other conclusion, for these Acts are a negation of every claim which the Romish Church makes in its dealings with the State. The Prussian priest will be nominally uncontrolled in his spiritual functions, but the state will interfere with him at every turn, and will exercise over him a ceaseless control. The details of these Acts are well worth studying, for it is only by reading their provisions that we can understand how severe is the pressure which the State is to exercise. From the first moment when his preparation for his sacred office begins the State takes the priest in hand; it sees that he is educated properly, sanctions the exercise of his functions, removes him if he offends against secular law, restrains his action towards his fellows, and allows him to enforce none but spiritual penalties against the laity. Certain provisions are made in favour of those who are already priests, or who are on the point of becoming priests; but, for the future, the new system of control will be rigidly applied. In the first place, none but a German or a naturalized foreigner is to exercise spiritual functions in Prussia; and the German who exercises them must be a German educated in a particular way. He must first duly pass through a gymnasium; he must then go through a three years' course of theological study, either in a State University or in a seminary under State control; and, lastly, he must satisfactorily pass a public oral examination conducted by State officials, the object of which is to show that he possesses what the Act terms the knowledge peculiarly necessary for his calling that is, the knowledge of philosophy, history, and German literature. No new seminaries are to be established; students in the Universities are not to be allowed to belong at the same time to seminaries; and it is only if he lives in a place where there is no State University that a student may go to a seminary at all; while every teacher in a seminary must show that he has received an education satisfactory according to a lay standard. Nor will the priests in future be permitted to get hold of the young and give them a special and appropriate training. Existing seminaries for boys are not to be closed at once, but then they are not to be allowed to receive any new pupils; and, if they venture to receive any, they are to be immediately shut up. The Act, in fact, recognizes that there must be priests, and that priests must learn theology; but it insists that priests shall be Germans with a Ger man lay education, and with their minds full of German philosophy, German history, and German literature. No enactment could possibly run more counter to the whole spirit and teaching of modern Ultramontanism. When the priest has been properly trained in this way, the time will arrive for him to be inducted into some spiritual office. His superior who proposes to appoint him must immediately give notice of his intention to the President of the province, and a similar notice must be given if it is proposed to transfer a priest from one spiritual office to another, or if merely a temporary occupant of the office is to be appointed. Within thirty days the President may object to the appointment on the ground that the nominee has not received a proper education, and does not know philosophy, history, and literature as well as a good priest ought to know them, or that the nominee has been convicted of, or is being prosecuted for, an offence against secular law; or, lastly, on the ground that he is a dangerous person, and not inclined to render due obedience to the State. Against this injunction of the provincial President the ecclesiastical superior is permitted to appeal to a new ecclesiastical tribunal constituted by one of these Acts, the character of which tribunal is sufficiently indicated by the provision that six out of its eleven members must be ordinary hy judges. But the State has another danger to guard against besides that of the wrong man being put into the place. There is the danger lest the place should remain unfilled. The Act therefore provides that within a year from the date of the vacancy the place must be filled up. If it is not filled up, the income attached to the office is stopped, the income of the superior who ought to appoint is stopped, and the superior is subjected to a fine not exceeding one thousand thalers, which fine is to be repeated until his contumacy is vanquished. The priest himself also who ventures to take an appointment without due permission, or temporarily performs the duties of a charge which the State requires to be permanently filled, is to be liable to a fine not exceeding one hundred thalers. Further, if the priest, after having been appointed, is guilty of any serious transgression of the secular lawas, for example, if he makes himself a party to any movement which the State considers prejudicial to its interests - he is by the mere fact of his conviction rendered incapable of discharging his spiritual up any penitentiary he pleases, and can duties; and if he persists in acting as if punish with a fine not exceeding a thouhe were still competent, he becomes lia- sand thalers any attempt to establish a ble to a heavy fine. All these enactments more rigorous discipline than the Act must be put together in order to see how permits. If the delinquent thinks himgreat is the change which the position of self unjustly treated, he can appeal to the priests in Prussia will undergo. To us new ecclesiastical Court, and especial who are accustomed to live among clergy-care is taken to provide that one ground men who have received the usual English education at large schools, who have then gone to an English University and taken the same degrees as their friends destined for lay professions, it may seem natural and right that what we know and approve of in England should be insisted on in Prussia. It is one of the great boasts of the Church of England that its ministers are in this way brought into harmony with the laity, share the same thoughts, and are animated by the same political instincts. But the Church of Rome wishes for something totally different. It wishes for a priesthood forming a caste distinct from the laity, trained in its own peculiar way, and breathing its own peculiar spirit. In Prussia it will not have any such priesthood; and the priesthood which it gets will not only be trained in what it thinks a wrong way, but will be subjected to a supervision it abhors, and will be constantly suspected of acts which are as meritorious in the eyes of Rome as they are treasonable in the judgment of Berlin. of this appeal shall be that an attempt has been made to prevent his appealing. The State, too, can itself appeal, or rather can carry the case before the ecclesiastical tribunal, if it thinks that the continuance in office of a priest is dangerous to