as the professors of legerdemain at our village fairs pull out ribbon after ribbon from their mouths. And not more difficult is it to reduce them back again to their different genera. But though this analysis is highly useful in rendering our knowledge more distinct, it does not really add to it. It does not increase, though it gives us a greater mastery over, the wealth which we before possessed. For forensic purposes, for all the established professions of society, this is sufficient. But for philosophy in its highest sense, as the science of ultimate truths, and therefore scientia scientiarum, this mere analysis of terms is preparative only, though, as a preparative discipline, indispensable. Still less dare a favorable perusal be anticipated from the proselytes of that compendious philosophy, which talking of mind but thinking of brick and mortar, or other images equally abstracted from body, contrives a theory of spirit by nicknaming matter, and in a few hours can qualify its dullest disciples to explain the omne scibile by reducing all things to impressions, ideas, and sensations. say To the The first range of hills that encircle the scanty vale But it is time to tell the truth; though it requires some courage to avow it in an age and country, in which disquisitions on all subjects, not privileged to adopt technical terms or scientific symbols, must be addressed to the PUBLIC. I then, that it is neither possible or necessary for all men, or for many, to be PHILOSOPHERS. There is a philosophic (and inasmuch as it is actualized by an effort of freedom, an artificial) consciousness, which lies beneath, or, (as it were,) behind the spontaneous consciousness natural to all reflecting beings. As the elder Romans distinguished their northern provinces into Cis-Alpine and Trans-Alpine, so may we divide all the objects of human knowledge into those on this side, and those on the other side of the spontaneous consciousness; citra et trans conscientiam communem. The latter is exclusively the domain of PURE philosophy, which is, therefore, properly entitled transcendental, in order to discriminate it at once, both from mere reflection and re-presentation on the one hand, and on the other from those flights of lawless speculation, which, aban-vidual, or an association of wealthy individuals, could bestow doned by all distinct consciousness, because transgressing the bounds and purposes of our intellectual faculties, are justly condemned, as transcendent.* *This distinction between transcendental and transcenden', is observed by our elder divines and philosophers, whenever they express themselves scholastically. Dr. Johnson, indeed, has confounded the two words; but his own authorities do not bear him out. Of this celebrated dictionary, I will ven ture to remark, once for all, that I should suspect the man of a morose disposition, who should speak of it without respect and gratitude, as a most instructive and entertaining book, and hitherto, unfortunately, an indispensable book; but I confess, that I should be surprised at hearing from a philosophic and thorough scholar, any but very qualified praises of it, as a dictionary. I am not now alluding to the number of genuine words omitted; for this is (and, perhaps, to a great extent) true, as Mr. Wakefield has noticed, of our best Greek Lexicons; and this, too, after the successive labors of so many giants in learning. I refer, at present, both to omissions and commissions of a more important nature. What there are, me saltem judice, will be stated at full in The Friend, re-published and completed. I had never heard of the correspondence between Wakefield and Fox, till I saw the account of it this morning. (16th the greatest and most unmixt benefit which a wealthy indi on their country and on mankind, I should not hesitate to become more than a committee for war and revenue! There † Ennead iii. 1. 8. c. 3. The force of the Greek 5vviévat is imperfectly expressed by "understand:" our own idiomatie phrase," to go along with me," comes nearest to it. The passage that follows, full of profound sense, appears to me evidently corrupt; and, in fact, no writer more wan's, better deserves, or is less likely to obtain, a new and more correct edition:-τί εν υμέναι, ὅτι τὸ γενόμενον ἐςι θέαμα Eμdv, stansis (mallem, diapa, ips 510WSNs) Ka φύσει γενόμενον θεώρημα, καὶ μοι γενομένη εκ θεωρίας της ὧδί την φύσιν ἔχειν φιλοθεάμονα μπαρκει (malem, και μοι "η γενομένη ἐκ θεωρίας αυτῆς ὡδίς.) "What then are we to understand? That whatever is produced is an TURE to answer a similar difficulty. "Should any one interrogate her how she works, if graciously she vouchsafe to listen and speak, she will reply, it behooves thee not to disquiet me with interrogatories, but to understand in silence, even as I am silent, and work without words." Likewise, in the fifth book of the fifth Ennead, speaking of the highest and intuitive knowledge as distinguished from the discursive, or, in the language of Wordsworth, "The vision and the faculty divine;" he says: "it is not lawful to inquire from whence it sprang, as if it were a thing subject to place and motion, for it neither approached hither, nor again departs from hence to some other place; but it either appears to us, or it does not appear. So that we ought not to pursue it with a view of detecting its secret source, but to watch in quiet till it suddenly shines upon