a fact, have been greatly misconceived. The changes of view on these
points make up a chapter in the history of the education of the human
mind. Perhaps the most decisive turning point was the publication of
Locke's "Essay concerning Human Understanding," the motive of which, as
stated in the homely and forcible language of the preface, was to
ascertain what our understandings can do, what subjects they are fit to
deal with, and where they should stop. I quote a few sentences:--
"If by this inquiry into the nature of the Understanding, I can discover
the powers thereof; how far they reach; to what things they are in any
degree proportionate; and where they fail us: I suppose it may be of
use, to prevail with the busy mind of man to be more cautious in
meddling with things exceeding its comprehension; to stop when it is at
the utmost extent of its tether; and to sit down in a quiet ignorance of
those things which, upon examination, are proved to be beyond the reach
of our capacities." "The candle that is set up in us, shines bright
enough for all our purposes. The discoveries we can make with this ought
to satisfy us. And we shall then use our Understandings aright, when we
entertain all objects in that way and proportion that they are suited to
our faculties, and upon those grounds they are capable of being proposed
to us." "It is of great use for the sailor to know the length of his
line, though he cannot fathom with it all the depths of the ocean."
The course of physical science was preparing the same salutary lesson.
Locke's great contemporary and friend, Isaac Newton, was his
fellow-worker in this tutorial undertaking; nor should Bacon be
forgotten, although there is dispute as to the extent and character of
his influence. The combined operation of these great leaders of thought
was apparent in the altered views of scientific inquirers as to what is
competent in research--what is the proper aim of inquiry. There arose a
disposition to abandon the pursuit of mysterious essences and grand
pervading unities, and ascertain with precision the facts and the laws
of natural phenomena. The study of astronomy was inaugurated in
Greenwich Observatory. The experiments of Priestley and of Franklin
farther exemplified the eighteenth-century key to the secrets of the
universe.
The lesson imparted by Newton and Locke and their successors still
remains to be carried out and embodied in the subtler inquiries. The
bearing upon what constitutes a Mystery, and what constitutes
Explanation, or the accounting for appearances, may be expressed thus:--
In the first place, the Understanding can never pass out of its own
experience--its acquired knowledge, whether of body or of mind. What we
obtain by our various sensibilities to the world about us, and by our
self-consciousness, are the foundation, the ABC of everything that we
are capable of knowing. We know colours, and we know sound; we know
pleasure and pain, and the various emotions of wonder, fear, love,
anger. If there be any being endowed with senses different from ours,
with that being we can have no communion. If there be any phenomena that
escape our limited sensibilities, they transcend the possibility of our
knowledge.
It is necessary, however, to take account of the combining or
constructive aptitudes of the mind. We can go a certain length in
putting together our alphabet of sensation and experience into many
various compounds. We can imagine a paradise or a pandemonium; but only
as made up of our own knowledge of things good and evil. The limits of
this constructive power are soon reached. We are baffled to enter into
the feelings of our own kindred, when they are far removed in character
and circumstances from ourselves. The youth at twenty cannot approximate
to the feelings of men of middle age. The healthy are unable to
comprehend the life of the invalid.
[TIME AND SPACE RELATIVE TO OUR FACULTIES.]
To come to the practical applications. The great leading notions called
Time and Space are known to us only under the conditions of our own
sensibility. Time is made known by all our actions, all our senses, all
our feelings, and by the succession of our thoughts; it is experienced
as a continuance and a repetition of movement, sight, sound, fear, or
any other state of feeling, or of thinking. One motion or sensation is
continued longer than another; or it is more frequently repeated after
intermission, giving the _numerical_ estimate of time, as in the beats
of the pendulum. In these ways we form estimates of seconds, minutes,
hours, days. And our constructive faculty can be brought into play to
conceive the larger tracts of duration--a century, or a hundred
centuries. Nay, by our arithmetical powers we can put down in cipher,
or conceive _symbolically_ (which is the meagrest of all conceptions)
millions of millions of centuries; these being after all but compounds
of our alphabet of enduring or repeated sensations and thoughts. We can
suppose this arithmetical process to operate upon past duration or upon
future duration, and there is no limit to the numbers that we can write
down. But there is one thing that we cannot do; we cannot fix upon a
point when Time or succession began, or upon a point when it will cease.
