the Maid held her own, and more than her own. She confounded her inquisitors by answers that seem actually inspired; she corrected their dates; she bantered them again and again with a humorous triumph, till even an English lord called out, 'The gallant lass, pity she is not English!' The question came to this at last, Would she submit her visions to the judgment of the Church? As to the Church,' they quibbled: they, and the University of Paris, were the Church,—for their purposes. Finally, she did submit herself to the judgment of God and the Pope.' And it was said to her that this did not suffice!' Heaven was too high, and Rome too far.

·

These arguments were held in front of the pyre, on May 24, 1431. The Judge began his sentence: the standers-by implored Jeanne to abjure. With the pyre before her, she submitted, not to the Church, but to those unjust judges. Her abjuration is said (by witnesses in 1456) to have been as long as a paternoster.' The document, on the other hand, preserved in the Procès,' consists of some four hundred words, and occupies a page and a half of close print. Now, in 1456, the huissier who read the abjuration, which she repeated after him, swore that it contained but eight lines, and that it was not the abjuration inserted in the process. However this may be, when she found herself still confined in a military prison, and compelled to assume male dress, in default of other, she averred that she had not understood her confession to involve denial of her saints; that whatever she did say, she said in fear of the fire; that she retracted her abjuration, and preferred death to such a life as her enemies led her. Her voices had reproved her, she declared, and now she won the first fight in her great victory over self and fear; the second was won at the scaffold.

On May 30, 1431, Jeanne crowned by a heroic death a life without stain as without example. No mortal force could now have saved her. Had she been absolved by the Court which so iniquitously condemned her, English brutality would have given her short shrift. It is a fact that, on the French side, no voice was raised for her, save in prayer, and no sword was drawn in her defence. By an amazing blunder Michelet declares that Xaintrailles and La Hire made an attempt on Rouen and were taken prisoners. Monseigneur Ricard and the Abbé Henri Débout repeat the flattering fable in two separate works, each named Jeanne d'Arc, la Vénérable.' The battle thus celebrated was fought months after the martyrdom, under the banner of the ecstatic and stigmatic' shepherd boy, whom the Archbishop of Rheims foisted on the faith of France. Money was readily paid to ransom Xaintrailles and La Hire: not

a sou

a sou was offered for the life of Jeanne d'Arc by the king, whose loyalty and faith she vaunted at every stage of her trial. In the whole crime of her death, the brutal and cowardly superstition of Bedford and Warwick is well matched by the cruel and hypocritical pedantry of the French divines who condemned her, rejoicing in their lucrative task, and by the base ingratitude of the poltroon whom she crowned.

Of all the knights, warriors, prelates, and priests who had employed and profited by her valour, but one man stood by her to the end, a monk of Scotland, the author of the 'Liber Pluscardensis.' For this fact we have his own evidence in the prologue of his book: the chapter which begins the history of the Maid is mutilated in all known copies, or was never completed. A mystery hides the cause, and we are left to guess how, except in disguise, a Scot who had been with Jeanne in her victories was able to be present at her martyrdom.

No vengeance fell on her murderers, save that one died an ill death, and one vanished suddenly from the world which they all polluted. But a little satisfaction may be derived from watching the lies, shifts, and quibbles of Thomas de Courcelles (who had voted for her torture), when he came to be examined in the trial of Rehabilitation.

Meanwhile France urges the canonization of the saintly heroine. In the printed summary of the cause presented at Rome, are forty pages of evidence to miracles of healing wrought by intercession of her whose ashes were scattered in the Seine. The cause of the purest of souls, the gladdest of maidens, needs no such posthumous evidence in the eyes of those who have studied her unparalleled history. 'Greece would have raised altars to her,' says the sceptical Hume, in the age when Voltaire was committing the chief of literary crimes, his detestable poem. Her place sur les autels may be granted, or may be denied, but, more splendid and more winning than any saintly halo, is the ideal of frank and gay and glorious maidenhood, conveyed in the title of La Pucelle.

Авт.

ART. VIII.-The Foundations of Belief, being Notes introductory to the Study of Theology. By the Right Hon. Arthur James Balfour. London, 1895.

MR.

R. BALFOUR has explained for us, in the Introduction to his book on the Foundations of Belief,' that the work is designed to recommend a particular way of looking at the World problems, which, whether we like it or not, we are compelled to face.' And the attitude he recommends, while forming a basis for the study of Theology, is brought into relief by contrast with what he calls Naturalism, the leading doctrines of which are, that we may know phenomena and the laws by which they are connected, but nothing more. More there may or may not be, but if it exists we can never apprehend it.' This system is, he adds, practically identical with what has been called Agnosticism or Empiricism. And yet, if one were to look for Mr. Balfour's intellectual ancestors, we believe that it is among the founders of Empiricism that they would be discovered. The Empirical School took its rise, as did Induction, in a protest against indulgence in speculation at the expense of fact. The father of Empiricism, John Locke, had been perplexed and discouraged in his undergraduate days by the futile subtlety of the Scholastic method pursued at Oxford. "True knowledge,' he wrote, first grew in the world by rational observation [but] man laboured by his imagination to supply what his observation and experience failed him in; and when he could not discover by experience the principles, causes, and methods of Nature's workmanship, he would needs fashion all these out of his own thought, and make a world to himself, framed and governed by his own intelligence.'* The consequence was that the most acute and ingenious part of man became by custom and education engaged in empty speculation.' This tendency is apparent in the exhaustive accounts of the Universe given by the later Schoolmen,-accounts based on principles which they dispensed themselves from proving, on the plea that they were 'innate.' It was this method of reasoning that Bacon styled the intellectus sibi permissus; and, like Bacon, Locke protested against it. He insisted on rigid observation of the actual capacities of the human mind in place of indulgence of the speculative imagination; on the humble search for what knowledge the constitution of our nature permits us, in place of the vanity' of supposing that our narrow weak minds'

