ent we hear expressing himself with so much firmness, vigor, and delicacy, without ever hesitating for a shade of expression, had at that time to surmount many hesitations of form, and many phases of bashfulness; he had a tender front, as was said of Nicole. And there his Breton heart was tender too and could not remain altogether insensible in this divorce, slow as it was, but decisive and irrevocable, from the beliefs of his cradle and his childhood, which were escaping from him. It cost him pain to separate from things, as well as from men. But, with that exception, he had no other effort to make in his spiritual life, than to allow himself to grow and ripen; he had his evolution, not his revolution. The modern scientific spirit had gradually laid hold of him, and spread by degrees, like the light which rises on the horizon, and rapidly fills all space. The old provisional edifice crumbled within him stone by stone; but ere the moment when it finally sank, it was already replaced by another, of deep and solid foundations. In a word, M. Renan, in passing from dogma to science, presents the most remarkable contrast to Lamennais : he is a Lamennais, young, gradual, delivered in time, without either hurricane or tempest - a progressive, and not a volcanic Lamennais. See him at the moment when he comes forth, and when he appears; he has nothing to throw down, nothing to overturn round about him, as happens when one makes his appearance in the world after a struggle; he does not burst forth in random flashes; he does break away, he detaches himself before the action. Thus his serenity as a student and as a scholar, notwithstanding even the greatest increase of labor, was never disturbed. He felt no irritation against what he had just left a very slight movement of reaction, which was soon calmed down, is barely observable in his first writings. His gravity, his dignity, and, if I may use the expression, his intellectual gait had not in any respect to suffer or to undergo discomposure, on account of a change, which was sincere and natural, which came at the proper time, in the natural course of things, through a necessary and generous crisis, and before any contrary or irrevocable step had been taken.

Left to himself henceforth, he had to try another career; the University attracted him; he entered himself as an agrégé of philosophy in 1848. But this philosophical teaching did not suit him; and in his paper on The Future of Metaphysics, written with special reference to a work of M. Vacherot's, he has sufficiently explained the reason. He has no taste for abstract study, for ideas in themselves, separated like fruits from their stems and considered as isolated; he has no confidence but in history, in history viewed in its succession, in all

its extent, genuine comparative human history. "And then," he tells us somewhere, "if I had been born to be a principal of a school, I should have had a strange whim: I should have liked only such of my pupils as detached themselves from me." Philosophical teaching, in fact, if it is not the forced demonstration of a sort of philosophical catechism, whose theses, laid down beforehand, are supposed to be irrefutable, can be nothing else but a provocation and an incitement to incessant research, which then brings with it what it can, and excludes nothing of what it finds. Now, this is not only something which the state in France has never sanctioned; it is also something which our public spirit does not seem to admit of. We rebel immediately against any professed opinion which differs from ours. I know persons, who from a spirit of opposition, after having battled all their lives against M. Cousin's philosophy as dangerous, as long as it was dominant, are now demanding to have it reëstablished in all its extent, even in our colleges, and who nevertheless do not wish to see any of the consequences to which it formerly led, and to which it may still lead. Young man, you must be satisfied with this reasoning, with this demonstration, though it may appear to you inadequate; in such high matters, you shall go thus far and no farther. A singular way to be consequent, and to foster ideas! I ask nothing better than that we should be philosophers, gentlemen, but then let us be so seriously and in good faith, without regard to consequences. Few minds, in this case, are called to be philosophical. Philosophy is a vocation and an original gift, as poetry is.

M. Renan, who was not a man to imprison himself in any way, turned to the Academies, and he did well. Whilst he was persevering in the direction of philosophy, studying Hebrew and Arabic, and whilst he was making steadfast progress in the positive side of languages, profiting by the instructions of M. Quatremére, a man altogether special and narrow, and drawing inspiration, in method and scientific fact, from M. Eugene Burnont, a superior mind, he competed for prizes offered by the Institute for learned memoirs. Such was the origin of one of those memoirs, which served as the basis for the General History of the Semitic Languages, and which obtained the Volney prize in 1847. Another memoir, crowned in the following year on The Study of Greek in the West during the Middle Ages has not yet been published. In 1850, M. Renan was appointed by the Academy of Inscriptions to a learned mission to Italy: there he prepared his work on Averroes and Averroism (1852) which was originally the subject of his thesis for the doctorate. After having written for the review, which appeared under the title of Liberty of Thought, among

other articles, a very remarkable one on the Origin of Language (1848) he soon marked his appearance in the Revue des Deux Mondes (1851), and almost at the same time in the Journal des Debats (1852) by a series of essays or articles perfect and excellent, in which this learned, profound, delicate, fine, proud and somewhat disdainful mind uttered itself on many subjects of history, literature and art, under a form at once grave and stirring.