That is an operation not in keeping with our faculties; the very
supposition is impracticable. We cannot entertain the notion of a state
of things wherein the fact of continuance had no place; the effort
belies itself. Time is inseparable from our mental nature; whatever we
imagine, we must imagine as enduring. Some philosophers have supposed
that we must be endowed by nature with the conception of Time, before we
begin to exercise our senses; but the difficulty would be to deprive us
of that adjunct without extinguishing our mental nature. Give us
sensibility, and you cannot withhold the element of Time. The
supposition of Kant and others, that it is implanted in us as an empty
form, before we begin to employ our senses upon things, is needless; for
as soon as we move, see, hear, think, are pleased or pained, we create
time. And our notion of Time in general is exactly what these
sensibilities make it, only enlarged by our constructive power already
spoken of.
[MATTER AND VOID SUPPLEMENTARY.]
While all our senses and feelings give us time, it is our experience of
Motion and Resistance,--the energetic or active side of our nature
alone,--that gives us Space. The simplest feature of Space is the
alternation of Resistance and Non-Resistance, of obstructed motion and
freedom to move. The hand presses dead upon an obstacle; the obstacle
gives way and allows free motion; these two contrasting experiences are
the elements of the two contrasting facts--Matter and Space. By none of
the five senses, in their pure and proper character as senses, can we
obtain these experiences; and hence at an earlier stage of inquiry into
the mind, when our knowledge-giving sensibilities were referred to the
five senses, there was no adequate account of the notion of Space or
Extension. Space includes more than this simple contrast of the
resisting and the non-resisting; it includes what we call the
Co-existing or Contemporaneous, the great aggregate of the outspread
world, as existing at any moment, a somewhat complicated attainment,
which I am not now specially concerned with. It sufficiently illustrates
the limitation of our knowledge by our sensibilities, from the nature of
space, to fasten attention on the double and mutually supplementing
experience of Matter and Void; the one resisting movement, and giving
the consciousness of resistance, or dead strain, the other permitting
movement, and giving the consciousness of the unobstructed sweep of the
limbs or members. Whatever else may be in space, this freedom to move,
to soar, to expatiate (in contrast to being hemmed in, obstructed, held
fast), is an essential part of the conception, and is formed out of our
active or moving sensibilities. Now, as far as movement is concerned, we
must be in one of two states;--we must be putting forth energy without
effecting movement, being met by obstacles called matter; or we must be
putting forth energy unresisted and effecting movement, which is what we
mean by empty space. There is no third position in the matter of putting
forth our active energy. Where resistance ends and freedom begins, there
is space; where freedom ends, and obstruction begins, there is matter.
We find our sentient life to be made up, as regards movement, of a
certain number and range of these two alternations; in other words, free
spaces and resisting barriers. And we can, by the constructive power
already mentioned, imagine other proportions of the two experiences; we
can imagine the scope for movement, the absence of obstruction, to be
enlarged more and more, to be counted by thousands and millions of
miles; but the only terminus or boundary that we can imagine is
resistance, a dead obstacle. We are able to conceive the starry spaces
widened and prolonged from galaxy to galaxy through enormous strides of
increasing amplitude, but when we try to think an end to this career, we
can think only of a dead wall. There is no other end of space within the
grasp of our faculties; and that termination is not an end of extension;
for we know that solid matter, viewed in other ways than as obstructing
movement, has the same property of the extended belonging to the empty
void. The inference is, that the limitation of our means of knowledge
renders altogether incompetent the imagination of an end to either Time
or Space. The greatest efforts of our combining faculty cannot exceed
the elements presented to it, and these elements contain nothing that
would set forth the situation of space ending, and obstruction not
beginning.
