as the region where all the divergent streams of thought had their source and watershed.

Two traits were very marked in Appleton: his perfect fairness in argument, and his tendency to postpone details and consequences to the establishment (or refutation) of the principles which governed them; this last a trait by no means universal in Englishmen. So that, being agreed, as I have already remarked, on so much of the preliminaries, we generally found ourselves joining battle on Hegelianism, of which Appleton was an ardent disciple.

Then, there was a courtesy and a gentleness about his whole manner of arguing, which rendered a discussion with him a real pleasure. He would try to see your position in its best light and its strongest points, and do full justice to it. Then he would state his own case in the same way. I speak of cases where he was arguing for victory. The laws of fairness in discussion are different according as you are arguing for victory, or for eliciting truth by a common effort. In the latter case you are bound, in the former you are not, to state for the common benefit whatever difficulties may occur to you as important, against the view which you are maintaining. Appleton's fairness and courtesy, combined with what I shall presently notice, his subtlety, made him a powerful advocate. He had the rare art of persuading by argument. He was a born diplomatist, in the true and honourable sense of the word.

Another of his prominent traits was one which, it sometimes occurred to me, might be a source of his Hegelianism, I mean his generally sanguine temperament. If an idea was at once consistent, tenable, and desirable, then, to him it seemed that it could lack no condition of realization. Sooner or later it must take its place among actual facts.

Add to this sanguine temperament an artist-like delight in elegance and congruity, in the constructions of thought as well as in æsthetics proper; add, further, another trait not very usual in Englishmen, nor perhaps anywhere, at least in a high degree, I mean subtlety of intellect as distinguished from acuteness; that is to say, a fineness and keenness of the perceptive as distinguished from the discursive powers; and you have, it seems to me, a character predisposed for Hegelianism, if other circumstances favour.

Circumstances did favour, at Oxford, in Appleton's time. There was and still is going on there a series of events, which

repeats on a small scale what has already happened on a larger theatre, in the history of philosophy itself. On the larger theatre, we have the sequence of Hume's eighteenth century naturalism, Kant's criticism, Hegel's absolutism. On the smaller, we have the dominance of Mill's or nineteenth century naturalism, inaugurated with the University Reform of 1851; then the Kantian re-action, led by the late Dean Mansel; then the Hegelianism, which still continues. Of course I

speak only of the Oxford world which is affected by such topics. Theological Oxford, scientific Oxford, classical Oxford, æsthetic Oxford, and so on, are different matters, though of course not unconnected.

Appleton belonged to the Hegelian development. I well remember the vividness with which he pictured, in one of our conversations, his weariness of that dreary method of "pigeonholing everything," which, by some imaginative process of his own, he identified with the Aristotelian logic, and the philosophies which are based upon it; not seeing that, though any system whatever may be frozen into formalities by incompetent expounders, yet, of all systems that have ever been promulgated, none so lends itself to such an ice-bound state as the Hegelian; a system in which all explanations, all theories, in every branch of knowledge, consist of giving the exact position of the subject in hand relatively to its neighbours, placing it in its precise niche in the particular "stage of development" to which it belongs in the great thought-process. But Appleton had eyes only for the life and motion of that process. To him the Hegelian logic revived what the Aristotelian stifled, the life and freedom of the universe. No dead abstractions, but a concrete idea developing endless articulations, matter and form, in one living union governed by thought. No logic but this could be commensurate to the boundless variety, the unfettered energy of existence.

I used sometimes to tell him (sure that he would not misconstrue me), that, with all his subtlety, he seemed to me to lack the one essential condition of philosophy-a determined spirit of analysis. He courted philosophy for what it could give (I do not mean its temporalities)-for the freedom and amplitude of its outlook, the basis it afforded for intellectual activity in all directions, the intellectual dignity it lent to culture, in short as an adornment and instrument of the higher life. Perhaps he might with some plausibility have replied, that to do otherwise was to make philosophy itself a

"pigeon-hole." But he did not accept my criticism. It was his continual regret that his multifarious engagements, especially as editor of the Academy, prevented his devoting his time more uninterruptedly to philosophical study, as he always hoped, some day or other, to be able to do; a wish unhappily not destined in this world to be fulfilled.

The bearing of philosophy on religion was one of its fruits in which he was most deeply interested. He had no sympathy with those who, from mistaking the deeply seated character of those feelings and cravings of human nature, which have never yet been satisfied without some form of theological creed touching the invisible world, and from thus misreading the facts of the case, are led on first to identify religion with creed, and then to consider creeds either as the mere guesses of antiquated science, or as the arbitrary creations of a self-indulgent fancy. Hegelianism is in no sense open to this reproach. It is a philosophy eminently compatible with religious faith in unseen realities, and performs in this respect all that religion can legitimately demand at the hands of philosophy (supposing philosophy has the power), namely, that it should secure for it a ground, in the unseen world, whereon its anchor can fasten, and hold for it, so to speak, against all comers, the intellectual right to believe.

