by knowledge and ignorance, and, if received at all, it must be received by a profound and unreasoning faith.

6

M. Comte has been compared to Bacon and Descartes,-to the profoundest thinkers and greatest reformers of science. We have not the smallest doubt that the rhapsodical eulogies which a few disciples have indulged in will soon be felt to have been most ludicrously misplaced. M. Comte's enormous assumptions, and the manner in which he travesties all history to make them seem plausible, will go far to determine his true place in philosophy; it will also be seen, on a due estimate, how little there is in what he has written to justify the supposition that he has himself enlarged, or has given man a 'method' by which his successors may enlarge the domain of science. We find, indeed, an eternal iteration of certain positions in different forms; but supposing them ever so true, (and while some are true, not to say truistical, others are as utterly false,) we see not how they can give us a new method. A thousand times we hear that M. Comte has 'inaugurated the true hierarchy of the sciences,' -that he has co-ordinated physical and moral science,'-that he has constituted the real scientific system'-the encyclopaedic series' of the sciences,-that he has laid the foundation of the 'real encyclopædic culture and development' of the sciences; that he has taught us that in the development both of society and the individual there are of necessity three stages-the 'theological,' 'metaphysical,' and 'positive;-that scientific discovery must proceed from the more simple and general to the more complex special phenomena;-that the phenomena of 'biology and sociology are more complicated than those of chemistry, and those of chemistry than mechanics,' &c. &c. &c., all which we are told over and over again in an immensity of cloudy verbiage; yet granting for the sake of argument that it is all true, what new powers that the Baconian did not previously possess, does it give us? What instrument or method, different from and superior to that by which science was before prosecuted, does it present us with? To us, we confess, this iteration is, as Burke says, 'much going in a scanty space; a postilion's travels-miles enough to circle the globe in one short stage;-an everlasting repetition of half a dozen barren formulæ. If it be said that the great benefit of the Positive philosophy is that it will induce man to have done with seeking or speculating about 'causes,' and to confine himself solely to phenomena,' it may be well questioned whether any philosophy will ever do that; if it be said that it will have this effect so far as to prevent the prejudices and preconceptions of the theological stage from summarily dealing with the problems of science, the answer is, that that lesson had

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been pretty well learned, without abolishing theology altogether, long before Comte was born; learned by thousands who had done far more for science than he ever did, and without surrendering theology' at all. Comte's promises of the progress of science in all directions, in virtue of the prosecution of his method,' are, we know, magnificent; but we cannot see that the inductive philosophy was not, and is not, in secure possession of everything. that is really conducive to the progress of discovery, independently of M. Comte's voluminous expositions. His promises are magnificent; but if they be verified, we cannot see that it will be in virtue of any new organum which M. Comte has put into men's hands. Magnificent, however, as are occasionally M. Comte's promises, we must say in justice to him he is hardly so bold as some of his followers in this country. Little as we expect that men will gain that measure of prevision' which even he ventures to promise us, he yet shrinks from the more audacious hopes which he seems to have inspired in some on this side the Channel, who are for exercising a prevision' which is to make them masters of destiny, and convert science, as a great secularist says, into the 'providence of man.' In this very book, though M. Comte expresses himself boldly enough of the progress of humanity, yet he expressly admits that as we proceed to biology and sociology, and generally to the sciences which have to deal with special phenomena, those phenomena become so complicated that we can never hope to calculate them in any given case so as to have prevision. Empirical rule is all that he encourages us to hope for; meteorology and geology he does not allow to be sciences at all.

Let us hear him; for at this crisis in the history of speculation in our own country it is not without instruction to find even the great manufacturer of the Grand Etre confessing that he calls us to worship a Deity who, like each one of us, does not know, in the spheres which most concern happiness, in the phenomena of biology, sociology, meteorology, what a day or an hour shall bring forth; so complicated are the conditions of events submitted to our calculus, so infinite the variables that enter them, so circuitously and remotely may they tend to produce one another, and so dependent may be the least on the greatest, and the greatest on the least.

'The various branches into which the study of the world or of man is, for practical need, divided, reveal to us an increasing number of different laws. These laws will never be susceptible of reduction, the one under the other, spite of the frivolous hopes inspired at first by our discovery of the law of planetary gravitation. These laws are for the most part, still unknown; many must ever remain so.'—p. 161.

In conclusion, we would observe that if the 'previsions' of science which M. Comte promises us be of the same quality with his own previsions' of the speedy triumphs of the Positive Religion, they will not be worth much to the world. At the same time, we frankly concede that in indulging them M. Comte has proceeded in the very spirit of his own method, and has completely ignored all- Causes!'

ART. VI.-(1.) The History of Herodotus. A new English Version. Edited with copious Notes and Appendices, illustrating the History and Geography of Herodotus, from the most recent sources of information; and embodying the chief results, Historical and Ethnographical, which have been obtained in the progress of Cuneiform and Hieroglyphical Discovery. By GEORGE RAWLINSON, M.A., late Fellow and Tutor of Exeter College, Oxford, assisted by Colonel Sir H. RAWLINSON, K.C.B., and Sir J. G. WILKINSON, F.R.S. Vols I. and II. London: Murray. (2.) Herodotus; with a Commentary, by JOSEPH WILLIAMS BLAKESLEY, B.D., late Fellow and Tutor of Trinity College, Cambridge. Two Vols. London: Whittaker and Co. 1854.

1858.