[ARE TIME AND SPACE INFINITE?]
Under these circumstances, it is an irrevelant enquiry, to ask, Are Time
and Space finite or infinite? Many philosophers have put the question,
and even answered it. They say Time has no beginning and no end, and
Space has no boundaries; or, as otherwise expressed,--Time and Space are
Infinite: an answer of such vagueness as to mean anything, from a
harmless and proper assertion of the limits of our faculties, up to the
verge of extravagance and self-contradiction.
When, in fact, people talk of the Infinite in Time and Space, they can
point to one intelligible signification; as to the rest, this word is
not a subject for scientific propositions, and the attempt at such can
lead only to contradictions. The Infinite is a phrase most various in
its purport: it is for the most part an emotional word, expressing human
desire and aspiration; a word of poetry, imagination, and preaching, not
a word to be discussed under science; no intellectual definition would
exhibit its emotional force.
The second property of our intelligence is, that we can generalise many
facts into one. Tracing agreement among the multifarious appearances of
things, we can comprehend in one statement a vast number of details. The
single law of gravity expresses the fall of a stone, the flow of rivers,
the retention of the moon in her circuit round the earth. Now, this
generalising sweep is a real advance in our knowledge, an ascent in the
matter of intelligence, a step towards centralising the empire of
science. What is more, this is the only real meaning of EXPLANATION.
A difficulty is solved, a mystery unriddled; when it can be shown to
resemble something else; to be an example of a fact already known.
Mystery is isolation, exception, or, it may be, apparent contradiction;
the resolution of the mystery is found in assimilation, identity,
fraternity. When all things are assimilated, so far as assimilation can
go, so far as likeness holds, there is an end to explanation; there is
an end to what the mind can do, or can intelligently desire.
[GRAVITY NOT A MYSTERY.]
Thus, when Gravity was generalised, by assimilating the terrestrial
attraction seen in falling bodies with the celestial attraction of the
sun and planets; and when, by fair presumption, the same power was
extended to the remote stars; when, also, the _law_ was ascertained, so
that the movements of the various bodies could be computed and
predicted, there was nothing further to be done; explanation was
exhausted. Unless we can find some other force to fraternise with
gravity, so that the two might become a still more comprehensive unity,
we must rest in gravity as the ultimatum of our faculties. There is no
conceivable modification, or substitute, that would better our position.
Before Newton, it was a mystery what kept the moon and the planets in
their places; the assimilation with falling bodies was the solution.
But, say many persons, is not gravity itself a mystery? We say No;
gravity has passed through all the stages of legitimate and possible
explanation; it is the most highly generalised of all physical facts,
and by no assignable transformation could it be made more intelligible
than it is. It is singularly easy of comprehension; its law is exactly
known; and, excepting the details of calculation, in its more complex
workings, there is nothing to complain of, nothing to rectify, nothing
to pretend ignorance about; it is the very pattern, the model, the
consummation of knowledge. The path of science, as exhibited in modern
times, is towards generality, wider and wider, until we reach the
highest, the widest laws of every department of things; there
explanation is finished, mystery ends, perfect vision is gained.
* * * * *
What is always reckoned the mystery by pre-eminence is the union of BODY
and MIND. How, then, should we treat this Mystery according to the
spirit of modern thought, according to the modern laws of explanation?
The course is to _conceive_ the elements according to the only possible
plan, our own sensibility or consciousness; which gives us matter as one
class of facts--extension, inertness, weight, and so on; and mind as
another class of facts--pleasures, pains, volitions, ideas. The
difference between these two is total, diametrical, complete; there is
really nothing common to the experience of pleasure and the experience
of a tree; difference has here reached its _acme_; agreement is
eliminated; there is no higher genus to include these two in one; as the
ultimate, the highest elements of knowledge, they admit of 110 fusion,
no resolution, no unity. Our utmost flight of generality leaves us in
possession of a double, a _couple_ of absolutely heterogeneous elements.
