KARL MARX: Poverty, hatred shaped life of a great revolutionary.

 Does the spread of Communism menace world security? Is it a sane political doctrine, or a new form of Fascism? This study of Communist No. 1, Karl Marx, helps to answer these questions.

THIS week, Mr. Churchill told the British House of Commons: "It is in the Kremlin, if anywhere, that the seeds of a new World war are being sown."

 What are Russia's plans?

 How is the original doctrine of Communism, as defined by the intellectual father of the Soviet regime, Dr. Karl Marx, likely to affect our future?

 The world would like to know.

 Marx, the most influential political economist of the past century (if not of all time) died in London 63 years ago.

 Today he is a sort of demigod to Communists throughout the world; to them his doctrines, as interpreted by Lenin and currently by Stalin, are an official gospel with the force of a religion.

 To others, including some non-Marxian socialists as well as many believers in individual freedom, Marx is one of history's most wicked men, a brilliant but depraved apostle of hate whose doctrines would destroy most of the values of Western civilisation.

 Some people believe that the Russian Revolution and Soviet international policy are the living embodiments of Marx's doctrines. Others regard them as a complete negation of his doctrines.

 The truth lies somewhere between.

 But, however narrowly limited is the possibility of understanding current Soviet manoeuvres through Marxian texts, a study of Marx helps to illuminate some basic attributes of Soviet thought and behavior that have puzzled Western observers.

 Karl Marx was born in 1818 in Trier, a Rhineland city near the French border, the son of a well-to-do lawyer and a descendant rabbis on both sides.

 Heinrich hoped that his son would follow in his respectable footsteps. He was overjoyed when at 18 Karl became engaged to the 22-year-old girl next door, Jenny von Westphalen, beautiful daughter of a baron.

 Although Heinrich died when his son was only 20, he had already foreseen disappointment.

 After Karl had gone to the university (first at Bonn, where he soon got in trouble for radical activities and "nocturnal drunkenness and riot," then at Berlin), the paternal letters were filled with foreboding and reproach; for the boy's egoism, for his neglect of his parents, for his extravagance and "wild frolics," for the "demon" that seemed possess him, for fear that his heart was not as great as his mind, for the "dangerous and uncertain future" he was preparing for Jenny.

 Despite occasional "frolics," Marx was already displaying a prodigious intellectual energy.

 In one of his infrequent letters to his father, he reported that during the past term, in addition to reading an astonishing variety of books and writing summaries and reflections on them, he had written three volumes of poems to Jenny, translated the "Germania" of Tacitus and the "Elegies" of Ovid, plus two volumes of the "Pandects" (Roman civil law), written a play and an original philosophy of law that he tore up as worthless, and, "while out of sorts," got to know Hegel "from beginning to end." 

Hegel, who had died only a few years before, was to remain a major influence on Marx's thinking.

 The first of Marx's political articles that got him into trouble was written early in 1842. It was a blast at the Prussian censorship.

 Soon the young rebel began writing for Cologne's liberal Rheinische Zeitung. In October he became its editor-in-chief.

 A few months later the paper was suppressed because it had criticised the Russian Czarist regime.

 Marx, after a seven-year engagement, married Jenny and went off to Paris to study socialism.

 In Paris he swiftly developed from rebellious youth to full-fledged revolutionary, resolved to destroy existing society and bring about a "complete rebirth of mankind." 

In Paris, too, began the great friendship and collaboration of Marx's life. Friedrich Engels, two years younger, was also a Rhinelander, the son of a prosperous textile manufacturer with mills in Prussia's Barmen and in England's Manchester.

 Friedrich Engels' revolutionary zeal had been spurred by the degradation of Barmen's industrial workers and by the harsh bigotry of his grimly Calvinistic father. 

Outwardly Marx and Engels were almost complete opposites.

 Marx was short, stocky, powerful-chested, with a swarthy skin and shaggy mane and beard of coal-black hair. Engels was tall, slender, blue-eyed, fair-haired.

 Marx was grim, brooding, academic, awkward, unconventional. Engels was gay, gregarious, a devotee of fencing, fox-hunting, and other sports, a lover of wine and music.

 But when Engels stopped in Paris to pay a call on Marx in 1844, the two found their ideas and sympathies so closely matched and mutually so stimulating that they talked steadily for 10 days. Thereafter, whether they wrote jointly or discussed and encouraged each other's individual efforts, their lives and work were indissolubly joined. 

Marx was no mere armchair revolutionist.

 In Brussels, after being expelled from Paris, he and Engels joined the League of the Just (soon renamed the Communist League and transformed from a hole-and-corner conspiracy into a propaganda society with unconcealed revolutionary aims) and set about fanning, by means of writing and speeches, the fires of revolt that were to sweep Europe in 1848.

 In 1847, in the "Communist Manifesto," they produced one of the most forceful pieces of propaganda ever written. 

The next year, after the beginning of the revolts and Marx's expulsion from Brussels (in the course of which Jenny, jailed over night, was forced to share a cell with a prostitute), they hurried to Cologne to publish a revolutionary newspaper, the Neue Rheinische Zeitung.

 Engels even fired some rifle shots against the Prussian Army when it invaded the Palatinate. The revolution failed.

 Marx brought out the last number of his paper in red ink; it sold 20,000 copies. 

Years later, in 1864, after the Communist League had broken up, the two friends helped found the International Workingmen's Association — the first International. 

One of his sons-in-law compared Marx's mind to a warship with steam up, always ready to move in any direction on the sea of thought.

 He won arguments — but never any large personal following. He was handicapped not only by his metallic voice and general lack of stage magnetism, but more seriously by his passion to dominate, his fierce intolerance of any ideas or leadership except his own.

 Sooner or later he quarrelled with nearly all of his fellow socialists and other radicals. The failure of the 1848 revolution and the suppression of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, into which he had poured all that he could raise on his and Jenny's inheritances, left Marx penniless.

 Banished from Germany, he abandoned his Prussian citizenship. Now, for the rest of his life, he was a man without a country.

 After a short time in Paris and one last expulsion, he went to London to stay. There, determined to follow his goal "through thick and thin," he resolutely refused to let "bourgeois society turn me into a money-making machine."

 Marx was not entirely "practical" in his private affairs; there was about him something of the absent-minded scholar (he had once hoped to become a professor). 

Only once during his 33-year exile in England did Marx grow desperate enough to try to get a regular job: then a railway company turned him down because of poor hand writing.

 Always Marx plodded ahead on his masterpiece, "Capital," reading enormously in many languages and piling up mountains of notes. He worked mostly in the British Museum, daily from ten to seven, and then at home far into the night.

 When Marx in 1867 published the book "to which I have sacrificed my health, my happiness, and my family," he firmly but quite wrongly hoped that he would soon be a "made man."

