and more successful; but their joint help had really availed but little when, on July 16th, 1662, Frederick saw himself compelled (partly by pressure put upon him by his fatherin-law) to dismiss the two generals who-the one from hatred of Austria, the other from love to Elizabethbravely maintained and kept alive a falling cause.

After the bitter step of such a dismissal, Frederick would seem to have begun to suffer from life-weariness. He stood apart, and left his affairs mainly to his sprightly wife, and to the Secretary, Russdorf.

It is impossible in this short essay to narrate all the battles, sieges, fortunes, which occurred in the great war, even in so far as such events may have indirectly affected the fortunes of the Palatine House. Much must necessarily be passed over, and I am compelled to restrict myself to those leading occurrences which were most clearly determinate of the fortunes of Germany, and by consequence of those of Elizabeth Stuart.

H. SCHÜTZ WILSON.

(To be continued.)

MR. RHYS DAVIDS' HIBBERT LECTURES.*

WE

E can hardly be surprised that Mr. Rhys Davids begins his course of interesting and suggestive lectures by declaring that "it would be a hopeless task to attempt in six Lectures, that is to say, in six hours, to give any adequate account of that great movement which has influenced the greater portion of the human race during the lapse of so many centuries." It might perhaps be possible to give a tolerably complete sketch of Buddhism in a volume of the same size as the one before us; but the result would be a mere sketch more suited to a handbook on the history of religion than to a course of lectures. For a lecturer must never forget that he has to rouse the interest of his hearers in his subject; nor can he find any more efficient means of doing so than the constant reference to points of resemblance and difference between the ideas with which they are already familiar and those which they are to meet with on the comparatively strange field of his special investigations. The lecturer, therefore, is at liberty, or rather is compelled, to make a selection from the rich accumulations of his knowledge, and to go to work eclectically, without, however, considering himself absolved from the necessity of following a definite plan.

The plan which Mr. Rhys Davids has proposed to himself is "to discuss those points in the history of Buddhism

* Lectures on the Origin and Growth of Religion, as Illustrated by Some Points in the History of Indian Buddhism. By T. W. RHYS DAVIDS. (Hibbert Lectures, 1881.) Williams and Norgate.

which appear to throw light on the origin and growth of religious belief," and, further to explain his meaning, he adds, "This means, as I understand it, the origin and growth of religion outside, as well as inside, the circle of the Buddhist beliefs themselves."

The method which the lecturer promises to follow is "the comparative method," especially that which is followed in "comparative philology." In this science, we are told, "we find, firstly, that words in the more modern dialects of any family are derived, as far as possible historically, from words or roots in the older dialects." I am afraid that no one who has not worked at comparative philology" himself will be led to a correct idea of the method in question by these words. The fact is that the philologist, by comparing the facts and phenomena observed in the languages of one family known to him, and by applying certain strict rules which he has derived from his linguistic studies, endeavours to track out the older pre-historic condition of a family of speeches. He endeavours to proceed from the known to the unknown, to fix the degrees of relationship between the several members of the same family of languages, and to prove that at some remote period there was one language, out of which, in the course of time, all these dialects, which appear so different, have grown in natural or, at any rate, in explicable ways. We shall see the important bearing of the distinction here drawn when we come to the Sixth Lecture.

The second mark of "comparative philology," we are told, is that in it "general rules respecting the tendencies of the growth of language, and of vowel and consonantal change, are laid down as being of very general or even sometimes of universal application." It is very questionable whether such general rules with respect to tendencies have much value on the field of comparative philology, even

if they are anything more than hasty generalisations. What does chemistry care for the fact that the elements, as a general rule, have a tendency to combine? On the contrary, it is of supreme importance to her to ascertain the conditions under which the compounds are formed and resolved, the quantitative relations of the respective elements in each compound, and so forth. It is just the same in comparative philology, the results of which, at any rate so far, have been due exclusively to "the investigation of very special laws derived from the observation of phenomena. Possibly the time may come when every one will endorse Mr. Davids' remark:-"It is precisely such general observations which are now, and will increasingly be, the most valuable results of philological research." But in any case he himself admits that the application of the method in question to the study of the development of religions only leads to the discovery of "general tendencies," and, what is more, that we are not to look for anything else, even in the future. "We must not hope to find more than tendencies, to find laws in the scientific sense." The reason why this is so is set forth on p. 10.

We shall perhaps do best, under these circumstances, in taking up, lecture by lecture, a few of the special points on which Mr. Rhys Davids' views appear to us to be open to criticism, rather than attempting any general survey of the subject.

After speaking of those phases of religion which are indicated by the words "animism" and "polytheism," and the connected representations of the soul and the future life, the lecturer pauses at the conception of "transmigration." The same point is treated more fully in the third lecture, where the conclusion is reached (on grounds for which we must refer the reader to the volume itself) "that the pre-Aryan occupants of the valley of the Ganges were

believers in something of the kind, and that the Āryans first derived the principle of the idea from them; but not until long after the Aryans had entered India, and until the conquerors and the conquered had been fused together into one people" (p. 82).

Be our opinions what they may as to the probability of this supposition, it is certain, at any rate, that we have no right a priori to deny that the aborigines exercised any influence upon the Indian Aryans; but we do not know whether they were numerous enough to produce any marked effect upon the mind of the Aryans, any more than we know to which of the three races-Dravidian, Kolarian, or Kirâtan-they belonged. This much, at any rate, would follow from the hypothesis of Mr. Rhys Davids, that the aborigines were not exterminated, nor even very grievously oppressed, as it has been sometimes asserted.

We return to the First Lecture to ascertain the views of Mr. Rhys Davids with reference to Indian monotheism and pantheism. Concerning the latter, we find much which remains, to me at least, even after repeated reading, far from clear-e.g., "And as to the souls of men, though they are condemned to wander for ever and ever from shape to shape, from labour to trouble, their existence is not independent; they are not self-existent, and they can defeat the unlucky action of the God that gave birth to their individuality by certain ceremonies, or a certain kind of knowledge, held, by various opposing schools, to be able to destroy again that individuality by bringing about the return of the spark to the central fire, by the absorption of the human soul in that Great Soul which was supposed to be the only real existence" (p. 20). I am not aware that any school taught that the Salvation (Moksha, Mukti, &c.) could be obtained "by certain ceremonies, or a certain kind of knowledge." The highest good, inseparably associated