public order. The previous Act had provided that a priest convicted of an offence against public order should be deposed; but this Act goes further, and provides that a priest who is merely considered to be a dangerous person may have proceedings taken against him. His own ecclesiastical superiors are to be first invited to take upon themselves the responsibil ity of deposing him; but, if they decline, the authority of the tribunal is to be called into play; and if, after it pronounces against him, he presumes to discharge the duties of his office, he is liable to a fine not exceeding a hundred thalers, which is to be increased to a thousand thalers if he persists in his offence. The laity are protected by an Act, which provides that no ecclesiastical punishment can be inflicted affecting their personal But the jealous watchfulness of the liberty, their property, or their civil staState is carried still further. A properly tus. Nor can any ecclesiastical punishtrained priest guilty of no offence against ment be inflicted if its ground is that the the State might still, in the exercise of offender has done something which the his spiritual functions, be inclined to ty- State requires him to do, or has voted or rannize over other priests or over lay- not voted where the State permitted him Two other Acts tie him up as tight a free choice. For purely spiritual ofas Acts can tie him, lest he should trans-fences a spiritual penalty may be inflicted; gress in this direction. The discipline but then no public notification of its inof the Church over ecclesiastics can only be exercised by German ecclesiastical authorities. Punishment can only be inflicted after proceedings have been taken in a formal manner, after the accused has been heard, and after the grounds of condemnation have been duly recorded. No corporal punishment is to be inflicted, the delinquent can only be fined to the extent of a month's salary, and although he may be sent to a penitentiary for three months, he cannot be sent out of Germany. And his detention must be immediately notified with the most precise details to the provincial President, who can shut men. fliction may be made, and all that may be done is to announce to members of the same communion that it has been inflicted; and even then this announcement must be made in language which cannot convey any unnecessary pain to the offender. The spiritual terrors of excommunication thus remain; but every precaution is taken that, in this world at least, they shall operate in the mildest possible manner. If it is the duty of a State to protect its subjects against their spiritual pastors and masters, every one must allow that Prussia has now fulfilled this duty as it was never fulfilled before. 128 From Fraser's Magazine. to a desperate attempt to restore the old LECTURES ON MR. DARWIN'S PHILOSO- dynasty of Locke and Hume. During PHY OF LANGUAGE. BY PROFESSOR MAX MULLER. SECOND LECTURE, DELIVERED AT THE KOYAL INSTITUTION, MARCH 29, 1873. * the years immediately preceding the publication of Darwin's Origin of Species (1860) and his Descent of Man, the old problems which had been discussed in the days of Berkeley, Hume, and Kant, If we want to understand the history turned up again in full force. We had to of the Norman Conquest, the Reforma- read again that sensuous impressions tion, the French Revolution, or any other were the sole constituent elements of the great crisis in the political, religious, and human intellect; that general ideas were social state of the world, we know that all developed spontaneously from single we must study the history of the times impressions; that the only difference immediately preceding those momentous between sensations and ideas was the changes. Nor shall we ever understand faintness of the latter; that what we the real character of a great philosophical mean by substance is only a collection of crisis unless we have made ourselves particular ideas, united by imagination, thoroughly familiar with its antecedents. and comprehended by a particular name ; Without going so far as Hegel, who saw and that what we are pleased to call our in the whole history of philosophy an un- mind, is but a delusion, though who the broken dialectic evolution, it is easy to deluder is and who the deluded, would see that there certainly is a greater conseem to be a question too indiscreet to tinuity in the history of philosophic ask. thought than in the history of politics, and it therefore seemed to me essential to dwell in my first Lecture on the exact stage which the philosophical struggle of our century had reached before Mr. Darwin's publications appeared, in order to enable us to appreciate fully his historical position, not only as an eminent physiologist, but as the restorer of that great empire in the world of thought which claims as its founders the glorious names of Locke and Hume. It might indeed be said of Mr. Darwin what was once said of the restorer of another empire, "Il n'est pas parvenu, il est arrivé." The philosophical empire of Locke and Hume had fallen under the blows of Kant's Criticism of pure Reason. But the successors of Kant - Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel disregarding the checks by which Kant had so carefully defined the legitimate exercise of the rights of Pure Reason, indulged in such flights of transcendent fancy, that a reaction became inevitable. First came the violent protest of Schopenhauer, and his exhortation to return to the old fundamental principles of Kant's philosophy. These, owing to their very violence, passed unheeded. Then followed a complete disorganization of philosophic thought, and this led in the end i. p. 33. But the principal assault in this struggle came from a new quarter. It was not to be the old battle over again, we were told; but the fight was to be carried on with modern and irresistible weapons. The new philosophy, priding itself, as all philosophies have done, on its positive character, professed to despise the endless argumentations of the schools, and to appeal for evidence to matter of fact only. Our mind, whether consisting of material impressions or intellectual concepts, was now to be submitted to the dissecting knife and the microscope. We were shown the nervous tubes, afferent and efferent, through which shocks from without pass on to sensitive and motive cells; the commissural tubes holding these cells together were laid bare before us; the exact place in the brain pointed out where the messages from without were delivered; and it seemed as if nothing were wanting but a more powerful lens to enable us to see with our own eyes how, in the workshop of the brain, as in a photographic apparatus, the pictures of the senses and the ideas of the intellect were being turned out in endless variety. was * Hume, Treatise on Human Nature, book i. sec. |