easily be done, hundreds and thousands of parents throughout the country would be to initiate perhaps the most important reform movement that our century has witnessed.
A CRITIC CRITICISED.
A few months ago there appeared in France a French translation of Mr. Balfour's work on The Foundations of Belief, with an introduction by the well known editor of the Revue des Deux Mondes, M. Ferdinand Brunetière. In this introduction M. Brunetière took occasion to repeat many of the arguments already used by him in his article of a year or so ago on The Bankruptcy of Science. He was greatly pleased to think that Mr. Balfour had shown that science could not lay claim to any greater certainty than theology, and he quoted with much satisfaction Mr. Benjamin Kidd's disparagements of the reasoning faculty and exaltation of the irrational or suprarational as the source of everything good and excellent in human society and in the history of the race. It is a little wonderful that men of the general intelligence of M. Brunetière and Mr. Kidd do not recognize the futility of such intellectual exercitations as those in which they indulge; but the former of these gentlemen can at least see how his attitude strikes a common-sense observer in a very sprightly article published in La Nouvelle Revue of the 15th of January last.
The writer, M. Gustave Téry, begins by observing that M. Brunetière only a few years ago was one of the most severely scientific writers of the time. In physical science he was an evolutionist and in literary criticism as rigid and inflexible as Sarah Battle over her game of whist. One fine day he turned round on evolution, and shortly afterward he declared war on science. Now there is no knowing where to find him. He is here, there, and everywhere, showing different colors at different angles, and taking pride in nothing so much as an infinite flexibility of mind and conviction. His present condition seems traceable in the main to an interview he had a couple of years ago with the Pope, who showed him all the kingdoms of the world in a moment of time, and, if he did not convert him outright to Catholic orthodoxy, filled him with a holy zeal for persuading the world that science is the one thing least worthy of trust. In pursuance of this mission he has charged science with having undertaken to "explain the universe" and with having egregiously and shamefully failed to do so. But, as M. Téry says in the article before us: "What savant ever claimed to explain Nature in the ontological sense that is to say, to reveal the nature of Being? All that science undertakes is to connect phenomena with one another, to relate them to their causes and formulate their laws." If, he further observes, M. Brunetière will only make this elementary distinction, he will not be so scandalized as he appears to be at the reply attributed to Laplace when some one—the pious Napoleon Bonaparte, was it not?—asked him what place God occupied in his speculations. The reply was that he did not need that hypothesis, by which he meant that a speculation as to a first cause had no place in a series of inquiries relating to secondary causes.
One of the amiable remarks of M. Brunetière apropos of reason is that while it is easy enough to see the ruins it has wrought, it is by no means so easy to see what it has constructed. This in face of the fact that day by day all the solid and enduring work in the world is done by the aid of reason and in accordance
