reality. On the contrary, I have desired to insist on the view that the life of mind is an integral part of that reality. I am aware of the perplexities attaching to the term 'part of reality.' They are too numerous to be adequately handled in a sentence. I shall only say that, according to the view I take, reality is the interconnected system of which the correlatives, mind and the apprehended world of fact, are the partial manifestations. In this sense, mind is not less necessary to the completeness of the whole than nature, and to neither can be accorded the absolute independence which our imagination demands.

To say of mind, then, that it comes into being settles in no way its place in the scheme of things, as a secondary and inferior fact. As Lotze puts it, in reference to a somewhat similar problem, "Man esteems himself according to what he is, and not according to whence he arose. It is enough for us to feel now that we are not apes. It is of no consequence to us that our remote and unremembered ancestors should have belonged to this inferior grade of life. The only painful thought would be that we were destined to turn into apes again, and that it was likely to happen soon."

3. The last remark I make concerns the most notable feature in recent work within the range of philosophy, the vast increase of interest in psychology. Hegel used to say that it was only in a period of decline in philosophy that there came an outburst of empirical psychology; and I believe there are many observers of the course of modern philosophical work disposed to apply his remark to the present condition of things. I think there is another side to the matter. Even the empirical psychology which Hegel had in view, abstract and unsatisfactory as it was, had at least the merit that it strove to get near to the actual life of mind. Psychology, as it is conceived at present, has certainly lost the abstractness of its earlier form, and though no

doubt pursued by many minds with great diversity of interest, may claim a genuinely philosophical character. To trace out the history of the mental life, to determine the natural conditions on which it depends, and to follow the several stages of its development from the lowest to the highest, keeping ever before us the concrete character of the whole, is impossible except as part of and in the light of a general philosophical view. The problem which Psychology has before it cannot be arbitrarily severed from the general questions of philosophy, and it cannot be satisfactorily solved except as part of the more general treatment which by long. tradition and common consent is called philosophical. It is with the nature of knowledge that theoretical philosophy has to deal; and its three main branches-Logic, the description of the form of knowledge, Psychology, the account of the mode in which knowledge is realised in mind, and Metaphysics, the systematic statement of the thoughts which express the nature of reality and the relation of mind thereto are so interdependent that the problems of any one lead on inevitably to the problems of the others.

I cannot but fear that in attempting to indicate what appears to me the character of the important change passing over the spirit and method of philosophy, I may have fallen into the very error I have been condemning. An abstract conception or a general description has little significance when divested of the detail of concrete illustration. A new methodical principle in philosophy can only be understood, as it can only be tested, by the resolute endeavour to apply it to the whole round of questions which have long exercised human reason. So to think out a philosophical idea is no easy matter; not like the spinning of an oystershell, but a revolution of the whole soul. "The eye," says Berkeley," by long use comes to see even in the darkest cavern:

and there is no subject so obscure but we may discern some glimpse of truth by long poring on it. Truth is the cry of all, but the game of a few. Certainly when it is the chief passion, it doth not give way to vulgar cares and views; nor is it contented with a little ardour in the early time of life; active, perhaps, to pursue, but not so fit to weigh and revise. He that would make a real progress in knowledge must dedicate his age as well as youth, the later growth as well as the first fruits, at the altar of Truth."

23

II.

GIORDANO BRUNO.1

GIORDANO BRUNO, "a man of impure and abandoned life: a double renegade, a heretic formally condemned, whose obstinacy against the Church endured unbroken "even to his last breath. He possessed no remarkable scientific knowledge, for his own writings condemn him of pantheism and of a degraded materialism, and show that he was entangled in commonplace errors and not unfrequently utterly inconsistent. He had no splendid adornments of virtue, for as evidence against his moral character there stand those extravagances of wickedness and corruption into which all men are driven by passions unrestrained. He was the hero of no famous exploits, and did no signal service to the State; his familiar accomplishments were insincerity, lying and perfect selfishness, intolerance of all who disagreed with him, abject meanness, and perverted ingenuity in adulation."

This testimonial to character comes from no vigorous polemic of Bruno's time, an age yet unskilled in the delicate art of vituperation. It is an extract from an allocution addressed by the Pope in 1889 to the Sacred College in Consistory, and ordered by the Sacred Congregation of Bishops and Regulars to be read in the various Roman Catholic Churches. The spirit in which it is conceived has

1 [Read 4th February 1895, at the Owens College, Manchester, as one of a series of popular evening lectures.]

for long proved successful in surrounding the life-history and the ideas of Bruno with a veil of obscurity through which only very recent researches have penetrated, and which even yet is not wholly removed. But the more enlightened historic conscience of our generation, aided perhaps by a certain fondness for rehabilitating damaged reputations, has worked to good purpose in Bruno's case. His writings, formerly hard to procure and evidently little known or appreciated, have been collected in handsome and fairly complete form, and are thus at least accessible. All the new data for a narrative of his career, so far as they have yet been obtained, are collected in the life of Bruno by his countryman, Domenico Berti. From the sources thus opened up, and under the impulse given by the erection of a statue to Bruno in Rome, quite a little flood of larger treatises and smaller pamphlets has been poured forth.

Prior to the discovery of the new materials relating to the life of Bruno, a discovery initiated by the researches of Foncard into the archives of the Savii sopra l'Eresia in Venice, there existed only one foundation for a sketch of Bruno's career. That foundation, however, is in itself remarkable and interesting. It is in the form of a letter by an eyewitness of the burning of Bruno at Rome in February 1600. The letter seems first to have appeared in print in 1620 or 1621, and was again printed, apparently from another MS. copy, in 1701. On the authenticity of the document, and consequently on the historic credibility of the event it narrates, quite unnecessary doubts have more than once been cast. Mr Chancellor Christie, on the occasion of a recent revival of these doubts, brought to bear upon the matter his great and minute knowledge of the contemporary literature, and had no difficulty in showing that there was satisfactory independent evidence for the event narrated, and that there was as strong evidence as can reasonably be de