us; preparing ourselves for the blessed spectacle, as the eye waits patiently for the rising sun." They, and they only, can acquire the philosophic imagination, the sacred power of selfintuition, who, within themselves, can interpret and understand the symbol, that the wings of the air-sylph are forming within the skin of the caterpillar; those only, who feel in their own spirits the same instinct which impels the crysalis of the horned fly to leave room in its involucrum for antennæ yet to come. They know and feel, that the potential works in them, even as the actual works on them! In short, all the organs of sense are framed for a corresponding world of sense; and we have it. All the organs of spirit are framed for a correspondent world of spirit: though the latter organs are not developed in all alike. But they exist in all, and their first appearance discloses itself in the moral being. How else could it be, that even worldlings, not wholly debased, will contemplate the man of simple and disinterested goodness with contradictory feelings of pity and respect? Poor man! he is not made for this world." Oh! herein they utter a prophecy of universal fulfilment; for man must either rise or sink. ritual in man, (i. e. of that which lies on the other side of our natural consciousness,) must needs have a great obscurity for those who have never disciplined and strengthened this ulterior consciousness. It must, in truth, be a land of darkness, a perfect AnteGoshen, for men to whom the noblest treasures of their being are reported only through the imperfect translation of lifeless and sightless notions: perhaps. in great part, through words which are but the shadows of notions; even as the notional understanding itself is but the shadowy abstraction of living and actual truth. On the IMMEDIATE, which dwells in every man, and on the original intuition, or absolute affirmation of it, (which is likewise in every man, but does not in every man rise into consciousness,) all the certainty of our knowledge depends; and this becomes intelligible to no man by the ministery of mere words from without. The medium by which spirits understand each other, is not the surrounding air; but the freedom which they possess in common, as the common ethereal element of their being, the tremulous reciprocations of which propagate themselves even to the inmost of the soul. Where the spirit of a man is not filled with the consciousness of freedom, (were it only from its restlessness, as of one still struggling in bondage,) all spiritual intercourse is interrupted, not only with others, but even with himself. No wonder, then, that he remains incomprehensible to himself as well as to others. No wonder, that in the fearful desert of his consciousness, he wearies himself out with empty words, to which no friendly echo answers, eithef from his own heart or the heart of a fellow-being; or bewilders himself in the pursuit of notional phantoms, the mere refractions from unseen and distant truths, through the distorting medium of his own unenlivened and stagnant understanding! To remain unintelligible to such a mind, exclaims Schelling, on a like occasion, is honor and a good name before God and man. The history of philosophy, (the same writer observes,) contains instances of systems which for successive generations, have remained enigmatic. Such he deems the system of Leibnitz, whom another writer, (rashly I think, and invidiously,) extols as the only philosopher who was himself deeply convinced of his own doctrines. As hitherto interpreted, however, they have not produced the effect which Leib nitz himself, in a most instructive passage, describes as the criterion of a true philosophy; namely, that it would at once explain and collect the fragments of truth scattered through systems apparently the most incongruous. The truth, says he, is diffused more widely than is commonly believed; but it is often painted, yet oftener masked, and is sometimes muti It is the essential mark of the true philosopher to rest satisfied with no imperfect light, as long as the impossibility of attaining a fuller knowledge has not been demonstrated. That the common consciousness itself will furnish proofs by its own direction, that it is connected with master-currents below the surface, I shall merely assume as a postulate pro tempore. This having been granted, though but in expectation of the argument, I can safely deduce from it the equal truth of my former assertion, that philosophy cannot be intelligible to all, even of the most learned and cultivated classes. A system, the first principle of which it is to render the mind intuitive of the spi-lated, and sometimes, alas! in close alliance with intuition, I silent; and that, which is thus generated, is by its nature a theorem, or form of contemplation; and the birth, which results to me from this contemplation, attains to have a Contemplative nature." So Synesius; 'is pa, Appra Torn. The after comparison of the process of the natura naturans with that of the geometrician is drawn from the very heart of philosophy. mischievous errors. The deeper, however, we penetrate into the ground of things, the more truth we discover in the doctrines of the greater number of the in the objects of the senses, according to the scep philosophical sects. The want of substantial reality tics; the harmonies or numbers, the prototypes and ideas, to which the