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carried on with a singular fulness of perception, with pungent flashes of sarcasm, but with a power of speaking truths as undeniable as they are unpleasant, and yet with so much true urbanity -in spite of certain little defects, when he seems to be rather forcing himself to be humorous, and becomes liable to an accusation of flippancy-in such a case, I say, that we ought to be grateful to our critic. His criticism is anything but final, but it is to be taken into account by every man who believes in the importance of really civilizing the coming world. How the huge, all-devouring monster which we call Democracy is to be dealt with how he is to be coaxed or lectured or preached into taking as large a dose as possible of culture, of respect for true science and genuine thought, is really one of the most pressing of problems. Some look on with despair, doubting only by whatever particular process we shall be crushed into a dead level of monotonous mediocrity. I do not suppose that Arnold could give any solution of the great problems; what he could do, and did, I think, more effectually than any one, was to wake us out of our dull complacency-to help to break through the stolid crust, whatever seeds may be sown by other hands. Perhaps this explains why he is read in America, where the Philistine is a very conspicuous phenomenon and the ugly side of middleclass mediocrity is more prominent.

I have judiciously reserved to the last, in order that I may pass lightly, the point which to Arnold himself doubtless appeared to be the most important part of his teaching--I mean, of course, the criticism of religion, to which he devoted his last writings. In his last books, Arnold preached a doctrine which will hardly find many followers. He seemed even to be taking pains to get into a position scarcely intelligible to people who take things practically. He poses, one may say, as a literary critic; he disavows all logical system, and declares almost ostentatiously that he is no metaphysician; but his apparent conclusion is not that he is incompetent to speak of philosophy, but that philosophy is mere pedantry, so far as it is not poetry in disguise. The organ by which we are to discover religious

truth does not employ the prosaic method of examining evidence, nor the logical method of à priori reasoning; but that free play of thought which is our guide in letters: the judgment, as he says, which insensibly forms itself in a fair mind, familiar with the best thoughts of the world. The prophet is inspired by the Zeitgeist, and judges by a cultivated instinct, not by systematic argument. The rather airy mode of treating great problems which emerges is often bewildering to the ordinary mind. The orthodox may revolt against the airy confidence in which the Zeitgeist puts aside "miracles" and the supernatural,-not as disproved, but obviously not worth the trouble of disproving. The agnostic is amazed to find that Arnold, while treating all theological dogma as exploded rubbish, expatiates upon the supreme value of the sublimated essence of theology. God, Arnold tells us, is not a term of science, but a term of poetry and eloquence-a term "thrown out" at a not fully grasped object of consciousness-a literary term, in short-with various indefinite meanings for different people.* The "magnified and non-natural man" of whom theologians speak is to be superseded by the "stream of tendency" or the "not ourselves which makes for righteousness ;" and, in expressing his contempt for the vulgar conceptions, he perhaps sometimes forgot his usual good taste, as in the famous reference to the three Lord Shaftsburys. Such phrases might be taken for the scoffing which he condemned in others. glanced the other day at a satirical novel, in which the writer asks whether an old Irishwoman is to say, instead of "God bless you!" "The stream of tendency bless you." I then opened the Preface to Arnold's God and the Bible and found him making a similar criticism upon Mr. Herbert Spencer. Nobody, he observes, would say, "The unknowable is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble."

Arnold's answer to his critic would, in fact, have been that he never proposed that the old Irish woman should give up her form of expression. He professed to be simply explaining her

* Lit, and Dogma, p. 12.

real meaning. He apparently thought, as I have said, that a modified form of Catholicism would be the religion of the future; the modification amounting to this, that it would only profess to be poetry instead of science, and giving symbols "thrown out" at truth, not dogmas with the validity of theorems in geometry. He argued that the Hebrew religion itself is not only to be taken by us in the poetical sense, but that by the prophets themselves it was never understood differently. So the text which says that "Man must be born of a spirit" means only that man must be born of an influence; and never meant more. This was the original sense of the first utterance, which was only twisted into pseudo-science by later dogmatists. It follows that orthodox theology is an "immense misunderstanding of the Bible"-a misunderstanding because it takes poetry for prose. By clearing away the accretions we see that the Bible is to be read throughout in this sense; and therefore that, to restore its true value, we are not to throw it aside, but to take it as the original authors meant us to take it.