 In London, the Marx family's situation shortly grew so desperate that Engels felt compelled to go back to "filthy trade" in his father's Manchester mill in order to support them all. But the sums he was able to send from time to time were not enough to do more than keep the Marxes alive.

 After eviction from their first London home, the Marxes (with a German maid who stayed with them to the end) moved to a two-room tenement in the slums of Soho.

Sometimes Marx lacked money for writing paper or for postage. Sometimes, beset by dunning or distrustful tradesmen, the family lived for days on bread and potatoes. 

The evidence is surprisingly unanimous that under these circumstances Marx remained as devoted to his family as he was truculent in his relations with the bourgeoisie and rival revolutionists. A police agent, for example, regarded him as "the gentlest and mildest of men" in the home circle.

 Marx was plagued by ill-health during most of the last half of his life. He was tortured by chronic insomnia, inflammation of the eyes, racking headaches, rheumatism.

 THE great riddle of Karl Marx's personality will probably always be in dispute: how much was he driven to his extraordinary life and work by love of humanity, how much by hatred of capitalist society and of its more fortunate members?

 Certainly he kept himself personally remote from the proletariat he championed. 

The vivid accounts of English working-class miseries in the mid-19th century that help make "Capital" so heart-searing a document were drawn, not from personal observation, but in the main from Engels' "Condition of the English Working Class," and from reports of parliamentary investigations Marx read in the British Museum. 

"Working for the world" was one of Marx's favorite sayings, and occasionally he mentioned the service or the sufferings of humanity in his writings. But for every word of such explicit humanitarianism there are a thousand of hatred and appeals to hatred.

 He spoke the word "bourgeois" as though spitting out something evil-tasting.

 He asserted that the power of love had failed to better social conditions in the 1800 years since Christ, and that the "iron necessity" that drives the proletariat to destroy capitalism and capitalists "will open the way to socialist reforms by transformation of existing economic relations sooner than all the love that glows in all the feeling hearts of the world."

 He argued that what the proletariat needed was not Christian "self-abasement, resignation, submission and humility," but "courage, confidence, pride, and independence even more than it needs daily bread."

 Marxism is not to be found neatly packaged in "Capital" — and especially not in the first volume alone, which is all that most people read.

 His theories of history, politics, and revolution are scattered through the writings of 40 years.

 Some of the reasoning is difficult to follow, especially for those not steeped in the grandiose and mystical speculations of German philosophy.

 Sometimes the reasoning in one work contradicts in part, that in another. But Marxs' main conclusions, his fundamental principles, are reasonably clear.

 Marx called his theory "historical materialism." It was the application to history of what Engels called "dialectical materialism."

 From Hegel the team borrowed the notion that everything in the world is in constant flux; something new is always developing, something old is dying away. And sooner or later all this change is for the better.

 Progress is achieved by what Hegel called the dialectic: one force (thesis) is opposed by a second (antithesis), which has split from it, and from their conflict emerges a synthesis containing the best elements of both. 

When the unification is completed, then it gradually becomes old and the process is repeated. 

Hegel, a patriotic State-worshipper, believed that human progress had reached its apex in the Prussian State of Friedrich Wilhelm III.

 Marx held out for one more step.

 "Modern bourgeois society, rising from the ruins of feudal society," proclaimed the "Manifesto," "did not make an end of class antagonisms. It merely set up new classes in place of the old; new conditions of oppression, new embodiments of struggle. Our own age, the bourgeois age, is distinguished by this; that it has simplified class antagonisms. More and more society is splitting into two great hostile camps, into two great and directly contraposed classes: Bourgeois and Proletariat."

In "Capital," Marx set out to show how capitalism (thesis) must inevitably, by its own inner laws, become so increasingly intolerable to the proletariat as to produce revolt against the bourgeoisie (antithesis) and a classless society (synthesis).

 Marx, who scorned other socialists' neat blueprinted Utopias, said little about what the classless society would be like.

 He did not even find it necessary to assume that the revolution would wash away all human vice.

 For him it was enough that:

 ⬤ Most of the world's troubles have sprung from the exploitation of class by class. ⬤ The ascendancy of the working class would abolish classes by making every man a producer.

 ⬤ Abolition of private property in the means of production would mean that no one would have anything to exploit anyone with.

 To be sure, he predicted that after the revolution, while Communism was emerging from the womb of capitalism in a "long and painful travail," there would be a "political transition period" requiring a "revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat" and considerable inequality of living conditions.

 But after sufficient education and organisation, the no-longer-needed State would "wither away," and everyone would live in peace and plenty in a society devoted to "the full and free development of every individual," under the slogan, "From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs!"

 This vision, the end result of the continuous progress assured by the dialectic, is to almost all Marxists not a hope but a "certainty," for to them, as to Marx, dialectic materialism is not a philosophy but a science, a science of society comparable in exactness with the science of biology.

 Indeed, Marx fancied himself as the Darwin of the social sciences.

 In explaining why capitalism contains the seeds of its own destruction, Marx begins with the theory, inconclusively advanced by Adam Smith and developed by David Ricardo that labor is the source of all value.

 He went on to develop his theory of surplus value, the keystone of his economic philosophy. According to this view, each worker spent only a fraction of his working hours earning his wages. The rest of the day he works for nothing.

 From this unpaid labor come all profits, providing those needed to pay interest and rent.

 Thus Marx arrived at his picture of society; a host of useless capitalists and landlords robbing the workers of the fruits of their labor.

 Every capitalist, he argued, necessarily likes to wring from his workers as much surplus value as he can; even if he is humane, his competitors force him to exploit. At first he may simply make his employees work longer hours. When the law forbids that, or the capitalist finds that it lessens efficiency, he may shorten the hours, but introduce the speed-up and stretch-out to make his workers work faster and harder. 

What do these things mean for the worker?

 Marx's summation: "They mutilate the laborer into a fragment of a man, degrade him to the level of an appendage of a machine, destroy every remnant of charm in his work and turn it into a hated toil; they estrange from him the intellectual potentialities of the labor process in the same proportion as science is incorporated in it as an independent power; they distort the conditions under which he works, subject him during the labor process to a despotism the more hateful for its meanness; they transform his lifetime into working time, and drag his wife and child beneath the wheels of the Juggernaut of capital."

 Machinery produces technological unemployment. The capitalist accumulates more and more of the profits of his unpaid labor, he buys more and more machinery, machines do more and more of the work, fewer and fewer human hands are needed to tend them.

 Besides, capitalism needs a large unemployed "industrial reserve army" for the times when it suddenly wants to hurl large amounts of its overflowing wealth into new industries, or into old ones whose markets have suddenly expanded.

 Finally comes the worst of capitalism's evils, the periodic recurrence of ruinous depressions.

Marx, although asserting that capitalism tends to give the working class less and less money to buy its products, flatly rejected the belief of labor leaders and other reformers that everything would be all right if employers would only pay their workers high enough wages to maintain a balance between production and consumption.