Pythagoreans and Platonists re duced all things; the ONE and ALL of Parmenides and Plotinus, without Spinozism;* the necessary connection of things according to the Stoics, reconcilable with the spontaneity of the other schools; the vital philosophy of the Cabalists and Hermetists, who assumed the universality of sensation; the substantial forms and entelechies of Aristotle and the schoolmen, together with the mechanical solution of all particular phenomena according to Democritus and the recent philosophers; all these we shall find united in one perspective central point, which shows regularity and a coincidence of all the parts in the very object which, from every point of view, must appear confused and distorted. The spirit of sectarianism has been hitherto our fault, and the cause of our failures. We have imprisoned our own conceptions by the lines which we have drawn in order to exclude the conceptions of others. J'ai trouvé que la plupart des sectes ont raison dans une bonne partie de ce qu'elles avancent, mais non pas en ce qu'elles nient. A system which aims to deduce the memory with all the other functions of intelligence, must, of course place its first position from beyond the memory, and anterior to it, otherwise the principle of solution would be itself a part of the problem to be solved. Such a position, therefore, must, in the first instance, be demanded, and the first question will be, by what right is it demanded? On this account I think it expedient to make some preliminary remarks on the *This is happily effected in three lines by Synesius, in his Fourth Hymn: · 'Ev kaì Пlávтa-(taken by itself) is Spinozism. 'Ev d'Aπáνrwv-a mere anima Mundi. * Εν τε πρό παντων—is mechanical Theism. But unite all three, and the result is the Theism of St. Paul and Christianity. Synesius was censured for his doctrine of the pre-existence of the Soul; but never, that I can find, arraigned or deemed heretical for his Pantheism, though neither Giordano Bruno, or Jacob Behmen, ever avowed it more broadly. Μύσας δὲ Νδος, Σὺ τὸ τικτον ἔφυς, Σὺ τὸ φωτίζιον, Σὺ τὸ λαμπόμενον Σὺ τὸ φαινόμενον, Σὺ τὸ κρυπτόμενον Καί διὰ πάντων. Pantheism is, therefore, not necessarily irreligious or heretical; though it may be taught atheistically. Thus, Spinoza would agree with Synesius in calling God Pusis Ev Noɛpois, the Nature in Intelligences; but he could not subscribe to the preceding Nous káι Noɛpos, i. e. Himself Intelligence and intelligent. In this biographical sketch of my literary life, I may be excused, if I mention here, that I had translated the eight Hymns of Synesius from the Greek into English Anacreontics before my 15th year. introduction of POSTULATES in philosophy. The word postulate, is borrowed from the science of mathematics. (See Schell. abhandl zur Erlauter, des id der Wissenschaftslehre.) In geometry the primary construction is not demonstrated, but postulated. This first and most simple construction in space, is the point in motion, or the line. Whether the point is moved in one and the same direction, or whether its direction is continually changed, remains as yet undetermined. But if the direction of the point have been determined, it is either by a point without it, and then there arises the straight line which incloses no space; or the direction of the point is not determined by a point without it, and then it must flow back again on itself; that is, there arises a cyclical line, which does inclose a space. If the straight line be assumed as the positive, the cyclical is then the negation of the straight. It is a line which at no point strikes out into the straight, but changes its direction continuously. But if the primary line be conceived as undetermined, and the straight line as determined throughout, then the cyclical is the third, compounded of both. It is at once undetermined and determined; undetermined through any point without, and determined through itself. Geometry, therefore, supplies philosophy with the example of a primary intuition, from which every science that lays claim to evidence must make its commencement. The ma thematician does not begin with a demonstrable proposition, but with an intuition, a practical idea. But here an important distinction presents itself. Philosophy is employed on objects of the INNER SENSE, and cannot, like geometry, appropriate to every construction a correspondent outward intuition. Nevertheless, philosophy, if it is to arrive at evidence, must proceed from the most original construc. tion, and the question then is, what is the most original construction or first productive act for the INNER SENSE? The answer to this question depends on the direction which is given to the INNER SENSE. But in philosophy, the INNER SENSE cannot have its direction determined by any outward object. To the original construction of the line, I can be compelled, by a line drawn before me, on the slate or on sand. The stroke thus drawn is, indeed, not the line itself, but only the image or picture of the line. It is not from it that we first learn to know the line; but, on the contrary, we bring this stroke to the original line, generated by the act of the imagination; otherwise we could not define it as without breadth or thickness. Still, however, this stroke is the sensuous image of the original or ideal line, and an efficient mean to excite every imagination to the intuition of it. It is