The young writer had nothing of the beginner about him; neither in thought nor expression, was there anything slipshod. Amid a diversity of subjects, there was felt to be a steadfast vocation, and a unity. His vocation, as far as purpose was concerned, was evidently to write religious history; as far as the method was concerned, to study every form, and every production of human genius, historically not dogmatically, and in this historical study, not to confine himself to the mere facts themselves, or to any series or collection of facts, but to consider the whole aspect of production and continuous living vegetation, from the root, from the silent germination, through all its developments up to the flower. Endowed not merely with an extreme personal eagerness to learn and to know, but with the love of the true and with "that great curiosity," which carries with its dominant idea, and thus suits itself to the actual and precise needs of human effort at every period, he early convinced himself that what he most desired to know, others desired to know also; and he assigned to himself, as a rendezvous, and as a distant but certain goal, notwithstanding the variety and apparent desultoriness of his works, the History of the Origins of Christianity. He meditated undertaking this history at once critical and living, with all the resources of modern erudition, "above and far beyond any polemical or apologetical intention:" this was his constant dream—the fairest, the loftiest and the most complicated of dreams. Meanwhile, he gave his prelude, not wishing to attack this great subject till after he had made himself an authority, and gained the favor of the public by works of a purely literary or scientific character, in which his ulterior aim, and religious bias should not excite too much suspicion.

In this he succeeded to a certain extent, and gave proofs of his knowledge and his art, in a number of fresh and ingenious essays, loftily and finely thought, on every subject. Wherever he passed, things seemed different from what they had been before; he taught you to see the country as if from the top of a hill. But in vain; his religious bias showed itself, people felt the presence of a witness, an observer of a new order, armed with instruments of his own, and smacking of pure curiosity under the guise of respect. People shouted

and denounced: he remained calm, kept apart from polemics as from an inferior exercise, and rose a degree higher in his own point of view, so as not to fear even to encounter a slight cloud - the golden cloud of poësy. He seems to have tried to wrap himself round with it sometimes.

In general, the method of criticism, which he applies in every branch of study, and which he has exalted into an art, is this:

He endeavors to arrive at the formula, the idea, the abridged image of each country, each race, each historic group, each salient individual, in order to give it its rank and its proper place in this ideal representation, which the élite of the human race successively carries with it. This is what he calls the consciousness of the human race, a sort of superior movable mirror, in which are reflected and concentrated the principle rays or features of the past, and which at every period, the larger or smaller number of men who think, carry with them and transmit to those who follow. Humanity thus conceived and reduced to its élite cannot however carry everything along with it at every moment selection, pruning, generalization are necessary. Events themselves usually look after this simplification; humanity itself, in cases of necessity, provides for it by means of sacrifices. "On the monuments of Persepolis," M. Renan tells us, "we see each of the different nations tributary to the King of Persia represented by a person wearing the costume of his country, and carrying in his hands. the productions of his province to present to the sovereign. Such is humanity each nation, each intellectual, religious or moral formula leaves behind it a short expression, which is, as it were, its abridged and expressive type, and which remains to represent the millions of men forever forgotten, who have lived and died grouped around it." This consciousness, this memory of the human race, is therefore a sort of perennial Noah's Ark, unto which only the file-leaders of each race, each series, are allowed to enter. I fancy this symbolical humanity of M. Renan's, like Dante's great eagle (in the Paradiso) that wonderful bird, altogether made up of lights, souls and eyes. the part of science, in every branch to take up and try what is worthy to enter into it, and to figure in it. According to this view, we have a sort of equivalent for immortality, the idea whereof would thus only change its position and be translated. For what more beautiful can a great soul, a lofty intelligence desire, if perchance life and individual consciousness should not last forever, but should vanish after this mortal life? It must desire that its work at least should endure, that that better part of it, into which it has put the keenest of its thought and all its flame, should henceforth enter into the common

inheritance, into the general result of human labor, into the consciousness of humanity; thereby it is that it redeems itself and is able to live. 66 The works of each man," says M. Renan, "these are his immortal part, Glory is not a vain word, and we critics and historians pronounce in some sense, a veritable judgment of God. This judg ment indeed is not all; humanity is often but a poor interpreter of absolute justice. But what seems to me to result from the general view of the world, is that an infinite work is going on, into which each man puts his action as an atom. This action, once inserted, is an eternal fact." These are some of his own words.

Surely the man who expresses himself thus is not irreligious; he would seem to me even to preserve, and to introduce into his final conclusion a small portion of mysticism or indeterminateness under the form of the ideal; and I should rather be tempted, when I consider the history of the world, the vanity of our experience, the variety and perpetual recommencement of our follies; when I come to think how many deficiences there really are in this cabinet of types and samples, which he magnificently calls the consciousness of the human race, how many irreparable losses there are, and what an amount of chance there is in what has perished and what has been preserved ; how much arbitrariness and caprice there is in the classing of what remains, and that this remnant of which we are so proud, is, if we except the most recent centuries, which encumber us and fill us to repletion, after all only a treasure composed of drifts, as if after a wreck; when I think of all those breaks, those oblivions, those abruptnesses, and outlines of reminiscences, those complete ignorances or those approximations, and to tell the truth, those anythings which after all can never be completely reconciled, I should rather, I confess, be tempted to say that M. Renan has far too much respect and far too high a reverence for its majesty, the human mind.

But in a country like France, it is well that there should appear from time to time such lofty, earnest intellects to form a counterpoise to the mischievous, mocking, sceptical, incredulous spirit, which lies at the foundation of the race; and M. Renan is one of these intellects, if ever there was one. It may seem somewhat strange to those who set him down as an unbeliever, to see that I prefer classing him with the opposite class. Of this more anon. TOM DAVIDSON.