 Marx held that the prime cause of depression is overproduction, resulting from expanding capital's insatiable urge to find a profit and the compulsion upon invested capital to keep producing, regardless of demand, in a desperate effort to maintain itself.

 Marx predicted capitalism's trend toward concentration and monopoly. "One capitalist," he observed, "always kills many."

 He predicted the virtual disappearance of the middle class, as one ruined capitalist after another dropped into the proletariat.

 He believed that the end would come when a handful of great capitalists at last con-fronted a proletarian multitude, disciplined and united by enforced association in great industries, driven to despair by prolonged depression.

 By that time, too, capitalism would have reached its highest development, as Marx believed it must; its centralisation and productivity would be at a peak of ripeness for handy plucking by the proletariat.

 To Marx it made no difference whether Capitalists are good or bad: they are driven by forces they neither control nor understand.

 No matter how much the worker's lot may be improved, there can be no final compromise; the class war must be fought to the end. The end must be "a revolutionary change in the whole structure of society," or else "the common ruin of the contending classes." 

Marx taught his followers to harness for their ends the energy of class hatred wherever it existed.

 But he was aware that the conditions for revolution had not arrived. The only hope of a proletarian victory, as he saw it, was through a temporary alliance with the bourgeois democrats then revolting against monarchy and aristocracy.

 In 1850, Marx gave the Communist League significant strategic instructions in handling the bourgeoisie: "In the event of a struggle against a common foe . . the interests of both parties coincide for the moment . . .

 "During the struggle and after the struggle . . the workers must at every opportunity put forth their own demands alongside those of the bourgeois democrats. They must demand guarantees for the workers the moment the democratic citizens set about taking over the government . . . 

"From the first moment of victory our distrust must no longer be directed against the vanquished reactionary party, but against our previous allies, against the party which seeks to exploit the common victory for itself alone " 

The "Manifesto" laid out the goal: "The Communists . . . openly declare that their purpose can be achieved only by the forcible overthrow of the whole existing social order . . . Proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. Proletarians of all lands, unite!"

 What Marx meant by some of his strategic and tactical statements has been a subject of bitter dispute among his disciples.

 Interestingly enough, Marx did not mention a party in his 1850 address. In the "Manifesto" he wrote that "Communists do not form a separate party conflicting with other working class parties."

 He never spoke of a dictatorship of the party. Of course, just as he believed in the state and the dictatorship of the proletariat as instruments of struggle toward his goal of the classless and stateless society, he believed in a party as an educational agency. 

But he had never seen nor could he have envisioned the kind of monolithic and omnipotent party that rules Russia today. 

As for the "dictatorship" idea, there has long been controversy as to the meaning he attached to this concept.

 But this much is clear: Marx defined freedom as a condition in which the state is subordinate to society, and Engels equated the dictatorship of the proletariat with "the democratic republic."

 What was meant by this seeming semantic outrage?

 Some followers have believed that it meant a political democracy in which the proletariat, grown to immense proportions, could by ballot dictate economic measures, furthering its interests against those of the capitalists. Then the task of the party would be not to rule, but to educate and lead the proletariat.

 Perhaps this sounds like nothing more than New Dealism, rather than violent revolution.

 THE fact is that Marx observed the failure of his frequent prophecies of early revolution and he shifted from the hot intransigency of youth to the involved economic and metaphysical abstractions that make "Capital" such hard going in spots.

 Without ceasing to be a revolutionist, he became more reconciled to waiting and even eschewed the dogma of the universal indispensability of violence, declaring that socialism had a good chance of a peaceful birth where indigenous democratic traditions were as tenaciously rooted as in the Netherlands, England, and the U.S. 

Eventually, struggles inside the First International put before Marx and Engels the unpleasant alternatives of concentrating on its affairs to the neglect of study and writing or of letting dominance pass to the Russian anarchist, Bakunin, an advocate of direct and violent action without reference to political conditions.

 Thereupon Marx and Engels sent the International to the U.S. to die, which it did.

 In 1889, with Engels' blessing and under the leadership of some of Marx's disciples, the Second International was founded. 

The Second International placed its faith in slow accretions of power by the proletariat, which would build a new socialist society inside the shell of the old. 

The socialist task, therefore, was to teach and preach the inevitable coming of a classless society by almost automatic evolution.

 World War I laid the Second International low.

 Another interpretation of Marx was made by V. I. Lenin for use in the country Marx had regarded as the least hopeful prospect for socialist revolution.

 By its use Lenin organised the Bolshevik Party, captured power, and founded the Soviet state, which he called the dictatorship of the proletariat, and, when he was being more accurate, the dictatorship of the Communist Party.

There is no record that he ever disputed a statement of Marx's. But to square all of Lenin with all of Marx is extremely difficult.

 Lenin regarded the party as an elite of hardened professional revolutionaries capable of knowing the relatively backward workers' interests better than the workers themselves. It must therefore be justified in using and means to make its will prevail. 

In contrast to Marx's contempt for concealment was Lenin's advice to members of the Communist Party that to capture strategic posts of power "it is necessary . . . to go the whole length of any sacrifice, if needed, to resort to strategy and adroitness, illegal proceedings, reticence, and subterfuge — to anything in order to penetrate ... at any cost, to carry on Communistic work. ..."

 When the saving revolutions that Lenin looked for in Germany and the industrially advanced west failed to develop, even with the sparkling of the Third International set-up in Moscow, he did not drop the power he got under such special conditions. He decided to dig in, build industry, await new tumults. 

War, he felt, must come — "the existence of the Soviet Republic side by side with the imperialist states for any length of time is inconceivable."

 Lenin was succeeded, after a struggle between Leon Trotsky and Joseph Stalin, by the latter, whose removal from the party secretaryship had been the outstanding point in Lenin's political testament.

 After a series of purges, political trials, and executions of most of their surviving old comrades, Stalin and a small group around him consolidated their dictatorship of the Communist Party and through it of the Soviet state.

 From proclaiming the goal of building "socialism in one country"— a revision of Lenin as well as of Marx — the Bolsheviks went on to a nationalism so strong that they claimed, with much justice, the mantles of ancient Russian national heroes, such as Peter the Great and even Ivan the Terrible.

 Thus was Marx reinterpreted again.

 During the last years of Lenin's life, Russian writers began referring to their gospel as "Marxism-Leninism" rather than simply as Marxism.

 After Lenin's death, Trotsky, in his attacks on Stalin, began referring invidiously to the current gospel as "Stalinism."

 For a time the use of this word was regarded by the regime as a sign of opposition and disloyalty. Then Soviet writers began referring to official doctrine as "Marxism-Leninism-Stalinism," and later as simply "Stalinism."

 This is now an official Soviet term.

 Leninism has been called "the Marxism of the imperialist epoch"; Stalinism may be called the Leninism of the epoch of the party dictatorship.

 Last February, Stalin made a speech about capitalism's doom and socialist revolution.

