friendly ushers or employés. Those officers always halted at Passy, encouraged me and promised to do their best to induce the Government to come to our aid. Every day bourgeois fleeing with their cash from different parts of Paris crossed the arrondissement on their way to Versailles, and assured me that they would urge, by all the means in their power, the necessity of keeping free the gates through which they themselves were escaping. I had thus good reason for believing that in presence of so many advisers the Government would see the necessity of helping us. VI. Yet, in spite of these advices, in spite of pressing letters in which I explained my critical situation, the rulers at Versailles remained inactive and silent. I know that a few of them opposed this attitude; but their opinion was combated by some military men who were anxious that the Government should not be indebted to the National Guards for anything, and who perhaps hoped to find in the second siege of Paris a set-off to the defeats of Sedan and of Metz. Be it as it may, the Government left Passy and its defenders to their fate; and so an hour came when I was informed that, from the day but one after, the mayoralty could not proride any longer for the pay of my battalion. I made a last effort. On the 29th of March an officer went to Versailles, instructed by me to set forth, before the proper authorities, the situation of the 16th Arrondissement, and to point out the advantages to be derived from it. This officer was received by M. Picard, then Minister of Finances, and explained to him all that had occurred in Passy since the beginning of the crisis, particularly insisting upon the question of the pay, and on that of the gates we were still guarding. M. Picard laughed, and said in that cynical way of his, 'Go and tell your commander that he must not trouble himself about the gates which his men are keeping. There are three of them, I suppose. Well, we will have twenty gates to-morrow, if we like.' That M. Picard is a man of wit nobody denies. That he was on this occasion sensible and far-sighted may well be doubted when we now reflect upon the time and money spent during the second siege in taking the three gates here alluded to. As for me, I felt so indignant at such a reply, and at all the political nonsense it involved, that I hurried to Versailles, when I chanced to get at once a hearing from M. de Larcy, then Minister of Public Works. Curiously enough, this gentleman, whose political feelings might well have biassed his mind against Paris, and whom I considered as strongly reluctant to any alliance of the Government with any sections of the Parisians, was much struck by my arguments in favour of the possibility of concluding such an alliance with the 16th Arrondissement. He took me in his carriage to the house of M. Thiers, and requested me to repeat before the Chief of the State all that I had related to him. This I did at great length, narrating all the facts and circumstances which I have commented upon in the course of this paper. The President of the Republic listened to me politely, and when my statement was finished, we sat looking at each other for a while. I waited for a reply, and the great statesman was going to give it, when trumpets were heard sounding the march-past. Thereupon M. Thiers stood up, went to the window, and calling me towards him, 'You see,' he said, this regiment passing. How well the soldiers look! Now that they are no longer in contact with the Parisians, they begin to resume their habits of discipline. Those are the only men who will put a stop to the Revolution!' VII. After such an answer, distinct though veiled, I had but to advise the men of my battalion to retire to their homes, and I did so, not without feeling a deep sorrow for their fate. A few of them joined the insurrection; but the great majority were disarmed by the Commune, which, however, granted them the thirty sous refused by the Government of Versailles. And as to the 16th Arrondissement, it was occupied on the 31st of March by the Fédérés, and soon covered with the shells that the guns of Fort Valérien and the batteries on the heights of St. Cloud did not cease pouring upon it from the first days of April until the 23rd of May, when the Versailles troops entered Paris through its gates. How sadly, two years ago, straying amidst the ruins of Passy and Auteuil, I thought over the events which I have just tried to relate. Here I close my recital. My experience of Paris during the two sieges includes the scenes which followed the entrance of the Versailles troops into Paris, but I shrink from bringing under the eyes of the reader those scenes the bare remembrance of which appals me. May the blood which was then spilled not have been shed in vain! May it above all teach the lesson that social problems cannot be solved by violent means! J. DE BOUTEILLER. THE RELATION OF METAPHYSICS TO LITERATURE AND SCIENCE. A Lecture delivered before the Philosophical Society of the University of Edinburgh, March 26, 1873. META BY JOHN STUART BLACKIE, PROFESSOR OF GREEK. ETAPHYSICS is with