the acceptance of miracles and on other chief phases
of our historical development, Mr. Lecky has laid himself open to
considerable criticism. The chapters on the "Miracles of the Church,"
the aesthetic, scientific, and moral development of Rationalism, the
Secularization of Politics, and the Industrial History of Rationalism,
embrace a wide range of diligently gathered facts; but they are nowhere
illuminated by a sufficiently clear conception and statement of the
agencies at work, or the mode of their action, in the gradual
modification of opinion and of life. The writer frequently impresses us
as being in a state of hesitation concerning his own standing-point,
which may form a desirable stage in private meditation but not in
published exposition. Certain epochs in theoretic conception, certain
considerations, which should be fundamental to his survey, are introduced
quite incidentally in a sentence or two, or in a note which seems to be
an afterthought. Great writers and their ideas are touched upon too
slightly and with too little discrimination, and important theories are
sometimes characterized with a rashness which conscientious revision will
correct. There is a fatiguing use of vague or shifting phrases, such as
"modern civilization," "spirit of the age," "tone of thought,"
"intellectual type of the age," "bias of the imagination," "habits of
religious thought," unbalanced by any precise definition; and the spirit
of rationalism is sometimes treated of as if it lay outside the specific
mental activities of which it is a generalized expression. Mr. Curdle's
famous definition of the dramatic unities as "a sort of a general
oneness," is not totally false; but such luminousness as it has could
only be perceived by those who already knew what the unities were. Mr.
Lecky has the advantage of being strongly impressed with the great part
played by the emotions in the formation of opinion, and with the high
complexity of the causes at work in social evolution; but he frequently
writes as if he had never yet distinguished between the complexity of the
conditions that produce prevalent states of mind and the inability of
particular minds to give distinct reasons for the preferences or
persuasions produced by those states. In brief, he does not
discriminate, or does not help his reader to discriminate, between
objective complexity and subjective confusion. But the most
muddle-headed gentleman who represents the spir