 Until then he had not talked like a Marxist in any important public speech since 1939, when he said that Russians can expect to achieve a stateless society only when socialism is victorious in all or most countries and "there is no more danger of attack."

 Then Marxism went into a wartime eclipse. Neither during the pact with Nazi Germany nor during the "great patriotic war" did Marx make a happy Soviet symbol. 

No longer were huge posters showing Marx's head a dominant feature of Moscow parades and meetings. Throughout the war his name was taboo in the chief Army publication, Red Star.

 True, Marx's writings continue to be analysed, worked over, dissected, and classified by Soviet authorities.

 But basic Soviet policy is largely independent of Marx.

 For example, he declared that "we Communists do not deign to conceal our aims." But Moscow-controlled Communist parties conceal and disguise themselves, e.g., in Cuba where the Communists call themselves Popular Socialists.

 On the other hand, whereas Marx opposed all reformers, the Communist Party cannot be counted on to do so, as Australian Labor leaders learned when it so embarrassingly endorsed them at the last election.

 Such subterfuges and compromises are mightily modified forms of Marxism. 

Nevertheless, to Russians, Marxism, as interpreted by their leaders, has given some-thing important in addition to the wide variety of propaganda masks suitable for all eventualities of the changing world scene.

 It has given them reason, as the world's sole great "proletarian nation," to be suspicious of nations that are not only foreign, but capitalistic, and has given certainty that they are full sail in the main stream of history, while capitalistic outlanders stupidly row against the current.

 Has Marxism bound Russia to turn on her late allies and organise, agitate, and, if necessary, fight until the revolution has triumphed in all or at least some of the dominant countries of the world?

 Although Russian spokesmen may quote Marx on this point now and then, to try to find the answer to the question in Marx is futile. For Soviet policy is neither world revolution nor simple nationalism; the two aspects exist simultaneously.

 To Russia's revolutionary policy, the nationalist aspect lends a dynamism derived from propaganda about a holy socialist fatherland flowing with liberty and security; to the nationalist policy the revolutionary aspect brings the services of disciples in every foreign land, organised to do Moscow's bidding.

 None of this is simple Marxism.

 All of it ignores Marx's warning that the outcome of human struggle may be progress under socialism, but that it may also be — a striking phrase today— "the common ruin of the contending classes."

 Karl Marx has had an influence so great as to be difficult to explain in terms of his own theory of history.

 Somehow his personality and intellectual achievement seem to loom larger than they should according to his theory, with its stress on broad social forces.

 Few careers pose the problem of the relation of the individual personality to history so sharply as does that of this son of the bourgeoisie who sacrificed comfort and family to the intellectual goal of building a classless society.

 Marx's money worries lasted until 1869, when Engels sold out his interest in Ermen and Engels, moved to London, and gave his friend a settled income.

 Jenny died in 1881, Marx in 1883 at his dusty scholar's desk, Engels in 1895, after publishing the second and third volumes of "Capital."

 Marx's daughter Eleanor committed suicide in 1898 at the age of 43 because of a disappointment in love.

 Another daughter, Laura, and her husband, Dr. Paul Lafargue, committed suicide at the age of 70, feeling that their useful years were over and not wishing to be a burden in old age and illness.

 The third daughter, Jenny Longuet, alone left progeny; her son Jean was a leading French Socialist; her grandson, Robert-Jean Longuet, is a French Socialist writer.

http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article248500951

MATERIALISM.

We have not yet heard the last of Dr. Tyndall and his views about the origin of the universe. It was currently believed by the more orthodox party in science that he had so far explained or modified the celebrated sentence occurring in his British Association address as to come within the category of Pyrrhonists or doubters. But it seems from an article in the Fortnightly for November that he is no doubter, but a strong and an ardent believer in the potentiality of matter to produce, by its own inherent activity, every possible form of life. Still further has he stretched his view, backward and forward — backward into the " infinite-azure" of the past, and forward into the infinite development of the future, and he sees only matter advancing by successive creations, or rather by a sequential progress, throughout the unending eternity. Possibly his opponents, and especially his clerical opponents, have said quite enough in defence of faith, and, too little in the way of philosophical reasoning, but to herd them all together, under the contemptuous phrase of  "his more noisy and unreasonable assailants" is certainly not to argue with the spirit of Plato, nor according  to the canons of Aristotle. Calm and settled conviction is wont to be courteous, and even to treat the most antagonistic views as springing from a love of truth, however much they may pass beside it. There is a dogmatism in science as well as in religion. The true thinker of our age, as of all the ages, recognises the limitations of the human vision and the fallibility of the human mind, and is prepared to concede both earnestness and fairness to all truth seekers, and the possibility of very wide divergences in opinion and belief. In the Tusculan disputations of Cicero there occurs a sentence which is worthy of heed by all who would dogmatise on matters that are evidently beyond human ken, and has a special application to the theories of Mr. Tyndall: —"If I have not forgotten, these are all the opinions concerning the soul. I have omitted Democritus, a very great man indeed, but who deduces the soul from the fortuitous concourse of light and round corpuscles, as with them the crowd of atoms can effect everything. Which of these opinions is true some god must determine ; the great question with us is which has most the appearance of truth.
 The controversy between Tyndall and his opponents centres upon the origin of being. There was a time when things that are now, were not, when all that vast succession of beings that people the air, the earth, and water, had not begun to be. How are we to conceive of creation? Abandoning the merciless paradox of Hegel —"Das seyn ist das nichts?" we want to form some idea more or less definite of the beginning of things, and of the power or force by which they were created. The ordinary doctrine of development, as expounded by a living and yet more illustrious philosopher than Tyndall, will not serve us here. A mode of development no more explains the commencement of being, than a knowledge of the gyrations of a top explains the act of spinning. Creation cannot be eternal. Far back in the illimitable past there must have been a time when creatures began to be. It matters not how great the period of actual existence. The beginning may have been six thousand years ago, or six thousand ages ago, or six thousand millions of ages ago— at a time so remote as to transcend the arithmetic of men or angels. But the beginning must have been ; and how ? Mr. Tyndall says— " Matter I define as the mysterious thing by which all this is accomplished." In matter, then, visible or invisible, in the elementary atoms ever changing, but all enduring, of which the universe is composed, there is inherent, there always has been inherent, the power, or force, or potentiality of all existing forms of being and life. All the elementary substances and the endless variety of forms in the inorganic world, all the untold species of vegetable organisms, from the minute diatom of our running streams to the gigantic gum tree of our forests, and all the innumerable kinds of animate life, from the monad up to man, have been successively produced by the inherent and active force of matter. Even the soul —there is no escape from the conclusion —is a product of mere matter. The genius of Shakspeare was evolved out of existing atoms. All things that we can see or hear or feel, in the heavens above or on the earth beneath, have had a merely material origin. Matter they are, and unto matter they will return.
 This is no exaggerated view of the opinions held by Tyndall touching the origin of the universe. They are opposed by nearly all teachers of science, both in the past and present. The eternity of matter has indeed been held by many of the greatest and most reverent minds, but this is altogether different from believing that matter itself is possessed of potency equal to all the demands made upon it by the ages of duration. The majority of men believe, and we confess ourselves to be among them, that as mind, even within the sphere of human life, is infinitely above matter, so must we conceive mind to have exercised itself upon matter before the simplest phenomenon of the visible universe could be brought about. The Professor himself would seem to be scarcely content with his position, although he vehemently defends it. One needs to have one's system conceivably possible in its earliest as well as its latest stages, and yet thus it is he has written in one of his works — endorsing his, statement in the recent article : — " You cannot satisfy the human understanding in its demand for logical continuity between molecular processes and the phenomena of the human mind. This is a rock on which materialism must inevitably split, whenever it pretends to be a complete philosophy of the human mind." Now, what we hold is that, although a teacher of science is not bound to explain all the processes of nature, and specially those hidden processes which link the universe of matter with the universe of mind, he is bound to adopt a theory which does not render them absolutely inconceivable. Mr. Tyndall's materialism differ in some of its phases from the vulgar materialistic philosophies, but it seems to us more absolutely and utterly materialistic than any. In refusing to admit the idea of a First Cause, a Supreme Mind, a Creator, and confining all potency to material atoms, he has gone further than any philosopher of note since the days of Democritus. Cicero tells us of one Aristoxenus, a musician, who taught that a "certain intension of the body, like what is called harmony in music," was the soul. He adds, after declaring that, he could not understand him, "he had better, learned as he is, leave this to his master, Aristotle, and follow his trade as a musician." Similar advice might be given to Professor Tyndall. As an original investigator into natural phenomena and as a master of applied physics, he stands almost without a rival in Britain. Let him cleave to experimental and practical science, and leave to others the task of constructing a philosophy of the universe.