most persons in this country, perhaps to a certain extent in all countries, a word of ill omen. When they hear it uttered, they are apt to feel uncomfortable, as if at the suspicion of an approaching headache. They rub their eyes and look apprehensive, doubtful whether the intrusive apparition be a cloud or a ghostin either case an object of just avoidance; for in a world of clouds we are apt to lose our bearings, and in a world of ghosts we lose our wits. Philosophy is a term of less unpleasant associations; still it is not popular. A philosopher, John Bull is apt to conceive, is a person who can do anything but hit a nail on the head; and Sandy, though not without a certain pride in his Humes and his Hamiltons, feels on the whole inclined to refer in matters of speculation rather to a jury of common sense;' and besides cannot understand what synthesis or antithesis of abstract ideas can contribute to the replenishing of his empty pockets. The Englishman is pre-eminently a practical man; and in the composition of the Scot a certain hard and square utilitarianism, suspicious of sentiment and condemnatory of all operations not directly conducing to a visible and immediate result, is a strong element. Nevertheless, both John Bull and Sandy, in their sweeping condemnation of metaphysical speculation, are wrong. Metaphysics, as the science of ultimate principles, is merely the highest form of thought, and a man can no more reject it altogether than he can reject thinking. No doubt there is a considerable class of persons to whom thinking is rather a bother, and they content themselves easily with as little of it as possible; whereas metaphysics always means as much of it as possible. But even these persons, unless in the lowest scale of mere nomad or gypsy life, cannot get on without some substratum of consistent thinking; and this they generally find ready-made to their hands in the current theology of the country to which they belong. The existence of religion, indeed, except in its very lowest forms, where it expresses only dependence, proves that man is a metaphysical animal; for the highest thought to which the metaphysician can ascend is God, and theology and metaphysics are only two different names for the same goal arrived at by different roads. We are all, therefore, in so far as we are complete men, by necessity metaphysicians; some ultimate principles of thought and action we must either work out for ourselves, or assume as worked out by others. The only apology that can be offered for the proverbial English antipathy to metaphysics is, that metaphysicians are not always wise, and sometimes are even absurd, according to Cicero's well-known saying, 'Nihil est tam absurdum quod non dixerit aliquis philosophorum;' and seem to have employed themselves in twisting a golden or gilded cord with which to strangle themselves. All this may be freely admitted; also that some persons, who in this unspeculative country have been allowed to pass as philosophers, have stamped with their signature speculations more suitable for pigs-if indeed pigs could speculate-than for men; and some of them have even gone so far as, not without a certain amount of reverberant applause, to plant Epicurus publicly on the throne of Plato. Better no philosophy at all, of course, than such open prostitution of all that is noblest and highest in human nature, such perverse inversion of the natural poles of things. But it is not fair to make metaphysics, any more than poetry or political economy, the scapegoat for the sins of its professors; and it must remain an unshaken truth in the history of human society, that a nation which disowns metaphysics has already condemned itself as either utterly unthinking or contented with a style of thinking sufficient only for the most immediate uses and the most ephemeral purposes. One thing I candidly admit-that there is no necessity for all men being metaphysical; nay, more, I say, happiest often are they who have nothing to do with abstract thinking, and happiest, it may be, the ages in which no profoundly metaphysical question was ever stirred. How this? Plainly be cause in the constitution of certain minds, and in certain stages of society, the great and fundamental truths of metaphysics exist in a sort of concrete, unconscious state; believed in and acted on, but not proved, because not questioned. Homer, I feel sure, was no metaphysician; neither Homer nor the age of which he was a spokesman ; but that he was a full and complete, a rich, luxuriant, and thoroughly well-furnished, and altogether healthy-minded man will scarcely be denied by any; and if so, his concrete nature could not have been destitute of those original instincts and fundamental convictions which the metaphysics of the schools can systematise, but does not pretend to create. Nor is it difficult to see wherein his concrete metaphysics lay. He had the most profound and deep-rooted conviction of the omniscience and omnipotence of the gods, and the providential government of the world-a belief which in a summary form, and with a popular phraseology, in fact