and worthlessness are not conclusions of reasoning, but immediate sensations like those of seeing and hearing; and although, like the other senses, they may be mistaken sometimes in the accounts they render to us, the fact of the existence of such feelings at all proves that there is something which corresponds to them.  If there be any such things as “true ideas,” or clear distinct perceptions at all, this of praise and blame is one of them, and according to Spinoza’s own rule we must accept what it involves.  And it involves that somewhere or other the influence of causes ceases to operate, and that some degree of power there is in men of self-determination, by the amount of which, and not by their specific actions, moral merit or demerit is to be measured.  Speculative difficulties remain in abundance.  It will be said in a case, e.g. of moral trial, that there may have been power; but was there power enough to resist the temptation?  If there was, then it was resisted.  If there was not, there was no responsibility.  We must answer again from a practical instinct.  We refuse to allow men to be considered all equally guilty who have committed the same faults; and we insist that their actions must be measured against their opportunities.  But a similar conviction assures us that there is somewhere a point of freedom.  Where that point is, where other influences terminate, and responsibility begins, will always be of intricate and often impossible solution.  But if there be such a point at all, it is fatal to necessitarianism, and man is what he has been hitherto supposed to be—­an exception in the order of nature, with a power not differing in degree but differing in kind from those of other creatures.  Moral life, like all life, is a mystery; and as to dissect the body will not reveal the secret of animation, so with the actions of the moral man.  The spiritual life, which alone gives them meaning and being, glides away before the logical dissecting knife, and leaves it but a corpse to work upon. ____

REYNARD THE FOX

In a recent dissatisfied perusal of Mr. Macaulay’s collected articles, we were especially offended by his curious and undesirable Essay on Machiavelli.  Declining the various solutions which have been offered to explain how a man supposed to be so great could have lent his genius to the doctrine of “the Prince,” he has advanced a hypothesis of his own, which may or may not be true, as an interpretation of Machiavelli’s character, but which, as an exposition of a universal ethical theory, is as detestable as what it is brought forward to explain ...  We will not show Mr. Macaulay the disrespect of supposing that he has unsuccessfully attempted an elaborate piece of irony.  It is possible that he may have been exercising his genius with a paradox, but the subject is not of the sort in which we can patiently permit such exercises.  It is hard work with all of us to keep ourselves straight, even when we see the road with all plainness as it lies out before us; and clever men must be good enough to find something else to amuse themselves with, instead of dusting our eyes with sophistry.