South Australian Chronicle and Weekly Mail (Adelaide, SA : 1868 - 1881), Saturday 29 January 1876, page 6

DEATH OF DAVID FREDERICH STRAUSS.

(From the London Daily Telegraph.)

A telegram which we received last night, announces that Dr. David Frederich Strauss, the author of the Life of Jesus, died on Sunday morning at Ludwigsburg, in the sixty-sixth year of his age. Thus has passed away a writer who was, in his department, one of the most influential men of his day. The news of his death will be a message to all the world this morning. In every English parsonage the details of the elections and the grand victories of the Bible and of Beer will he neglected for  a moment while the reverend head of the family announces that Strauss is dead, and minutely calculates what mischief Strauss has done. Every Scotch manse will find the news a theme for talk Cavinistically fierce. The religious communities of America and the English colonies will take up tale that Strauss is no more. Next Sunday it will point a few pungent or mournful sentences in all the sermons which aspire to be intellectual. The religious papers will treat the event in the way peculiar to themselves. Meanwhile, the reading class of Germany, France, Russia, and England knows that one of the chief disintegrating forces of the time has ceased to exist. There are greater writers among the contemporaries of Strauss ; there are men of more piercing faculty and of higher brilliancy; but it would be difficult to name one who has so distinctly been the pivot of theological thought. For good or for evil, he has been a mighty disturber of old beliefs. Seated in his quiet library at Tubingen, he laid his hand on the orthodoxy of Oxford and Cambridge, on the grim Calvinism of the Scottish Kirk, on the quiet, easy going theology of English rectories, and he raised a storm of protest, indignation, and conviction. Some men he helped to drive into Rome by filling their mind with the wild dread that nowhere else could they be safe from the pursuing vengeance of his terrible criticism. Some thundered out that he was a feebler and a duller Voltaire. He was refuted in hundreds of books. The volumes that were written against him would form a small library, and another could be made out of the books which were suggested by his labours. More than any other man of his time is he responsible for the heterodoxy which is fighting a fierce battle in the theological literature and the pulpits of England. He, if any one, was the parent of Essays and Reviews and the tutor of Bishop Colenso.
 David Frederick Strauss was born at Ludwigsburg, which was also the place of his death, on the 27th,of June, 1808. After leading the simple and studious life of many Germans, he decided that he should become a clergyman, or at least a professor of theology.  He was a Lutheran and there is no reason to believe that his parents taught him any heterodox opinions. But after studying at the small town of Blaubeuren, he went to finish his ecclesiastical course at Tubingen, which was the most dangerous school of theology in Europe. In such a university a professor may deal with the most cherished or the most profound points of the Christian faith as freely as he would criticise a passage in the Koran, or as impartially as he would expound the dynamical theory of heat. He lectures, not as a partisan, but simply as a student. Religion is to him not a thing to be believed, but a series of phenomena to be sifted, weighed, examined, classified, rejected as false, or accepted as true with certain qualifications. Such a method of treatment is a far more powerful solvent of faith than any direct denunciation of orthodoxy, or even than the epigrams of mere irreverence, for it begets a habit of mind which is fatal to all enthusiasm of assent when the matter under review lies beyond the ken of the senses. We may presume, therefore, that Tubingen at least helped to launch him on that shoreless ocean of inquiry over which he was henceforth to sail. Indeed, the theological system which made him famous must have been largely formed when, leaving Tubingen at the age of twenty-two, he entered the ministry, and became a professor at Maulbronn. He had not, however, finished his ecclesiastical course, and he next went to Berlin to study under Hegel and Schleiermacher. The one was then by far the more famous philosopher in Europe, and the other was the greater of theological mystics. Hegel was applying to existing systems even a stronger solvent than Kant and Fichte had done. In the minds of enthusiastic young Germans, the sole drawback to his greatness was the obscurity of his style, which was like Egyptian darkness to all mankind save a few devotees whose eyes had been purged by the euphrasy and zeal of tremendous study. He it was who said on his death bed, " there is but one man in Europe understands me, and even he doesn't understand me." Heine, who was one of his pupils, and who did not laugh at him until he began to laugh at everything, once declared that Thiers had such a power of lucid statement as to be able even to make Hegel plain. Strauss, however, was no jester, but a sober, hard-working student, and on him the influence of Hegel's philosophy was profound. Seen in his first book and in his last, that influence strikingly proves how the shadowy subtleties of metaphysics can shape theologies and sanctities— the beliefs by the light of which men live and die. Strauss also learned much from Schleiermacher, who called himself a Christian, but taught so dim a creed as to defy classification among the lists of dogmatic tenets. The great mystic helped Strauss to leave the old paths. After studying under Hegel and Schleiermacher he went back to Tubingen, where he taught theology, and also went on  with his philosophical studies. His name was quite unknown to the world at the time, and he did not seem to have the slightest chance of becoming the most noted theologian of his day. But all the time he was elaborating a great book, which was published in 1835, when he was only twenty seven years old.  It was the Life of Jesus. Many books had been published under the same title, some being pious exercises of faith, some mere narratives, some criticisms on the texts of the Evangelists, and others coarse pieces of irreverence; but Strauss produced a work so bold and so original that it startled even the Germans, and speedily made Europe ring with amazement, indignation, or triumph. He laid down the thesis that the personality of Christ and his Apostles; such as they are pictured in the Evangelists — that the chief events in the life of each, such as they are recorded in the sacred records—indeed, that the whole fabric of the Christian faith were myths. They were not fictions, they were not false-hoods; but neither were they objectively true. On a slender basis of fact the imagination, the devout language, the superstitions, the fears and the beliefs had built up generation by generation a high superstructure of mythical story, which revealed, indeed, what manner of men were the Jews, the uneducated Greeks, and the untutored Romans, which gave a glimpse into the soul of these people, and told us what they wished to believe ; but had no such foundation of fact as would bear the scrutiny of reason. In order to make good his dogma, Strauss subjected the text of the Evangelists to a merciless criticism, and showed, as he thought, that it was full of inconsistencies and impossibilities. But the novelty in the book lay in the process by which he sought to explain how the wondrous fabric of the Christian faith grew into life, and had exercised an unparalleled influence on the destinies of mankind for eighteen centuries.