The weakness of the poetic or imaginative treatment is the tendency to confound a judgment of beauty with a judgment of fact. A creed is so charming or so morally stimulating that it must be true. Arnold did not accept this way of putting it. He had too geniune a respect for the daylight of the understanding, too much hearty loyalty to the Zeitgeist and scientific thought to accept a principle which would lead to simple reaction and recrudescence of superstition. He unequivocally accepts the results obtained by German critics, heavyeyed and pedantic as they may sometimes be, for he believes with all his heart in thorough, unflinching, scholarlike research. He will not shut his eyes or mistake mere æsthetic pleasure for logical conviction. But, he argues, the essence of the creed is precisely its moral beauty; the power with which it expresses certain ethical truths-its grasp of the doctrine (to quote his favorite, though I cannot think, very fortunate, formula) that conduct is three-fourths of life, that it is the essence of the religion, or rather, is

itself the religion; and that the whole framework of historical fact and ecclesiastical dogma is unimportant. We read Homer, he says, for our enjoyment, and to turn the book to our "benefit."* We should read the Bible in the same way. The truth of the Greek or Hebrew mythology and history is irrelevant. The true lights of the Christian Church, he says,† are not Augustine and Luther or Bossuet, but à Kempis and Tauler and St. Francis of Sales; not, that is, the legislators or reformers or systematizers of dogma, but the mystics and pietists and men who have uttered the religious sentiment in the most perfect form. It is characteristic that in his book upon St. Paul, while dwelling enthusiastically upon the apostle's ethical teaching, he says nothing of the work which to St. Paul himself, as to most historians, must surely have seemed important, the freeing of Christian doctrine from fetters of Judaism; and treats the theological reasons by which St. Paul justified his position as mere surplusage or concessions to contemporary prejudice.

The problem here suggested is a very wide one. We may agree that the true value of a religion is in its ethical force. We may admit that the moral ideas embodied in its teaching are the only part which is valuable when we cease to believe in the history or the dogma; and that they still preserve a very high value. We may still be edified by Homer or by Eschylus, or by Socrates and Epictetus, though we accept not a word of their statements of fact or philosophy. But can the essence of a religion be thus preserved intact when its dogma and its historical assertions are denied? Could St. Paul have spread the Church of the Gentiles without the help of the theories which Arnold regards as accretions? Would the beautiful spirit of the mystics have conquered the world as well as touched the hearts of a few hermits without the rigid framework of dogmas in which they were set and the great ecclesiastical organization for which a definite dogmatic system was required? We may love the mystical writers, but, without the or

* God and the Bible, p. 99. † Literature and Dogma, p. 290.

ganizers of Churches and creeds, can we believe that they would even have made a Church for the world? To set forth a great moral idea is undoubtedly an enormous service. But the prosaic mind will ask, Is it enough to present us with ideals? Do we not also require statements of fact? It is all very well to say be good, and to say this and that is the real meaning of goodness; but to make men good, you have also got to tell them why they should be good, and to create a system of discipline and dogma for effectually stimulating their love of goodness.

The questions I have suggested are the questions which upon Arnold's method seem to be passed over. It is his indifference to them which gives sometimes the very erroneous impression of a want of seriousness. Arnold was, I think, profoundly in earnest, though he seems scarcely to have realized the degree in which, to ordinary minds, he seemed to be offering not stones, but mere vapor, when asked for bread. Nor can I doubt that he was occupied with the most serious of problems, and saw at least some of the conditions of successful treatment. On all sides his loyalty to culture (the word has been a little spoiled of late), his genuine and hearty appreciation of scholarship and scientific thought, his longing to set himself in the great current of intellectual progress, are always attractive, and are the more marked because of his appreciation (his excessive appreciation, inay I say?) of the sweetness, if not the light, of the Oxford Movement. If, indeed, his appreciation was excessive, I am conscious, I hope, of the value of the doctrine which led him. We ought, he says, to have an "infinite tenderness" for the popular science of religion. It is "the spontaneous work of nature, the travail of the human mind, to adapt to its grasp and employment great ideas of which it feels the attraction." I feel the truth of this teaching more, I fear, than I have acted upon it. I belong, as I have said, to the brutal and prosaic class of mankind. We ought to catch at least something of Arnold's spirit, so

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* Literature and Dogma, p. 303.