I speak mainly from the recollection of a long talk with Appleton, in later years, but the exact date of which I cannot recall, on the subject of a future life, and the mutual recognition of friends therein. He strongly maintained our logical as well as moral right to believe, and not merely to wish, the affirmative of both points; though admitting the danger there was, and the consequent necessity of being on our guard, lest we confounded a belief, obtained as these are on the ground of a moral prompting, with a belief of facts which are in no way motived by desire and will, such as are the data and conclusions of science. A belief, which is a hope matured, cannot be inspired in others except by implanting the hope which is its seed. To teach it as if it were a fact of science, to teach it dogmatically as science is taught, is superstition. This is the difference between the two kinds of belief which it is important to observe, without giving up the right to believe in things sincerely hoped for and morally approved; the mainteLance of which right was the object of Appleton's earnest contention in the conversation which I am recording. He refused to admit that man's hopes, and if his hopes then also

his beliefs, either could be or ought to be confined within the limits of his merely scientific knowledge; that his reason should consent, as if mesmerized, to imagine herself a convinced and hopeless prisoner in the dark cavern of Plato's allegory.

I remember that the conversation contributed not a little to clear my own conceptions, at any rate, of these matters, as well as to strengthen my conviction of the reality of the unseen. On such talks it is a pleasure to look back, mixed though it be with the inevitable regret that they are to be enjoyed no more.

From Robinson Ellis, M.A., Senior Fellow of Trinity

College, Oxford.

My first introduction to Appleton was in 1860. In the October Term of that year, and the Spring Term of 1861, he read with me for Moderations, and, during the remainder of his undergraduate course, I had frequent opportunities of seeing and talking with him. He was at all times an interesting companion; though a hard reader, he was never so absorbed in books as not to be keenly alive to all that went on about him. Moreover, he was by nature an innovator, and as it was his fortune to be at a College which was supposed to be strongly opposed to innovation, he was rarely in want of some fresh grievance, real or imaginary. At such times, he would project schemes of reform which were amusing from their hopelessness. He obtained a second class in the final schools in 1863, having before this time succeeded to a Fellowship at his College. Thenceforth, throughout the time that we were at Oxford together, Appleton never lost sight of me. I was at that time working at my edition of Catullus, and he was always interested in hearing and talking about it. Meanwhile, his own studies, as I learnt from him, had taken a new course; he was devoting himself to modern languages and history. Not that he ever gave up his philosophical reading; philosophy was indeed the subject in which his chief interest lay, and I remember his subsequently interrupting the laborious routine, which his editorship of the Academy imposed upon him, to devote a month to the assiduous perusal of Hegel with a friend at Brighton.1

1

Namely, in the autumn of 1872, with Dr. Arnold Ruge, formerly Professor of the Hegelian Philosophy at the University of Halle, Editor of the Hallische Jahrbücher, and Member for Breslau in the First German Parliament at Frankfurt.-J. H. A.

From 1866 to 1869 I had few opportunities of meeting Appleton, already well-known at Oxford as an uncompromising reformer. But in the latter year the Academy was projected, and I was asked to become a contributor. Those who remember the Academy at its first starting, will not deny that it set up, and to a great degree fulfilled, a really high ideal. The Reviews were not only written by men of the highest eminence in their several departments, but with special attention to completeness and accuracy. The principle of signed articles made negligence impossible, and gave a significance to even short communications. None who knew the character of Appleton can doubt that the design, as well as the successful execution of the design were mainly, if not wholly, due to him.

At the close of 1869, I was elected Professor of Latin at University College, London. Appleton was one of the first to congratulate me on the appointment, and, from that time till my resignation of the chair in 1876, was in frequent communication with me. Partly through this connection, partly through the Savile Club, he established a tolerably wide acquaintance with the Professors of University College: and that Institution has ever since made the Academy one of its chief advertising mediums, to say nothing of the contributions which members of the professional staff of the College have added to its pages.

It was in 1870, that the question of reforming the pronunciation of Latin was started by the conference of schoolmasters. The question was taken up by the philological societies of Oxford and Cambridge, and the result was the formation of a syllabus drawn up by Professor Munro and Professor E. Palmer. My intimacy with Professor Key, a scholar at all times profoundly interested in every point of Latin philology, and through him with Mr. Roby and Mr. A. J. Ellis, would have sufficed to make the question one of special interest to me, if I had not already been attracted to it by the great work of Corssen. Hence, when Appleton opened the pages of the Academy to a discussion on the pronunciation of c, in Latin, between Max Müller and Munro, I felt that I could not remain a mere spectator, and contributed to the controversy an article on the pronunciation of v. An animated discussion ensued, which, if it did not settle the question, aroused public attention not only in England, but America. Soon after, I obtained the consent of University College to the introduction