.

* Fragment, 'De arte Medica,' 1668.

could

could penetrate into the hidden causes of things,' and understand this great and curious fabric of the world, the workmanship of the Almighty,' which in truth cannot be perfectly comprehended by any understanding but his that made it.' But, on the other hand, Locke was no Agnostic. The man who should acquiesce in scepticism because he recognises the limitations of human knowledge he compares to one who would not use his legs, but sit still and perish because he had no wings to fly.'

Mr. Balfour's temper and method are up to a certain point very similar. He shows the same deep sense of the limitations of human knowledge, the same aversion to dogmatism, the same conviction of the futility of mere 'brain-spinning,' which he compares to a man walking nimbly on the deck of a ship, and congratulating himself on his successful locomotion, while all the time the ship itself may be making its way rapidly to shoals and rocks which will bring it to inevitable destruction. And by means of another nautical simile he indicates his own method, that of studying diligently the universe of fact, intent on missing no glimpse of real light which it may afford, by which we may guide our path; instead of inventing an ideal system which has no correspondence with the perplexing world in which man's lot is actually cast. 'If we have to find our way,' he writes, over difficult seas and under murky skies without compass or chronometer, we need not on that account allow the ship to drive at random. Rather ought we to weigh with the more anxious care every indication, be it negative or positive, and from whatever quarter it may come, which may help us to guess at our position and to lay out the course which it behoves us to steer.'

How, then, if Mr. Balfour's spirit is in great measure that which originally animated the Empiricists, has it come about that the Empirical philosophy is one principal object of his

attack?

One reason is that the later Empiricists themselves became speculative dogmatists.

Locke began, as we have seen, by protesting against unreal theorising and arbitrary assumptions. He proposed to scrutinise the limits of our faculties of knowledge. He found that a large number of our ideas really resolve themselves into the products of sensible experience. The analysis of experience was to him what the extensive observation of physical fact was to Bacon. It was safe ground. It was clear that at least all convictions which could be resolved into products of experience were true, whatever else might be due to prejudice or

illusion.

illusion. He treated the mind as a tabula rasa on which was gradually traced a network woven by sensation and the mind's reflection on its sensation. But with Hume the innate love of human nature for speculative systematising returned. Locke had never limited human certainties to the knowledge of phenomena.* His statement that all knowledge comes from experience did not exclude the knowledge of God. Hume arbitrarily limited the meaning of the statement in question, and made it the point of departure for the freest speculative deduction. He transformed Empiricism as understood by Locke, into Naturalism as explained by Mr. Balfour. Berkeley had led the way in the negative portion of his system of Idealism. Hume developed this side of Berkeley's teaching, and reached a scepticism highly speculative in its preference for rigid deduction from his own arbitrary interpretation of Locke's system, to the facts which his very reasoning process must presuppose, a scepticism which he combined with the dogmatism involved in his argument against miracles.

The successive phases of more or less dogmatic Empiricism need not be traced here. The same temper was visible— though in a lesser degree-in J. S. Mill's attempt to reduce our knowledge, even our mathematical knowledge, to the inseparable association of ideas. A more marked instance of it is the application by Mr. Herbert Spencer of the Evolution theory -which in Darwin's hands was so cautiously treated, with so much hesitation as to its details, with such wide observation of facts to form a complete and symmetrical system of philosophy. Both these systems are as arbitrary and dogmatic in what they exclude from the sphere of our knowledge, as the Scholastic innate' principles were in what they included.

6

Thus has come about the curious phenomenon that systems, primarily associated with two eminent representatives of that scientific temper which resents dogmatism and free speculation as diverting attention from the world of fact, have been applied and transformed to support conclusions replete with the very dogmatic and speculative character which was so repugnant to them. The detailed theories of Mill and even of Herbert Spencer have perhaps lost credit, but the tendency they represent is still abroad. Mr. Balfour opposes to it a rigid application of the true laws of induction. The all-solving principlewhether of association or of evolution-is (as a principle of universal application) a dogmatic assumption based on

an

* Locke's ideas of reflection, and his ontological certainties, 'God, the world, and the soul,' are, it need hardly be said, instances of his departure from thorough-going Empiricism.

insufficient