 The book was translated into every European language. The French version was done by M. Littreé; the English, we believe, by the author of Adam Bede, at that time altogether unknown. Amid the indescribable storm which followed the publication, Strauss suffered somewhat from the law of orthodoxy ; but the governing body of the Zurich University had the boldness to offer him the chair of Church History. A shout of protest went up from every part of Protestant Europe against such an  attempt to desecrate a town which had been a cradle of the reformation, and Strauss did not dare to accept the post. Going back to his studies, he produced in 1840 another great work, intended to show how the dogmas of Christianity had been developed. He has never ceased to study and write on the favourite themes of his youth. A few years ago he collected a series of essays, partially theological and partially personal, which cast a pleasant light on the scholar's own life. One was full of biographical details. Another was an eloquent plea for Protestantism, not because Strauss held it to be dogmatically true, but because he thought that it set man on the way to truth. The book was translated into French after the termination of the war, and commended to the notice of France in a beautiful preface by M. Renan, who proud of being the disciple of Strauss, besought his countrymen to forget their enmities in presence of such a man, and to remember that science is of no country. But a far more important work was The Old and the New Creed, which was published about a year ago, and had the honour to be eloquently denounced by the prime minister in a lecture at Liverpool. That book showed how Strauss had travelled beyond even the advanced post which he had occupied when he wrote the Life of Jesus ; for it revealed him bereft of all faith in a personal Deity or in the after life of the soul. His Hegelianism had at last met final deliverance of Comteism itself. It is not our province to say one word of criticism on such teaching. We merely record it as a sign of the times. We give it prominence because the teaching of Strauss has exercised a prodigious influence on the thought of the age.
 Strauss was a politician as well as a philosopher and a theologian. Strange to say, so radical and reckless an innovator was a Tory in politics. He would have voted with the church party and Mr. Disraeli if he had lived in England. Living in monarchial Germany, he was an ardent royalist, and a sturdy foe of all radical change. During the war with France he ardently flung his pen into the strife of polemics, and he drew forth an eloquent apology for France from his friend and disciple Rénan. His life, however, continued to be that of a student, and now he has passed away in the Wurtemburg town where he was born. Behind him he leaves an enduring memory, crowds of foes, a literature fashioned after the model of his great book, and another literature denouncing him as the most mischievous blasphemer since Voltaire.

Wagga Wagga Express 3 June 1874 http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article145057151

GATTHOLE EPHRAIM LESSING, HIS LIFE AND WORKS

LITERATURE.

Literary Notices.

"LESSING, HIS LIFE AND WORKS," by ADOLPH STAHR, Berlin. 8th edition.

"LESSING," by JAMES SYME. 2 vols. Trubner and Co., London.

"GATTHOLE EPHRAIM LESSING, HIS LIFE AND WORKS," by HELEN ZIMMERN, Longmans,London.