enunciates the highest metaphysical doctrines to which the comprehensive encyclopædism of a Leibnitz or the constructive subtlety of a Hegel has yet attained. And what we say here of Homer and the Homerides applies with equal truth to Walter Scott, the least metaphysical of modern poets, and to the atmosphere which he breathes. It is the happiness of poets specially, and of all poetical and artistic natures, as Wordsworth has it, 'to enjoy what others understand.' But there can be no enjoyment of any good which is not present; and so we may certainly say it is the privilege of poetical natures to be and to feel what philosophers prove ought to be and to be felt; and more than this, that a great poet-a Homer, a Shakespeare, a Burns, or a Scott (for no doubt there are sickly and senseless rhymers of whom the same cannot be said)-is a much safer and more reliable thermometer and barometer of a salubrious human atmosphere than a great metaphysician. For a great poet, by the breadth and depth of his sympathy, is inclusive of all things beautiful and sublime, exclusive of none; whereas a metaphysician— besides the danger of trying to leap out of his skin, which is always near-is apt, as Professor Ferrier well remarks, to leave some element out of the account which does not exactly fit into his system, and so he stands forth to the world like a bright sun with a big segment cut out of one side, or a fair woman squinting with one eye, which is but ill compensated for by the transcendent brilliance of the other. In an age so deeply stirred as the present with all sorts of questions, that probe the very roots of all existing habits of thought and time-hallowed institutions, it could not be but that poetry and literature generally should be more or less infected with that sort of conscious and formal metaphysics from which we consider it rather the privilege of Homer and Walter Scott to have been free. All this flirtation and tentative matchmaking between metaphysics and literature must be looked upon as a necessary growth of the age; and, if in some cases leading to strange discords and discomforts, not therefore by any means to be condemned wholesale. Literature, which, as distinguished from science, is the cunningly harmonised voice of humanity in reference to all things universally known, can exclude nothing from its sphere; and the union of contraries and apparent incompatibilities is just the grand function and the great glory of the highest minds. In Plato the ancient world saw a great philosopher draped in the vestments of a great poet, such as the ancient world saw but that once; and in Goethe the modern world admires a wonderful creature, in whom the impassioned imagination and the subtle sensibility of the poet shake hands with the profound speculation of the philosopher and the nice observation of the man of science, after a fashion to which even the rich intellectual records of classical Athens present no parallel. All this is true; but great combinations are only possible to the greatest minds; and upon the whole I think it were better, if only to avoid too much of a strong seasoning, which to many palates tastes very much like a drug, that this most recent alliance between metaphysics and minstrelsy should not go farther for the present. ought to be borne in mind that It poetry, like religion, misses the principal mark of its aim if it is not popular; and there can be no question that a transcendental desire, whether to fly into the uppermost heaven or to gauge the deepest hell, has rather a tendency to make a man obscure for the generality of earth-treading mortals. A good poem, it seems to me, rather, should be like a good wife A creature not too bright or good For human nature's daily food. At least let us have some poetry of this kind, like Chaucer and Burns and Scott. Let poets, made as they are, like other mortals, of flesh and blood, not indulge too freely in the high-strung luxury of spinning transcendental cobwebs even out of sunbeams. So much for literature. As for science, as it is by its essential nature possessed of a systematised consciousness of its own ideas, it must either remain destitute of ultimate principles or borrow them from metaphysics. The very definition of science is to know. The exercise of the cognitive faculty in a certain definite sphere is the proper domain of science; speculation does not come within its jurisdiction; and the moment it attempts to fix the boundary between the knowable and the unknowable it becomes metaphysics. Accordingly, we find in fact that scientific men are divided into two distinct classes: those who, confining themselves to their own proper sphere of knowing, are content to analyse and generalise the observed facts, and to tabulate the results; and those who mingle those results with certain theories and speculations which are either metaphysics or a temporary substitute for them. Take meteorology, for instance, the science of the weather and atmospheric changes. Such a science, though prosecuted on the largest scale, and crowned with the most important practical results, |