movement toward being, in which alone is beatitude; all movement in the moral direction from God is a movement away from being toward no-being, therefore toward evil. Even the omnipotence of God cannot make it otherwise, because he cannot provide for beatitude without being, or create existences that shall have being in themselves, or not have their being in him, in his own necessary, eternal, and immutable being. Hence his law, imposing upon us the duty of returning to him as our end, imposes upon us no obligation but that of seeking our real beatitude where, and only where, it can be found. Hence the law of God is good, and philosophy itself requires us to say with the Psalmist, "The law of the Lord is perfect, converting souls; the testimony of the Lord is sure, making wise the simple. The precepts of the Lord are right, giving joy to hearts; the commandment of the Lord is lightsome, giving light to the eyes." [Ps. xviii., 8, 9.] God is the fulness of beatitude, because the fulness of being, and it is impossible for him to command us in his law what is not for our good, because it is impossible for him to command what is repugnant to his own nature and essence. His law, then, is the expres sion toward us of his love, not his wrath, and is our friend, not our enemy. Therefore, the good love the law and joy to do the will of God. In keeping his commandments there is joy, and in doing his will there is peace.

We may now understand the question of evil. Evil is no positive being or existence; it is simply privative. There is, then, and can be no physical evil, for all positive physical existence is good, inasmuch as it participates through the creative act in being. The only sort of evil that can be conceived is moral evil, and that is not a positive object or quality of the will, any more than falsehood is a positive object or quality of the understanding. It has pleased God to create men free moral agents, or with free will, which enables them to act not merely ad finem, but also propter finem. Free will implies freedom of election, or power of choice. Now, being created thus free, we may choose or will to act for God, that is, to return to him as our chosen Final Cause, and if so, we move morally toward good, and there is and can be no evil for us. Nothing can harm us, or do us the least conceivable injury; pain, suffering, trials, afflictions, temptations, however grievous while they last, are no evils, and are simply effective means to help us on in our march toward our final beatitude. We

may, also, choose not to act for God as our Final Cause, to disregard his law, and to turn, as it were, our backs upon him, and depart from him. We then depart from being, and turn our faces and march toward no-being, towardnothing. The evil is not, then, in something positively inflicted on us, but in the rejection of the positive, and seeking our good where it is not, and in what is not. We, then, under the moral point of view, precipitate ourselves into the abyss of infinite Want, where there is no bread for our hunger, no water for our thirst. The soul participating as creature in being, and as creature having its being not in itself, has necessarily wants and desires, all good, since they spring from being, which only being can fill up or satisfy. Consequently, when it takes its portion of goods, turns its back on God, and departs for a far country, it leaves behind all that could satisfy its inherent desires, its internal wants, while its wants and desires remain in full force. The soul then suffers the rage, the torture, the agony of wants unfilled, desires unsatisfied. What it suffers is not something positive, but the want or privation of something positive. As heaven or beatitude is in the satisfaction or replenishment of the soul with Being, so hell, its opposite, the culmination of evil, the torments of the damned, we may suppose to consist not in something positive inflicted, but in the absence of this replenishment, with the consciousness of having forfeited it,-in the everlasting unappeasement of our inherent desires, in the everlasting torture of wants unfilled.

When

As evil is privative, it is never any thing positively willed, and we never do and never can will evil simply for the sake of evil. All sin implies malice, but malice, evil will, as we say, does not imply the willing of evil for the sake of evil. All evil is in carentia of some sort. the soul turns away from God as its Final Cause, it does not mean to reject good, but means to find it in creatures, or in itself, ignorant, or not reflecting, that it cannot find it. there. In not willing God as our good, we still will to fill up our wants, to appease our desires, therefore will beatitude. But elsewhere than in God our beatitude is not, for besides him there are only his creatures, and they have. being only in him, none in themselves. The evil is not in our being created with wants and desires that only being can satisfy, for these spring from the high destiny of our nature, but in not seeking their satisfaction, where, and

only where, it can be found. But even this is not the result of pure malice, but of the ignorance which mistakes the creature for the creator, or the weakness that shrinks from the effort necessary to forego a present, temporary, and relative good, for the real and eternal good.

Other questions, and important questions, too, there are, in the first part of morals, but, as we are not writing a treatise of moral philosophy, we are not required here to solve them. If we mistake not, they are all solvable by the aid of the principles and method we have briefly and feebly defended in modification of the principles and doctrines set forth by our author. At any rate, it is time to bring our review of the first chapter of his Philosophical Introduction to a close. We may, perhaps, return to his volume hereafter, and offer some further remarks, for we consider his publication, however much we may differ with him, an event in our English-speaking world. It can hardly fail to provoke thought, and compel our frivolous public to betake themselves to graver studies, and profounder investigations. No man, probably, will be found, to whom his work will prove less satisfactory than to ourselves; yet we can assure him that we have not only a high esteem for him personally, but for his work, which, under many points of view, we regard as a great work, marked at times by profound, frequently by ingenious, and always by independent and manly thought.

ART. II-1. Discussions on Philosophy and Literature, Education and University Reform, by SIR WILLIAM HAMILTON, Bart. New York. Harper and Brothers, 1860.