Matter cannot be resolved into mind; mind cannot be resolved into
matter; each has its own definition; each negatives the other.
This being the fact, we accept it, and acquiesce. There is surely
nothing to be dissatisfied with, to complain of, in the circumstance
that the elements of our experience are, in the last resort, two, and
not one. If we had been provided with fifty ultimate experiences, none
of them having a single property in common with any other; and if we had
only our present limited intellects, we might be entitled to complain
of the world's mysteriousness in the one proper acceptation of
mystery--namely, as overpowering our means of comprehension, as loading
us with unassimilable facts. As it is, matter, in its commoner aspects
and properties, is perfectly intelligible; in the great number and
variety of its endowments or properties, it is revealed to us slowly and
with much difficulty, and these subtle properties--the deep affinities
and molecular arrangements--- are the mysteries rightly so called. Mind
in itself is also intelligible; a pleasure is as intelligible as would
be any transmutation of it into the inscrutable essence that people
often desiderate. It is one of the facts of our sensibility, and has
a great many facts of its own kindred, which makes it all the more
intelligible.
The varieties of pleasure, pain, and emotion are very numerous; and to
know, remember, and classify them, is a work of labour, a _legitimate_
mystery. The subtle links of thought are also very various, although
probably all reducible to a small number; and the ascertaining and
following out of these has been a work of labour and time; they have,
therefore, been mysterious; mystery and intellectual toil being the real
correlatives. The _complications_ of matter and the _complications_ of
mind are genuine mysteries; the reducing or simplifying of these
complications, by the exertions of thinking men, is the way, and the
only way out of the darkness into light.
[UNION OF MIND AND BODY.]
But what now of the mysterious _union_ of the two great ultimate facts
of human experience? What should the followers of Newton and Locke say
to this crowning instance of deep and awful mystery? Only one answer can
be given. Accept the union, and generalise it. Find out the fewest
number of simple laws, such as will express all the phenomena of this
conjoint life. Resolve into the highest possible generalities the
connections of pleasure and pain, with all the physical stimulants of
the senses--food, tastes, odours, sounds, lights--with all the play of
feature and of gesture, and all the resulting movements and bodily
changes; and when you have done that, you have so far truly, fully,
finally explained the union of body and mind. Extend your generalities
to the course of the thoughts; determine what physical changes accompany
the memory, the reason, the imagination, and express those changes in
the most general, comprehensive laws, and you have explained the how and
the why brain causes thought, and thought works in brain. There is no
other explanation needful, no other competent, no other that would be
explanation. Instead of our being "unfortunate," as is sometimes said,
in not being able to know the essence of either matter or mind--in not
comprehending their union; our misfortune would be to have to know
anything different from what we do or may know. If there be still much
mystery attaching to this linking of the two extreme facts of our
experience, it is simply this: that we have made so little way in
ascertaining what in one goes with what in the other. We know a good
deal about the feelings and their alliances, some of which are open and
palpable to all mankind; and we have obtained some important
generalities in these alliances. Of the connections of thought with
physical changes we know very little: these connections, therefore,
are truly and properly mysterious; but they are not intrinsically or
hopelessly so. The advancing study of the physical organs, on the one
hand, and of the mental functions, on the other, may gradually abate
this mystery. And if a day arrive when the links that unite our
intellectual workings with the workings of the nervous system and the
other bodily organs shall be fully ascertained and adequately
generalised, no one thoroughly educated in the scientific spirit of the
last two centuries will call the union of mind and body any longer
inscrutable or mysterious.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 4: _Fortnightly Review_, October, 1868.]