*

far as to admit, at least, that the great problem is to reconcile unflinching loyalty to truth with tenderness" infinite," if possible, for the errors which are but a grasping after truth. If Arnold combined the two tendencies in a fashion of his own, he set a most valuable example, even to those who cannot think his method successful. He said of a great contemporary that he was always beating the bush without starting the hare. I am under the impression that Arnold, if he started the hare, did not quite catch it. But beating the bushes is an essential preliminary. He stirred and agitated many brains which could not be reached by sober argument or by coarser invective, and he applied good wholesome irritants to our stolid selfsatisfaction. When one remarks how little is left of most philosophers in the way of positive result, and yet remembers gratefully the service they have done in the way of stimulus to thought, one may feel grateful to a man who, while renouncing all claims to be a philosopher, did more than most philosophers to rouse us to new perception of our needs and was one of the most effective agents in breaking up old crusts of prejudice.

Putting on a mask sometimes of levity, sometimes of mere literary dandyism, with an irony which sometimes is a little too elaborate, but which often expresses the keenest intelligence trying to pass itself off as simplicity, he was a skirmisher, but a skirmisher who did more than most heavily armed warriors, against the vast oppressive reign of stupidity and prejudice. He made the old dragon Philistine (to use his phrase) wince at times, and showed the ugliness and clumsiness of the creature; and after all he did it in a spirit as of one who recognized the monster was after all a most kindly monster at bottom. He may be enlisted in useful service if you can only apply the goad successfully, and made effective, in his ponderous way, like the Carthaginian elephants, if only you can mount his neck and goad him in the right direction. No single arm is sufficient for such a task; the dragon shakes himself and goes to sleep again in a stertorous and rather less complacent fashion, let us hope; and we feel that the struggle

will too probably endure till we have ceased to be personally interested.

I cannot, indeed, get it out of my head that we slow-footed and prosaic persons sometimes make our ground surer; and that, for example, poor Bishop Colenso, whom Arnold ridiculed as the typical Philistine critic, did some good service with his prosaic arithmetic. There are cases in which the four rules are better than the finest

critical insight. But there is room for poets as well as for arithmeticians; and Arnold, as at once poet and critic, has the special gift-if I may trust my own experience of making one feel silly and tasteless when one has uttered a narrow-minded, crude, or ungenerous sentiment; and I dip into his writings to receive a shock, unpleasant at times, but excellent in its effects as an intellectual tonic.-National Review.

THE CHEMICAL ACTION OF MARINE ORGANISMS.

BY JOHN W. JUDD.

THAT agencies in themselves seemingly insignificant are capable, when operating continuously during long periods of time, of effecting stupendous results is a well-worn theme of the geologist. Mr. Darwin has familiarized the reading public with what must be regarded as one of the most striking and, at first sight, paradoxical illustrations of this principle as applied to the land areas of the globe. In his latest published book, Vegetable Mould and Earthworms, this acute observer has shown that, in many parts of England, the mould which in the course of a single year passes through the bodies of earthworms weighs, when dried, ten tons; or, in other words, that the worm-casts thrown up annually on a square mile of surface amount to no less than 6,400 tons of dry earth! Mr. Darwin justly remarks that, at this rate, the whole soil of the country must in a few years pass through the bodies of these organisms; and he shows how not only the burying of neglected cinder- and gravelpaths, but the covering of mosaic pavements and ruined walls, no less than the preservation of coins and other objects of art so precious to the antiquary, inust be ascribed to the unceasing action of these little-regarded creatures. Further than this, he calls attention to the fact that the fertility of the soil itself is largely due to the same cause. The body of each earthworm constitutes a mill, in which the mineral matter of the soil is reduced to the finest state of subdivision, while it is intimately admixed with organic materials; it is at the same

time a chemical laboratory, in which acids and other substances secreted by the organism are made to act upon the finely pulverized materials of the soil.