demanded, then, whether there be found any means in philosophy to determine the direction of the INNER SENSE, as in mathematics it is determinable by its specific image, or outward picture. Now, the inner sense has its direction determined for the greater part only by an act of freedom. One man's consciousness extends only to the pleasant or unpleasant sensations caused in him by external impressions; another enlarges his inner sense to a con On the other hand, the sum of all that is SUBJECTIVE, we may comprehend in the name of SELF OF INTELLI GENCE. Both conceptions are in necessary antithesis. Intelligence is conceived of, as exclusively representative, nature as exclusively represented; the one as conscious, the other as without consciousness. Now, in all acts of positive knowledge, there is required a reciprocal concurrence of both, namely, of the conscious being, and of that which is, in itself. unconscious. Our problem is to explain this concur rence, its possibility, and its necessity. sciousness of forms and quantity; a third, in addition will henceforth call NATURE, confining the term to its to the image, is conscious of the conception or notion passive and material sense, as comprising all the pheof the thing; a fourth attains to a notion of notions-nomena by which its existence is made known to us. he reflects on his own reflections; and thus we may say, without impropriety, that the one possesses more or less inner sense than the other. This more or less betrays already that philosophy, in its principles, must have a practical or moral, as well as a theoretical or speculative side. This difference in degree does not exist in the mathematics. Socrates in Plato shows, that an ignorant slave may be brought to understand, and, of himself, to solve the most geometrical problem. Socrates drew the figures for the slave in the sand. The disciples of the critical philosophy could likewise (as was indeed actually done by La During the act of knowledge itself, the objective Forge and some other followers of Des Cartes) repre- and subjective are so instantly united, that we cansent the origin of our representations in copper-plates; not determine to which of the two the priority be but no one has yet attempted it, and it would be ut- longs. There is here no first, and no second; both terly useless. To an Esquimaux or New Zealander, are coinstantaneous and one. While I am attemptour most popular philosophy would be wholly unin- ing to explain this intimate coalition, I must suppose telligible; for the sense, the inward organ, is not it dissolved. I must necessarily set out from the one yet born in him. So is there many a one among us, to which, therefore, I give hypothetical antecedence. yes, and some who think themselves philosophers, in order to arrive at the other. But, as there are but too, to whom the philosophic organ is entirely want-two factors or elements in the problem, subject and ing. To such a man, philosophy is a mere play of object, and as it is left indeterminate from which of words and notions, like a theory of music to the deaf, them I should commence, there are two cases equally or like the geometry of light to the blind. The con- possible. nection of the parts and their logical dependencies may be seen and remembered; but the whole is groundless and hollow; unsustained by living contact, unaccompanied with any realizing intuition which exists by, and in the act that affirms its existence, which is known, because it is, and is, because it is known. The words of Plotinus, in the assumed person of nature, holds true of the philosophic energy. 18 θεωρών με θεώρημα ποιει, ωςπερ οἱ Γεωμε]δαι θεωρίζες γράφεςιν, αλλ' ἐμῦ μὴ γραφέςης, θεωρήςος δὲ, ὑφίςανται αἱ τῶν ςωμάζων γδαμμαι. With me the act of contemplation makes the thing contemplated, as the geometricians contemplating describe lines correspondent; but I not describing lines, but simply contemplating, the representative forms of things rise up into existence. 1. EITHER THE OBJECTIVE IS TAKEN AS THE FIRST, AND THEN WE HAVE TO ACCOUNT FOR THE SUPERVENTION OF THE SUBJECTIVE, WHICH COALESCES WITH IT. The notion of the subjective is not contained in the notion of the objective. On the contrary, they mutually exclude each other. The subjective, therefore, must supervene to the objective. The conception of nature does not involve the co-presence of an intelligence making an ideal duplicate of it, i. e. representing it. This desk, for instance, would (according to our natural notions) be, though there should exist no sentient being to look at it. This then is the problem of natural philosophy. It assumes the objective or unconscious nature as the first, and has, therefore, to explain how intelligence can supervene to it, or how itself can grow into intelligence. If it should appear that all enlightened naturalists, without having distinctly proposed the problem to themselves, have yet constantly moved in the line of its solution, it must afford a strong presumption that the problem itself is founded in nature. For if all knowledge has, as it were, two poles reciprocally required and presupposed, all sciences must proceed from the one or the other, and must tend toward the opposite as far as the equatorial point in which both are reconciled, and become identical. The necessary tendence, therefore, of all natural philosophy, is from nature to intelligence; and this, and no