passionate wailing of unfruitful pain. He cannot be bereaved in soul! And I have had ample testimony that my poems have done welcome work, if only in helping to destroy the tyranny of death, which has made so many mental slaves afraid to live."

But Egyptology, as well as Spiritualism, found attraction for him, and he is, perhaps, known better for his volumes, six in number, in three couples on The Book of the Beginnings, published in 1881; The Natural Genesis, published in 1883; and Ancient Egypt, the Light of the World, published in 1907, the year of his passing

away.

In 1863, he was granted, on Lord Palmerston's recommendation, a Civil List pension of £70, which the Marquess of Salisbury increased to £100 in 1887. From 1866 to 1877 he lived at Ward's Hurst, near Little Gaddesden, in a farmhouse provided by Lord Brownlow. In the latter year he removed to New Southgate, where he remained until 1890, when he migrated to Dulwich. In 1893, he removed to South Norwood, where he passed away on 29th October, 1907, in the eightieth year of his age, his remains being interred in Old Southgate cemetery.

The career of Gerald Massey suggested the character of Felix Holt, the Radical, to George Eliot, and his work received at various times high appreciative notices from, among other, Walter Savage Landor, Matthew Arnold, John Ruskin, Henry Taylor (author of Philip Van Artevelde), Bishop Connop Thirlwall, Walter Bagehot, and Hugh Miller. He was twice married: first to Rosina Jane Knowles (buried in Little Gaddesdon Churchyard, 23rd March, 1866), by whom he had three daughters and a son, and second, in January, 1868, to Eva Byron, by whom he had four daughters and

a son.

REVOLUTION AND THE CULTURALIST

CONCEPTION OF HISTORY

I

BY WILLIAM NATHANSON

IN THE beginning of the nineteenth century, the thinking part of the human race was agreed that man, as a being who sees, feels and values nature, a being who sings of nature and admires her and in all sorts of ways utilizes her in his own service, in the satisfaction of his wants and as a means towards his ends, could not be simply the pure and direct product of nature alone-merely a rung in the ladder of her endless development.

After Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, this thinking part of humanity could not consider man only as a part, expression or child. of nature. On the contrary, the whole of nature, i. e., everything which we perceive with our senses and comprehend as something around us and external to us, was placed in direct dependence upon human thought. For with and since Kant time and space have become forms of the human understanding, irradiations of human thought, without which the present appearance, entire composition and form of everything which goes under the name of nature would be completely lost.

Of all the living creatures which we know, man is the only one who possesses transcendental apperception, which, naturally, has not originated with man but which came to him from a higher, superhuman world. It is this transcendental apperception, a superhuman power operating in man, which gives us the entire appearance, and the whole form, as well as a great part of the content, of the wide world outside us.

"No knowledge," says Kant, "can take place in us, no conjunction of unity of one kind of knowledge with another, without that unity of consciousness which precedes all data of intuition, and without reference to which no representation of objects is possible. This

pure, original, and unchangeable consciousness I shall call transcendental apperception. . . . It is we who carry into the phenomena which we call nature, order and regularity, nay; we should never find them in nature, if we ourselves, or the nature of our mind, had not originally placed them there. For the unity of nature is meant to be a necessary and a priori certain unity in the connection of all phenomena. And how should we a priori have arrived at such a synthetical unity, if the subjective grounds of such unity were not contained a priori in the original sources of our knowledge, and if those subjective conditions did not at the same time possess objective validity, as being the grounds on which alone an object becomes possible in our experience?"

Such a viewpoint, naturally, left not the least bit of ground for any realistic or materialistic conception. Kant's teaching did not permit searching in something unpossessed of thought or feeling, spirit or soul, for causes, origins, and explanations of everything lofty, spiritual and soulful.

Kant established that originality and independence can be properly possessed only by the mind and spirit. From this it follows that for sufficient causes and explanations of all phenomena, occurrences and events, we need not seek in nature or in economics or mechanics, but appeal to a higher force which can originate with itself and which is consequently capable of producing everything by all manner of means, natural as well as supernatural.

Even before Kant approached his Critique of Practical Reason, he indicated in his Critique of Pure Reason (in which he tried to avoid speculation beyond the bounds of pure reason) that although it could not be asserted in a positive and purely reasonable manner that the spirit which issues out of the human body is imperishable and indestructible, still the opposite could never be proved.

