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 VOL. II. 2 F truths was a rough summary of individual experience. It was, in short, an appeal to a number of isolated facts, without any due perception 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. 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,1 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 exis、 tence 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 cally different doctrines. Pope's God is the God of the old ontologists. Wordsworth, on the contrary, habitually and systematically bases his pantheism upon immediate intuition. He is simply embodying the vague emotions of awe, reverence, and love generated in his mind by the contemplation of the phenomena of the universe. He feels profoundly the incapacity of the old metaphysics to satisfy his imagination. They may prove a God; but not the God who appeals to his sympathies. His emotions find a theological utterance; but the theology must be based on the testimony of facts, not of abstract reasoning. He hates science, because it regards facts without the imaginative and emotional colouring; because it seems to desire to reduce the universe to a set of unconnected fragments; and, in breaking it up for examination, to lose the principle of unity and continuity. His pantheism, therefore, if it could be logically formulated, would imply what we may call the deification of natural laws. It would be the expression of reverential awe in which man regards the universe when conceived as an organic whole. Pope, on the other hand, has logically to regard the visible universe as a troublesome and illusory intruder, to be dismissed from our minds when we try to rise to the highest contemplative altitude. Thus, though there are many curious coincidences of language, the tendency of the earlier writer is to separate the highest thoughts of man from actual experience; of the other, to see the facts transfigured by his imagination. 135. Cowper occupies an intermediate position. Unsatisfied by the dominant theology of his times, he had taken refuge in the more vigorous creed of the early Evangelicals. The starting-point of Cowper's feelings was a profound sense of the corruption of the existing order of society. He quotes and approves Brown's Estimate,' one of the earliest indications, as we have seen, of the new current of opinion. His early poems are satires, adhering in form to the precedent of Pope, though wanting in the brilliancy attained by Pope alone. They differ, however, in this respect-that Pope's interest is fixed upon the individual character; and that he does not seriously contemplate the necessity of any change in the structure of society. He attacks faults prevalent in his day; but apparently holds that they can be sufficiently put down by satire or by the general good sense of mankind. Cowper, on the contrary, holds that the society is tainted by a deeply seated disease, and has a cure to set forth. So far he agrees with Rousseau; but the remedy is characteristically different. Rousseau says, in substance, Upset the world; Cowper says, Leave the world. Rousseau looks for regeneration by a return to nature and reason. Cowper expects a regeneration in the sense of those who opposed nature to supernatural grace. The difference is characteristic of the difference of the national modes of development. In France, as I have so often remarked, the issues were more distinct and thoroughgoing. To attack the political or the social order was to attack the Church and the orthodox faith. There could be no medium or compromise. In England, as the religious movement was to a great extent independent of the political, it was possible to be a reformer in one sense, whilst remaining a dogged conservative in the other sense. Cowper was nominally a Whig; but his Whiggism sat very lightly upon him. It meant nothing less than revolutionary sentiment. He saw in the poor not the victims of an oppressive caste, but sufferers from their own vices. He admires liberty; but he explains that the true liberty is not liberty from slavery, but liberty from the tyranny of spiritual evil. He escapes, in short, from a corrupt and cruel world by becoming a religious recluse. Brought up as a good Protestant, he has no taste for asceticism; but his ideal existence is one of quiet contemplation and unobtrusive benevolence, outside the hurry and the jar of the great turmoil of life. 136. With Cowper, then, the appeal to nature has a narrow though a most sincere meaning. The sight of naturethat is, of the external world of animal or material existence -is as the drop of cold water to a soul in purgatory. He escapes to quiet fields and brooks from the torture of his own excited imagination, and from the agonies inflicted upon a morbidly sensitive character by the conflict with his coarser fellows. The pantheistic phrase which escapes him is merely an expression of the sentiment that the divine element, no longer to be found in the hearts of men, manifests itself in the flowers of the field and the harmless animal creation. The position is not strictly logical. To a strict theologian, the curse |