2. The Catholic University Gazette. 1854-55. Dublin. James Duffy.

FIFTY years ago, a young student of Baliol College presented himself to be examined for his academic degrees before the authorities of Oxford University, England. The vastness of his erudition, his perfect acquaintance with all ancient and modern literature, the incredible extent to which he had carried his researches in philosophy and scholastic theology, astounded his examiners. Aristotle, Plato, Proclus, Plotinus, and all the writers of the Alexandrian school; Themistius, Ammonius, Simplicius, Philoponus, Averroes, Avicenna, the most philosophical of the Latin Fathers and writers, particularly

St. Augustine; St. Thomas Aquinas, John Duns Scotus, and all the great scholastics of the Middle Ages; the most out-of-the-way writers of the Revival,-all these he had read and studied, and mastered before he was twenty-five. "In fourteen of the books on Greek philosophy, which he brought up for examination," says one who was present at this splendid academic display, "he was not questioned, the greater part of them being declared by the master too abstrusely metaphysical for examination." His triumph was complete. In 1812 he left Oxford, and became a member of the Scottish bar in Edinburgh. His mighty intellect could not brook the limits of one profession. Phrenology, medicine, anatomy, general literature, above all, mental and moral philosophy were the combined theatre of his researches. He struck a death-blow at the fallacies of George Combe, the phrenologist, and the cloudy nonsense of the German Transcendentalists, Fichte, Hegel, and Schelling, and did for philosophy what no man achieved before or since, with the exception, perhaps, of the Italian Gioberti. His was one of the most metaphysical minds that have adorned the annals of modern philosophy. His essays on Education, published originally in the Edinburgh Review, created a deep sensation throughout Great Britain, France, and Germany. His discussions on the merits and defects of the English Universities, his sketches of the history of education, and the comparative value of different sysreplete with interesting suggestions, and constitute an invaluable treasure for the college professor. The individual in question was Sir William Hamilton, a native of Glasgow, Scotland. He was born in 1788, and died in May, 1856, Professor of Logic and Metaphysics in the University of the Scottish capital.

tems, are

We propose in our present article to develop, with occasional references to Sir William's essays on Collegiate and University Reform, some of the remarks made in the July number of the Review, on Catholic Education in the United States.

God wishes and commands man to use, and, by using, to improve the gifts of mind and body with which he has endowed him. The distribution of talents varies with individuals; to some he gives more, to others, less; but from all he expects payment at the great accounting-day, of principal and interest. The man who neglects to exercise his body to such a degree, at least, as to enable it to act as the ready and subservient instrument of the rational soul, sins against the order of Providence; he leaves one of his talents unemployed. We do not advocate "muscular Christianity;" we do not Charles Kingsley's novels, or throw our cap in the air for the two world-champions of the manly art of self-defence. Still the truth stands that man is bound by the law of nature and of nature's God to educate his body, that is, so to develop or restrain its powers, its cravings, and aversions as to make it the faithful servant of the VOL. II-No. I.

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imperial soul. But this soul, too, needs education. It is an instrument made for the sublimest of purposes, but an instrument blunt and unpolished when first united to the body to form man's individuality. God imposes on us the task of brightening it, of giving it a keen, trenchant edge, and of acquiring ease and gracefulness in its use. The fulfilment of this duty is called the education of the soul. It is a duty incumbent on all alike, the noble and the commoner, the rich and the poor,-for we are all bound to know truth and love goodness. Truth we cannot know, and goodness we cannot love, if mind and heart remain uneducated. The Catechism tells us that we are created to know God and to love him, and, therefore, to exercise our intellect and will, to educate them with reference to God as their object. Ignorance is a privation, a defect; but error, says St. Thomas, is an act superadded to ignorance. Error is the act of a mind in a state of ignorance, the passing of a judgment on an object not sufficiently known to warrant that judgment. Ignorance, as an occasion, a proximate cause of error, is always an evil, sometimes a moral evil or sin. It is the province of education to destroy error by striking at ignorance,-its root. The mind is essentially united, at the moment of its creation, with the objective truth; education strengthens and developes that union; it weaves numerous and beautiful links between the soul and the outward world. The duty of educating the mind to a higher or lower pitch of intellectual excellence varies with man's circumstances of wealth, position in society, natural tastes, past habits, and future prospects. The duty always exists and always urges, in one degree or other. The Church recognizes it, and directs the attention of her children to it. She founds schools, and inculcates by word and example the necessity of education for the formation of a genuine Christian character. The State recognizes it, and she, too, founds schools; for the history of the world teaches that education is necessary for the formation of public-spirited, loyal-hearted citizens. Ignorance breeds factions and rebellions, murder and anarchy; it is equally ready to head a mob or bow its neck beneath the heels of the tyrant. We find fault with neither Church nor State for taking education under its protection, because the interests of civil and ecclesiastical society are here equally concerned with those of the individual and the family. In a country where thought and speech are free, education is more imperatively necessary. Where falsehood has a fair field, truth demands one also. Nor do we repine at a state of things in which both have the same external advantages, in which each has to depend on its own innate strength. Give truth eibow-room and fair play, and the laurel wreath will soon grace her modest and queenly brow. But if her champions are boors or socialists, they pinion her arms and deliver her over blindfolded to the smitings of falsehood's impious hand. There is no censorship of the press for American republicans. There is corruption in our government, cor