And there is no ground for denying, by way of example, the following transcendental proposition, viz., that all of life is in reality transcendant and not subject to the vicissitudes to time, and does. not begin with birth nor end with death. "We might say that our life is phenomenal only, i. e., a mental representation of the purely spiritual life, and that the whole world utilized by our senses is nothing but a picture which passes by our present status of understanding, and which, like a dream, is without objective reality in itself. Furthermore, we might say, that if we could see ourselves and other objects as they are in reality, we would see ourselves in a world of spiritual nature, where our relation to it did not begin with our

birth and will not end with our bodily death, for both of these are phenomenal."

No wonder, then, that in the beginning of the nineteenth century when Kant's idea concerning the spirit as the lawgiver of nature. and the architect of matter and of everything which is fashioned, formed, and built thereof, had conquered the self-contemplating portion of humanity, the history of mankind, as well as that of individual peoples was written, read and interpreted, primarily, in the light of spiritual power and might.

The "must" hidden somewhere in the blind forces of nature. and the aimless, purposeless “necessity" that stares with glass eyes out of all the technical complications and economical relations, had never been considered by historians in general, and by historians of philosophy in particular, as the chief factors of spontaneous, human and social development. Over and against this merciless "must," over and against this blind necessity which stares and sees nothing, the ought and the should were established as the strong and powerful factors in the progress and development of man and society. Both of these spring from a universal will and conscience, permeated with aim and purpose, full of meaning and value.

In his Introduction to the Philosophy of History, Hegel urges the reader to first of all be permeated with the idea that universal history belongs to the domain of the spirit. The term "world," he says, includes both physical and psychical nature. Physical nature also plays its part in the world's history, and attention will have to be paid to the fundamental natural relations thus involved. But spirit in the course of its development is our substantial object.

History, according to Hegel, is nothing more than the development of spirit in time. The universal spirit in the course of its development is refracted, as it were, in man, just as a ray of light is refracted in a prism; and the breaking up into the diverse colors forms a spectrum of national and spiritual ideals and popular geniuses.

Naturally, none of the philosophers and historians of the early years of the nineteenth century was blind to the fact that every people as well as every man and group is influenced, and therefore limited, by forces and elements not included in the category of mind and spirit, senses or will. To them one thing was clear, however, viz., that while all these forces which are designated as natural or material over and against spiritual or ideal, may modify and complicate, accelerate or hinder various individually human and collec

tively social phenomena, they can in no way themselves produce a single phenomenon in the world, and therefore, indeed, cannot themselves explain a single phenomenon. The power of producing from itself, something in the form of an image or phenomenon, without the least external or outside aid, belongs to the spirit and the spirit alone. This then is the sense, the meaning and the significance of spirit. This is the characteristic property of spirit. This is its chief specific peculiarity. What other properties distinguish the genius of men, if not the properties of depth and originality? And do not both of these properties constitute the power to create in an independent way something that had never existed, something that originates with itself and therefore is absolutely new?

If one only thinks well into the independence of spirit and understands the possibility of identifying spirit with absolute independence, the question: How did spirit originate?-immediately vanishes. For then it becomes clear that spirit is nothing other than self-derived power, and for this reason all explanations, all causes and origins must be sought in it and through it. Spirit itself, however, cannot be explained or caused by any thing.

For this reason, too, Spinoza opens his Ethics with the following definition: "By that which is self-caused I mean that of which the essence involves existence, or that of which the nature is only conceivable as existent"; which means, that the conception of substance as something that needs no external causes for its origin, is considered as one of the primary presuppositions of any conception embracing the content and essence of the universe. For those, then, who feel and sense the intuitive meaning of this definition, the problems concerning the origin of the absolute substance of the universal spirit, or of an all-embracing God no longer exist. Substance, Spirit, and God are self-explained, and all else in the world must be explained through them.

Hegel follows in the footsteps of Spinoza.

Hegel explains that human history can have a meaning and value only when it is written and studied in the light of the following philosophic formulations: "Reason is substance as well as infinite power, its own infinite material its entire natural and spiritual life, which it originates. . . On one hand, Reason is the substance of the Universe; viz., that by which and in which all reality has its being and subsistence. On the other hand, it is the Infinite Energy of the Universe. . . . It is the infinite complex of things, their entire essence and truth. It is its own material which it commits to its