[Footnote 5: We may here recall an incident highly characteristic of the
late Earl of Carlisle. Being elected on one occasion to the office of
Lord Rector of Marischal College, Aberdeen, he had to deliver an address
to the students on the usual topics of diligence and hopefulness in
their studious career. Referring for a model to the addresses of former
rectors, he found, in that of his immediate predecessor, Lord Eglinton,
the Homeric sentiment above alluded to. It grated harshly on his mind,
and he avowed the fact to the students, he could not reconcile himself
to the elevating of one man upon the humiliation of all the rest. In a
strain more befitting a civilized age, he urged upon his hearers the
pursuit of excellence as such, without involving as a necessary
accompaniment the supplanting or throwing down of other men. He probably
did not sufficiently guard himself against a fallacy of Relativity; for
excellence is purely comparative; it subsists upon inferior grades of
attainment: still, there are many modes of it shared in by a great
number, and not confined to one or a few.]
* * * * *
III.
THE CIVIL SERVICE EXAMINATIONS[6]
1. HISTORICAL SKETCH.
Up to the year 1853, the appointing of Civil Servants lay wholly in the
hands of patrons. In 1853, patronage was severely condemned and
competitive examination officially recommended, for the first time, in a
Report by Sir Stafford Northcote and Sir Charles Trevelyan; but, while
the recommendation was taken up in the following year and immediately
acted upon in the Indian Civil Service, it was not till very much later
that it was fully adopted in the Home Service. The history, indeed, of
this last is somewhat peculiar. After the Report already referred to,
came an Order of Council, of date May 21, 1855, in which we find it
"ordered that all such young men as may be proposed to be appointed to
any junior situation in any department of the Civil Service shall,
before they are admitted to probation, be examined by or under the
Directors of the said Commissioners, and shall receive from them a
Certificate of Qualification for such situation". This order was
rigorously carried out by the Commissioners, and, although its absolute
requirement was simply that the nominees should pass a certain
examination, it, nevertheless, allowed the heads of departments to
institute competition if they cared. Accordingly, we find that
competition--_but limited_--was immediately set on foot in several of
the offices, and the result led to the following remark in the Report of
1856:--
"We do not think it within our province to discuss the expediency of
adopting the principle of open competition as contra-distinguished from
examination; but we must remark that, both in the competitive
examination for clerkships in our own and in other offices, those who
have succeeded in attaining the appointments have appeared to us to
possess considerably higher attainments than those who have come in upon
simple nomination; and, we may add, that we cannot doubt that if it be
adopted as a usual course to nominate several candidates to compete for
each vacancy, the expectation of this ordeal will act most beneficially
on the education and industry of those young persons who are looking
forward to public employment."
In 1857, a near approach was made to open competition, in the case of
four clerkships awarded by the competing examination in the
Commissioners' own establishment. "The fact of the competition was not
made public, but was communicated to one or two heads of schools and
colleges, and mentioned casually to other persons at various times. The
number of competitors who presented themselves was forty-six, of which
number, forty-four were actually examined."
[BEGINNING OF OPEN COMPETITION.]
It was reserved for 1858 to see the first absolutely open competition,
in the case of eight writerships in the Office of the Secretary of State
for India; and in that year, too, a step in advance was made when the
Commissioners in their Report "pointed out the advantage which would
result from enlarging the field of competition by substituting, for the
plan of nominating three persons only to compete for each vacant
situation, the system of nominating a proportionate number of candidates
to compete for several appointments at one examination".
The year 1860 sounded the death-knell of simple pass examination. It was
then recommended by a Select Committee of the House of Commons, and the
recommendation was adopted, that the competitive method, in its limited
form, should be henceforth _universally_ applied to junior situations.
This recommendation was at once acted upon in the case of clerkships
under the control of the Lords Commissioners of the Treasury, and others
by and by followed; but, as matter of fact, it was never strictly
carried out in all its scope and rigour; and as late as 1868 the
Commissioners in their Report stated that "the number of situations
filled on the competitive method has been comparatively small".
Meanwhile, competitive examination was making way in other quarters.