The investigations which during the last thirty or forty years have been carried on with a view to determining the nature of the ocean-floor, and of the operations that are going on there, have made us familiar with some illustrations of the same principle, that are certainly not less startling and suggestive than those derived from the study of land surfaces. We propose in the present article to give some account of the latest results which have been arrived at concerning these curious operations, and at the same time to indicate certain fields of research in which future investigators may be expected to gather abundant harvests. The publication of the latest of the Challenger Reports on "Deep Sea Deposits," by Dr. John Murray, one of the naturalists on board the exploring vessel, and Professor Renard of Ghent, a very able geologist, has supplied us with a great body of interesting facts, admirably described and classified, while many scattered papers by these authors and by Mr. Buchanan, who accompanied the Challenger in the capacity of chemist, suggest numerous interesting lines for thought and speculation.

A little consideration will show that all the known chemical elements-and even the unknown ones too-must be contained in solution in the waters of the ocean. Rivers flowing over the land are continually taking up mineral matter in solution, and these substances are

all added to the mass of materials dissolved in the oceanic waters. The Thames every day carries to the North Sea some 2,000 tons of dissolved material, and if all the rivers of the globe work at something like the same rate, 20,000,000 tons of mineral matter must day by day be added to the store of materials held in solution by the ocean. Now, all the chemical elements are capable of entering into compounds which are to a greater or less extent soluble in water, and hence we cannot doubt that in the enormous mass of materials dissolved in the vast body of sea-water on our globe all the elementary bodies must be represented.

It is true that the chemist, by his most refined methods of analysis, is unable to detect the proportion, even if he is able to determine the presence, of the rarer elementary substances which occur only as "minute traces" in seawater. When a large quantity of seawater is evaporated, we get a mass of chlorides and sulphates that can be separated by analysis; but even the very delicate tests of spectral analysis fail to make manifest many of the rarer metals and other elementary bodies that must certainly be present in the mass. In a well-known case, the copper sheathing of a vessel has been proved to have taken up silver from the sea-water by electro-chemical action, though it is probable that all our ordinary analytical processes would have failed to reveal the existence of the metal in the water itself.

There is another way, however, in which the presence of certain of the rarer elements in sea-water may be rendered manifest. When plants and animals which have lived wholly in the waters of the ocean are burned, so as to remove the organic matter, a mass of ash remains in which many rare chemical substances may sometimes be detected. Thus an ordinary analysis of sea-water, or of the salts derived from it by evaporation, may reveal only the merest traces of iodine, while, as is well known, certain seaweeds yield so much of this element in their ashes that until lately they constituted the largest, and indeed almost the only, source of the element. In such cases it is clear that the organisms must possess the power

of extracting and concentrating compounds of the rare element from the great mass of water in which they are diffused. Many other substances, such as sulphur, phosphorus, iron, and others of the metals which occur abundantly in the ashes of plants and animals, but which are found, if found at all, only as the minutest traces in sea-water, must have been isolated from it by the same selective action of plants and animals. It is this power belonging to all plants and animals, from the lowest to the highest, which accounts for the presence of minute quantities of the rarer chemical elements in organic tissues. Thus our bones are largely built up of a compound of phosphorus, while our teeth contain, in addition, fluorine. Analysis of the food we eat and of the water we drink shows that the former element exists only, when present at all, in very minute quantities, while all the most delicate tests at our command would probably fail to reveal the existence of the latter substance in either food or drink.

There are several mineral substances which are found only in minute quantities in the oceanic waters, but that are, nevertheless, separated from the water by various plants and animals which have the power of concentrating them in their skeletons; and on the death of the organism the mineral matter of the skeletons is left behind to build up great rock-masses. Chief among these substances so separated from sea-water is carbonate of lime. Careful analyses have shown that sea-water seldom contains more than 1 part in 10,000 by weight of carbonate of lime. Yet the myriad forms of foraminifera, corals, echinodermata, mollusca, and forms of life find in this minute proportion of material all that is necessary for the growth of their skeletons. In all parts of the ocean except some of the very shallow and the extremely deep areas, great numbers of calcareous organisms live and multiply, and in the warmer regions of the ocean a constant rain of calcareous matter is continually falling upon the ocean-floor from the death of the organisms which float in prodigious abundance at the surface and intermediate depths. It can be shown that the limestones of the earth's crust,

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