equal acceptance of the authority of reason.
In a couple of articles in the 'Nineteenth Century' (October 1887 and
January 1888), he argued with his old vigour that Mr. Mivart was in fact
proposing to put a match in a powder barrel and expect half to explode
and the other half to remain unaffected. This was his last encounter
upon the old question of authority. In the same year (April and May
1888) he wrote two articles upon a book by which he was singularly
interested, Professor Max Mueller's 'Science of Thought'; he expounds
Professor Max Mueller's philology in the tone of an ardent disciple, but
makes his own application to philosophy. I do not suppose that the
teacher would accept all the deductions of his follower. Fitzjames, in
fact, found in the 'Science of Thought' a scientific exposition of the
nominalism which he had more or less consciously accepted from Hobbes or
Horne Tooke. Max Mueller, he says, in a letter, has been knocking out the
bottom of all speculative theology and philosophy. Thought and language,
as he understands his teacher to maintain, are identical. Now language
is made up of about 120 roots combined in various ways. The words
supposed to express more abstract conceptions, some of them highly
important in theology, are mere metaphors founded upon previous
metaphors, twisted and changed in meaning from century to century.
Nothing remains but an almost absolute scepticism, for on such terms no
certainty can be obtained. In a letter he states that the only problems
which we can really solve are those of space and number; that even
astronomy involves assumptions to which there are 'unanswerable
objections'; that what is loosely called science, Darwinism, for
example, is 'dubious in the extreme'; that theology and politics are so
conjectural as to be practically worthless; and judicial and historical
evidence little more than a makeshift. In short, his doctrine is
'scepticism directed more particularly against modern science and
philosophy.' I do not take these hasty utterances as expressing a
settled state of opinion. I only quote them as vehement expressions of
an instinctive tendency. His strong conviction of the fallacies and
immoralities of the old theological dogmatism was combined with an
equally strong conviction of the necessity of some embodiment of the
religious instincts and of the impotence of the scientific dogmatism to
supply it. He therefore was led to a peculiar version of the not