theory had descended from the lecture-room into the street, but was not modified in substance. Rousseau's sentimentalism breathed new life into the dead bones; or his followers simply adopted the most convenient phraseology for sanctioning their destructive energies. The doctrine, imported into England by such men as Tom Paine, excited the wrathful denunciation of Burke's philosophical imagination, but scarcely took root in an uncongenial soil. 132. The English analogue is rather to be sought in the utilitarianism of Bentham, which rejected the old metaphysical method as well as the old traditional doctrine. Englishmen of this school sympathised with the return to nature, so far as they agreed in rejecting the ancient authority; but they would supplant it, not by abstract reasoning, but by a direct appeal to experience. I have sufficiently shown why this appeal was necessarily crude and unsatisfactory. It amounted, for the present, to an assertion that all philosophy was unsatisfactory, and that the only method of discovering political and moral truths was a rough summary of individual experience. It was, in short, an appeal to a number of isolated facts, without any due preception of the necessity of discovering the general laws by which the facts must be organised and bound together. Such a method, though invaluable as a first stage towards a true scientific conception of history, was less fruitful for the imagination than even the destructive theory of abstract rights. The attempt at scientific methods began by cutting up the world into independent atoms, and limiting the view to what was directly appreciable by the senses. It rejected, that is, precisely those aspects of the world and of man which it is the office of the poetical and religious imagination to embody in vivid symbolism. In this sense, the return to nature meant, or would have meant-for the phrase was hardly used by thinkers of this school-an abandonment of all the old authoritative teaching, and of all philosophy, old or new, and an attempt to make a fresh start to knowledge based upon individual experience of the most tangible facts. す 133. The philosophical and imaginative aspect of the movement took a parallel course. In the sphere of the imagination, the old symbols of the 'classical' or metaphysical school had become hopelessly effete. The life had departed, and they had become conventional or consciously fictitious. The muse of which Pope and his followers talked was an intolerable bore. The various abstract beings made by the use of capital letters, who play so great a part in the poetry 'of Gray,' were phantoms incapable of exciting the imagination. To return to nature was, therefore, primarily to sweep aside a set of arbitrary rules and symbols which had ceased to have any meaning. The philosophical movement explains the significance of the process. The weakness of the old theories consisted essentially in this, that it involved a complete divorce between reality and philosophy. God and nature, and the other high-sounding phrases of the earlier writers, turned out to correspond to barren abstractions which could not be brought into contact with the world of reality. 1 Thus, in the 'Ode to Adversity,' we have in about fifty lines the following personages :-Adversity, Virtue, Folly, Noise, Joy, Prosperity, Melancholy, Charity, Justice, Pity, Horror, Despair, Disease, and Poverty. Collins's 'Ode to the Passions' is a characteristic, though very fine example, of the same tendency. Coleridge's sentence, Inoculation, Heavenly maid !' shows the natural result. The actual world in which we live and move and have our being was regarded by the metaphysicians as somehow made up of illusory phenomena; and we must sweep them aside before we could attain to permanent truth. Inevitably, therefore, the God—whether called nature or Jehovah—whose existence and attributes were proved by mathematical demonstration, could not be made to interfere in human affairs, and remained obstinately alienated from human affections. To remedy this divorce, to bring fact and philosophy together, so that the highest truths might be embodied in laws of experience, and not dismissed to a distinct world of transcendental entities, was the problem which, for the most part unconsciously, occupied men's minds. The reaction—so far as I have to consider it is the result of an indistinct feeling after a gratification of this need by the most sensitive intellects. 134. Three distinguished poets, Pope, Cowper and Wordsworth, mark three terms in this process. All of them were directly didactic; and all of them have used language which might be called pantheistic. Pope says, for example— All are but parts of one stupendous whole, Cowper, that There lives and works A soul in all things, and that soul is God; and Wordsworth, speaking of the living principle of all nature, says From link to link It circulates, the soul of all the worlds. What is the difference between these utterances, alike in language, though marked by a profound difference in sentiment? With Pope the God who is nature is primarily the metaphysical God. Whenever he tries distinctly to realise the Divine character, or to show how that character is revealed to us, he necessarily falls back upon the dry ratiocination— or should we say word manufacture ?-of the school of Leibnitz. We have the arguments about the scale of being, the necessity of free-will, and so on, with which those reasoners tried to bewilder opponents rather than to satisfy themselves, and to spread a thin veil of theological phraseology over radi |