These three works will give anyone who chooses to read them a large amount of information respecting the life and works of the celebrated Lessing. Germany is now proud of being the fatherland of such a distinguished critic as Lessing, although a few years back, after the republican scare of 1848, some difficulty was experienced in obtaining sufficient subscriptions to erect a monument over his tomb.  . . .
Lessing was the son of a Lutheran pastor at Kamentz in Lusatia. His father was of the Puritan type, and was horrified at the idea of his son becoming a critic and a playright instead of a dogmatist. He did all a parent could do to wean the erring youngster from what Puritanism regarded as the certain road to perdition. But young Lessing, having made up his mind, was not to be turned from his purpose by either tears or remonstrances; and so he broke loose from parental control and set up as a Bohemian or literary pack at Berlin, where he obtained for some years a precarious livelihood by writing and translating for the publishers. About 1767 he established himself as publisher, author, and impresario, in Hamburg, where he failed in business both as an impresario and as a printer. Reimarus having left the Wolfenbüttel Fragments to the care of his daughter, she, after her father's death, gave them to Lessing, who published them and at once became famous. From that time forth he became a power in the literature of Germany.
His philosophy may he estimated by the following extract. His biographer says:—
Lessing's belief that there is a law in human conduct, as well as in physical processes, was the ground of his conviction that there is also a law in human history. If we cannot to some extent foretell the action of the individual, we cannot at all foretell the course of the mass. But grant that there is order even in the apparently confused web of individual conduct, and the conclusion that there is order in the apparently still more confused web of human development is a necessary result. In the one case as in the other we shall be able to predict the future precisely in proportion to our knowledge of the determining circumstances. The progress of the race involves so vast a sweep of thought that we shall probably never be able to advance beyond very general propositions respecting it ; that Lessing detected progress at all, and formulated something approaching to a law of progress, is one of his greatest services to modern thought.
His idea of the Divine element in the history of humanity may now be more easily understood. All religions systems he regarded as the product of the ordinary faculties of men, faculties which, in the case of the great founders of religions, have worked with exceptional force and intensity. But these faculties are themselves elements of the Divine thought. God acts directly in every mind; and the minds which have the grandest conceptions, and are moved by the best impulses, are the minds in which His qualities are most displayed. Historical religions, therefore, may be truly called revelations; only they are revelations evolved without miracle, in accordance with the laws which may be studied in the least, as in the most important of the operations of the heart and intellect. In like manner we may speak of every great result achieved by man as a revelation. Plato, Shakespeare, Moliere, Newton; such men as these open new and unexpected aspects of existence ; they raise their fellows to points of view from which the eye can sweep over wider ranges. And they do this because the Divine energy is greater in them than it is in ordinary humanity. The whole of human development is thus, according to the philosophy of Lessing, a manifestation of God. . . . .
The debt Germany owes him is immense. On the year of his death, Schiller published his first drama, and Kant issued his "Critique of Pure Reason." Soon afterwards Goethe returned to the career he seemed to have abandoned, and by-and-bye Fichte began to impress his countrymen by the power of his splendid personality. Thus Germany passed into the midst of that classical period in her literature to which she looks back with pride and longing. Thoroughly awake, she exercised her energies in all directions, and, while beaten and humiliated in the world of politics, took for a time the acknowledged lead in the greater world of thought.
But for Lessing this classical period would have been impossible. By his dramas, his incessant criticism, his controversies in literature, art, and theology, he awakened in the national mind a spirit of genuine freedom, an impatience of commonplace, a thirst for intellectual achievement of enduring excellence. He cleared and ploughed the soil on which his successors cast their fruitful seeds.
For the charm that belongs to quiet and resigned minds we must not look in Lessing. There never existed a more restless, ardent spirit. Nor will he please those whose ideal of a man is one who retires from contact with the world into the solitude of his own thoughts. He was essentially a man amongst men ; he found in society his highest happiness, his chief stimulus ; it was the steel that struck from the flint its most brilliant sparks. And in his vast labours it was society —the society of his own time—which he kept always before him as that to whose needs he was bound to minister. Even in questions that seemed remote from his age he detected points of contact with the impulses of the living present.
Miss Zimmern's work was written before Mr. Syme's work was published, but the latter had priority of publication, and to some extent forestalled the market. Those, however, who feel interested in the subject would do well to read the three works we have referred to. There is an American translation of Stahr's work. The reader of the three works will see Lessing's life and mental and moral character reviewed from almost every stand-point. Miss Zimmern often dwells on topics which the other biographers merely glance at, and vice versa. We extract her remarks on the "Wolfenbüttle Fragments," as a sample of her style. She says :
The "Wolfenbüttle Fragments" are no longer read. Modern theological criticism has far outstripped their crude speculations, belonging to the mechanical school of Deism, that held miracles as sheer impostures. Exegetical examination was unknown ; a narrative was either false or true, wilfully perverted or dictated by heaven. Written before the growth of myth was understood, or had been scientifically investigated, they were imbued with that early spirit of rationalism, which, in its earnest wish to be useful, ceased to be reasonable, and grew fanatically intolerant, indiscriminately condemning the past as worthless and rotten. The rationalist could see in the adherents of orthodoxy only the blind followers of a cunning imposture; while these based their beliefs upon a rigid theory of inspiration, " The child dream of a dead universe, governed by an absent God," was then in its heyday. On the other hand, the historical value of the Fragments" is unquestionable. Enlightenment owes them vast obligations, since their publication gave birth to a controversy whose like had not agitated Protestantism since the Reformation.
Reimarus was a forerunner of David Strauss; he wrought in the spirit of Wolff's philosophy, as Strauss in that of Hegel. The relative nature of truth was as yet unrecognised, as well as the gradual adaptation of truth to the requirement of every age. The spirit of inquiry that begot the Reformation was a breath of it; Bodin preached it in his "Republique," but the minds of men were unprepared for it. In Lessing's day it was floating in the air ; he seized it, and gave it written shape. He had the honesty that places a man above the factions of creeds, and a good portion of the personal indifference to odium needed by the innovator. In the notes—"Hints," he names them—with which he accompanies his "Fragments," he seeks to establish the legitimacy of free discussion on controversial themes. Until our time, he contends, religion had been as ill attacked as defended ; the author of the "Fragments" seemed to him to approach the ideal of a worthy adversary. But in the same sentence he expresses a wish that a man may arise who will no less approach the ideal of a defender of religion.
Lessing has been reproached for hiding his opinions. The classifiers of human minds have been unable to force him into any of their categories, and it was their utter misunderstanding of his purpose that furnished for Lessing the amusing element in the discussions excited by the publication of the "Fragments." He was not afraid of the issue.  Religion was to him apart from theology ; it consisted in feeling. This was his fundamental axiom. He carefully distinguishes between Christians and theologians, saying : "How do this man's hypotheses, and explanations, and proofs concern the Christian ? The Christianity which is so true, in which he feels himself so happy, cannot be a fiction, for it is here. When the paralysed man feels the beneficial shocks of the electric spark, what does it concern him whether Nollet or Franklin is right, or whether both are wrong?" He turned against the Conservatives, whose belief in the letter closed their minds against the theory which Lessing, with advanced insight, called to his aid ; he turned against the innovators, whose reform meant destruction. "Dirty water," says Reimarus, " ought not to be poured out before you have clean." " But," retorts Lessing, "he who does not pour out the dirty water can never have clean." For the author of the "Fragments" Christianity as a positive religion fell with its props of miracle, revelation, and fulfilment of prophecy. Not so for Lessing. He only inferred that the props were vain. Such arguments might confound the theologian, but they did not touch the simple Christian. The weight of Lessing's intellect leaned to untrammelled individual thought, and he regarded those who followed Reimarus, and the orthodox, as the two extremes, the neologians holding the central place. He could sympathise with all three parties and with none. This was extremely puzzling to his contemporaries. His own thoughts are reflected in some MS. notes published post-humourously. Preparing to study the manner in which the Christian religion has been founded and spread, he wrote :—" Undertake this investigation as an honest man," I say to myself, "look everywhere with your own eyes, distort nothing, embellish nothing. As the conclusions follow, so let them follow ; do not check their course, do not influence it."
One more extract and we shall leave the work in the hands of our readers. His biographer says :
Lessing was a man in whom two ages, two opposed tendencies of thought were combined in unique harmony. He exhibited in his person all the good elements of the eighteenth century, while he became the pioneer of the new. It was his peculiar characteristic to be at the same time the representative of his own and of a succeeding generation. For while the eighteenth century was negative and destructive, the nineteenth is affirmative and constructive: Lessing was both. He anticipated the nineteenth century in its tendency to return to the past, and its endeavours to disengage primitive truth from the disfiguring accretions of later ages. In this respect alone he presents a remarkable contrast to Voltaire : a contrast wholly to his advantage. In art, in religion; he helped towards the liberation of mankind from the shackles of mere tradition and authority as such. But while he destroyed, he built ; he did not use the thin weapons of sarcasm and persiflage to undermine both good and bad together, and leave his fellows shelterless. Hence it is that Lessing may lay claim to be the intellectual pioneer of our present culture. There are few departments of thought into which he did not penetrate, and none into which he penetrated, without leaving the impress of his genius behind him. So varied and catholic were his interests, that to many he is only known as a theologian, to others as an aesthetician, to others, again, as a dramatist, poet, critic, or philogist. In one point only he did not free himself from a characteristic defect of his age ; and this was his indifference to the beauty and significance of nature. In this respect alone he cannot be ranked as a precursor of Goethe, whom he anticipated in his attachment to the Greeks, Shakespeare, and Spinoza.
Born at the most depressed period of his native literature, he lived to see the first fruits of Goethe's genius, while the year of his death was marked by the publication of the book which may be said to close the eighteenth century mode of thought, the " Critique of Pure Reason."
The sculptor Rauch exhibited correct and delicate perception, when among the crowd of famous men that surround the monument of Frederick the Great at Berlin, he placed Lessing with his face turned towards Kant, as though exchanging ideas with him. Both were great emancipators of the human mind. Both strove to establish individual liberty of thought and action, both tried to awaken in their countrymen a just conception of the nature of freedom. It is small wonder that interest in Lessing has revived latterly in Germany, for the overgoverned and bureaucratic German still has need of him. At the same time Lessing never confounded liberty and licence. He did not live to see the French Revolution ; but he would have been the first to proclaim that despotism was equally degrading whether it were an imperial diadem or a red cap. He desired that each human being should be a man, thinking for himself. He recognised this as the secret of freedom, when he said, "Think wrongly if you please, but think for yourself."
 Lessing's life was made up of controversies. He liked literary warfare. It is said that his controversy with the pompous Goetz, of Hamburgh, was begun as a mode of relieving his grief at the death of his wife. Most of his works are now out of date, but they exercised an immense influence in their day over German culture, and were the heralds of that golden age in which Schiller and Goethe shone as stars of the first magnitude.