THERE is, perhaps, no other Greek author who wins a larger measure of our sympathy than Herodotus. This is no doubt partly to be accounted for by the nature of the work he has undertaken, and which, in an age ignorant of 'style,' allowed him to write as he would have talked, freely and colloquially. The author of the Iliad and Odyssey has little room to exhibit himself: his canvas is too full of gods and of heroes. And the great dramatic poets of Greece, as they stalk by in mask, pall, and cothurnus, give us but few glimpses of their every-day selves beneath the festival attire.

But still less approachable is the writer whose name is oftenest linked with that of Herodotus, as for some time his contemporary, and who takes up the thread of Grecian story where it was dropped by his immediate predecessor. Few compositions are so severe as the great work of Thucydides. According to a pleasant story in Lucian, which, we are inclined to think with Mr. Rawlinson, may have a basis of fact, Thucydides, when a lad, had been moved to tears at some reading' of the elder historian. There is little to suggest the invention of such a story in what he has himself produced. Thucydides wrote for the benefit of statesmen and students of the 'philosophy of history,' and speaks slightingly

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447 of some 'chroniclers, who were more anxious to amuse their readers than to adhere to the truth: not without a reference to Herodotus, probably. He had at least learned more command of his feelings when he began to write for himself. Hardly does any tale of wickedness and cruelty, or thrilling crisis of escape, elicit from him the warm sympathetic word which should make us feel him to be a man as well as a philosopher. His history makes about the same impression upon us as his well-known stately bust. It is cold, self-contained, and emotionless.

In Herodotus, on the contrary, we feel that we have a real human companion, and a frank and genial one. By degrees we seem almost to know him as a friend. We are willing that he should sit with us by the hour, and have no fear of being tired out with his spontaneous talk, or inexhaustible flow of anecdote. He makes no secret to us of his judgments or his feelings. He lets us see how everything that concerns his fellow-men has an interest for him. If it comes in his way, he will as soon tell of a babe's smile, of the beauty of a woman, of the passing tears of a king, as of battles and campaigns and empires. The old man has his foibles, no doubt: enlightened men call him credulous and superstitious; and there is no denying that he is now and then a little too ready to swallow a marvellous tale; but if that was the reason why his countrymen ridiculed and exiled him, as Mr. Rawlinson thinks, it was certainly more to their own discredit than his. We can imagine few things more pleasant, in the old Hellenic times, than to have shared the company of the good-natured traveller-historian in his quieter days at Thurii, and heard him tell some of those tales which had stirred his more youthful wonder and curiosity.

Perhaps more may be learned of the character of Herodotus than of his outward life. The former is written unmistakeably in his own pages; of the latter we have little more than a few bare facts. We know that he was born at Halicarnassus, in the Dorian part of Asia Minor, about the year 484 B.C.; and the well-known epitaph, which Mr. Rawlinson thinks may be regarded as genuine, tells us that he was buried at Thurii. According to Suidas, he took a prominent part as liberator and tyrannicide in the politics of his native city; but the statement is unsupported, and therefore doubtful. We gather from his own words that his travels extended as far as Babylon and Assyria, Egypt and Cyrene, Thrace and Magna Græcia. The epitaph just before alluded to, tells us further that the displeasure or ridicule, as Mr. Rawlinson translates it-of his fellow-citizens, was the occasion of his abandoning altogether the place of his birth. Athens was then in the height of her glory, before the outbreak of the

Peloponnesian war, and he would be naturally attracted thither. It was there, doubtless, that he made the friendship of the poet Sophocles, who in two curious passages, which cannot well be ascribed to coincidence, has inwrought into his drama materials furnished by the historian. When somewhat over forty, probably, he joined a party of settlers from Athens for Thurii, in Magna Græcia, and with the exception of an occasional excursion to Athens or elsewhere, in that city he appears to have spent the remainder of his days. We are left chiefly to internal evidence, and that of a very inconclusive character, to determine the period at which his travels were undertaken and his history composed, while the date of his death is quite uncertain. The student will find all these points discussed with good sense and sufficient information in Mr. Rawlinson's first chapter.

But there are certain characteristic features of mind and heart which we need no learned research to recognise and appreciate in the Father of History. They unfold themselves to every discerning, congenial reader, and as already observed, they are of such a kind as to win sympathy for the man no less than interest in his subject. Prominent among these is the kindly human feeling which pervades all that he has written. 'It is the spirit of gentle humanity in his bosom,' says Mr. Kenrick, which gives to his history the character of 0os,-that is to say, of sympathy and interest. Nor is it a mere spurious sentimentalism, finding its needful excitement in tales of pathos, but rather the natural expression of a generous heart, and one that has felt the power of that mysterious bond in which the Creator has linked in one all the nations of the earth.' It is this feature, closely related as it is to his beautiful simplicity, which has given such a vitality to his varied narrative. Apart from the sacred Scriptures, perhaps no stories have been so often repeated or had so wide a circulation as his. They are the life of books like Rollin's Ancient History, and come upon us refreshingly in the more scientific pages of Grote. When Goldsmith commenced his Animated Nature, said Dr. Johnson, he will make it as interesting as a fairy tale.' And this is precisely what Herodotus-a somewhat kindred spirit to the author of the Citizen of the World-has done for the periods of history with which he deals. Apart from its historical value, which can scarcely be over-rated, his volume

* See Soph. Ant. 905-912, as compared with Herod. iii. 119, and O. C. 337— 341, with Herod. ii. 35. In the former Antigone gives an over-subtle reason for her devotion to Polynices; to wit, that she might get a new husband or another child to supply the place of a lost one, but as her parents were dead, never another brother. In the latter, Edipus reproaches his sons with the effeminacy of the Egyptians, with whom men do the work of women, and women of men.