Australian Town and Country Journal 17 August 1878, 

SAMUEL ALEXANDER, O.M.

A GREAT SON OF AUSTRALIA.

By Proff. J. Alexander Gunn.

The greatest living British philosopher, Samuel Alexander, who received the Order of Merit on the Kings Birthday is an Australian by birth. He is an "old boy" of Wesley College where his name may be seen inscribed on the honour board. From Wesley he passed to the University of Melbourne, and thence by scholarship to Oxford where he had the distinction of gaining not merely a double first but a triple first. He graduated with first class honours in the three honours schools of classics, Mathematics and "greats "(philosophy and its cognate subjects). He obtained the Greer prize in moral philosophy and later he was elected a fellow of two Oxford colleges Balliol and Lincoln.
Like Bergson, Alexander was born in the year in which Darwin's "Origin of Species" was published and he grew up in the wake of the controversy which was to present such a problem to the thinkers of the nineteenth century the problem enunciated so clearly by Huxley, of the apparent contradiction between Nature and ethical ideas. This problem Alexander tackled in his first book "Moral Order and Progress" written in 1891 and dedicated to his Oxford teacher T. H. Green the great English Hegelian and idealist. No one reading that book could have suspected that the writer would give to the world nearly 30 years later such a remarkable, independent, and realist book as "Space, Time and Deity " Two years after the publication of "Moral Order and Progress," however, the death of Robert Adamson was announced at Manchester. This brilliant young Scot had gone to the University of Manchester as professor of philosophy, and his early death was a tragedy. Samuel Alexander was elected to succeed him. He held that chair until his retirement after the war.

The Problem of Knowledge

Away from the idealism of Oxford he worked out his own theories, taking a line entirely at variance with his Oxford teachings. The Oxford of that day, like Scotland, was largely under the domination of the German idealism of Hegel and his successors. This "mentalism," as it might be called, coloured the attitude adopted to all problems, logic, ethics, politics, and theology. It specially coloured the problem of knowledge itself. Knowing was a purely mental act. Some of the more unguarded teachers spoke as if the conscious mind of man actually created the world outside in comprehending it. Berkeley was invoked to support the general trend of Hegel, nothing could exist unless it were perceived by mind. If it was suggested that things might exist in their own right when human beings were not observing, appeal was made to the Deity. He at least would always be on watch. It was this argument which was so amusingly put by a puzzled undergraduate in lines which he wrote in some anxiety after a philosophy lecture: —

There once was a man who said "God

 Must think it exceedingly odd
If he finds that this tree

 Continues to be
When there's no one about in the Quad."

Alexander, rebelling against idealistic arguments of this type, saw no reason why the tree or any other thing might not exist in its own right, whether observed or not.

This is the philosophy of realism. For Alexander mind is only one in a democracy of things. Other things than mind, from trees to time, can exist, whether they are perceived or not, for perceiving does not create them. They exist independently, and this is so, however much it be affirmed that mind by selective interest "creates its world." Alexander, in a series of papers from 1893 to 1914, did much to renew the interest in this question. In a little book on the English philosopher John Locke he claimed that the views of idealism were imported from Germany and planted in foreign soil. English philosophy in Hobbes, Locke, Hume, and Mill had always been in tone realist, empirical, closely allied to science in its love of fact. Contemporary developments which come from Cambridge rather than " the home of lost causes" support Alexander's contentions. Moore, Russell, and Whitehead, together with most of the younger teachers of philosophy in Britain, no longer belong to the idealistic school, but are in large degree realists. This means a different attitude, not merely to the act of knowing itself, but also to other things, notably to the synthetic efforts of the Hegelians. Analysis and the tackling of separate problems replaces the Germanic attempt to erect great systems of the whole. Idealism always thought in terms of the whole or the absolute but realists are not convinced that there is a whole. Some of them like that radical empiricist and pluralist William James, are inclined to view the universe as "a multiverse."

The Gifford Lectures

During the last years of the war Alexander received the greatest honour which can come to any British philosopher. He was elected to deliver the Gifford lectures. These were published in 1920 under the title "Space, Time and Deity. " This book raised him at once to international fame. It is undoubtedly the most important book on philosophy published in England since Bradleys "Appearance and Reality " was issued in 1893. As Bradley relied for inspiration upon Hegel, Alexander seems to find his, to some extent, in Spinoza although his book is far less allied to Spinoza than Bradley's was to Hegel. Alexander however is not a pantheist. Whereas for Spinoza the basis of all things was God or Nature for Hegel the absolute idea, for Bergson the elan vital or life force for Alexander it is space—time.

It is difficult to convey briefly the wealth of argument and the grandeur of the conceptions of the universe which are set out in Space, Time, and Deity " Alexander like Kant in his "Critique of Pure Reason " begins with space and time as fundamental but he considers that one cannot exist apart from the other, and that in what he calls "space-time" lies the secret of the universe. This space time is the matrix from which spring all movements and these movements in the course of development give use to all the "things" found in the world. Undismayed by the saying, that "the world is so full of a number of things" he boldly claims that they somehow come from space time, the creator and sustainer of all that is. Like Kant again, and Renouvier, Alexander has much to say of categories. Space time itself, however, is not a category, nor is it substantial. " It is the fundamental creative matrix, the elan of which gives us the emergence of matter, life, mind and Deity (not God) Alexander distinguishes sharply between God and Deity. For him as for Spinoza, God is a fact. He is positively all there, is in space-time. Deity is the quality of striving or aspiring to a higher level.
The book contains many fine sayings about freedom, about morality, truth, and art.

The Argus  14 June 1930,