other, is the true ground and occasion of the instinctive striving to introduce theory into our views of natural phenomena. The highest perfection of natural philosophy would con The postulate of philosophy, and, at the same time, the test of philosophic capacity, is no other than the heaven-descended KNOW THYSELF! E calo descendil, (гvw0i stavov,) and this at once practically and speculatively. For, as philosophy is neither a science of the reason or understanding only, nor merely a science of morals, but the science of BEING altogether, its primary ground can be neither merely speculative or merely practical, but both in one. All knowledge rests on the coincidence of an object with a subject. (My readers have been warned in a former chapter, that for their convenience as well as the writer's, the term subject, is used by me in its scholastic sense, as equivalent to mind or sentient being, and as the necessary correlative of object or quicquid objicitur menti.) For we can know that only which is true;sist in the perfect spiritualization of all the laws of and the truth is universally placed in the coincidence of the thought with the thing, of the representation with the object represented. nature into laws of intuition and intellect. The phenomena (he material) must wholly disappear, and the laws alone (the formal) must remain. Thence it Now the sum of all that is merely OBJECTIVE, we comes, that in nature itself, the more the principle of law breaks forth, the more does the husk drop off, the phenomena themselves become more spiritual, and at length cease altogether in our consciousness. The optical phenomena, are but a geometry, the lines of which are drawn by light, and the materiality of this light itself has already become matter of doubt. In the appearances of magnetism, all trace of matter is lost, and, of the phenomena of gravitation, which, not a few among the most illustrious Newtonians, have declared no otherwise comprehensible than as an immediate spiritual influence, there remains nothing but its law, the execution of which on a vast scale, is the mechanism of the heavenly motions. The theory of natural philosophy would then be completed; when all nature was demonstrated to be identical in essence with that which, in its highest known power, exists in man as an intelligence, and self-consciousness; when the heavens and the earth shall declare, not only the power of their Maker, but the glory and the presence of their God, even as he appeared to the great prophet during the vision of the mount in the skirts of his divinity. This may suffice to show, that even natural science, which commences with the material phenomenon as the reality and substance of things existing, does yet, by the necessity of theorizing, unconsciously, and, as it were, instinctively, end in nature as an intelligence; and by this tendency, the science of nature becomes finally natural philosophy, the one of the two poles of fundamental science. 2. OR THE SUBJECTIVE IS TAKEN AS THE FIRST, AND THE PROBLEM THEN IS, HOW THERE SUPERVENES TO IT A COINCIDENT OBJECTIVE. In the pursuit of these sciences, our success in each depends on an austere and faithful adherence to its own principles, with a careful separation and exclusion of those which appertain to the opposite science. As the natural philosopher, who directs his views to the objective, avoids, above all things, the intermixture of the subjective in his knowledge, as for instance, arbitrary suppositions or rather suffictions, occult qualities, spiritual agents, and the substitution of final or efficient causes; so on the other hand, the transcendental or intelligential philosopher, is equally anxious to preclude all interpolation of the objective into the subjective principles of his science; as, for instance, the assumption of impresses or configurations in the brain, correspondent to miniature pictures on the retina painted by rays of light from supposed originals, which are not the immediate and real objects of vision, but deductions from it, for the purposes of explanation. This purification of the mind is effected by an absolute and scientific scepticism to which the mind voluntarily determines itself for the specific purpose of future certainty. Des Cartes, who (in his meditations) himself first, at least of the moderns, gave a beautiful example of this voluntary doubt, this self-determined indetermination, happily expresses its utter difference from the scepticism of vanity or irreligion: Nec tamen in eo scepticos imitabar, qui dubitant tantum ut dubitent, et preter incertitudinem ipsam nihil quærant. Nam conira totus in eo eram ut aliquid certi reperirem.-DES CARTES, de Methodo. Nor, is it less distinct in its motives and final aim, than in its proper objects, which are not, as in ordinary scepticism, the prejudices of education and circumstance, but those original and innate prejudices, which nature herself has planted in all men, and which, to all but the philosopher, are the first principles of knowledge, and the final test of truth. Now these essential prejudices are all reducible to the one fundamental presumption, THAT THERE EXIST THINGS WITHOUT US. As this on the one hand onginates, neither in grounds or arguments, and yet on the other hand remains proof against all attempts to remove it by grounds or arguments, (naturam furca expellas tamen usque redibit ;) on the one hand lays claim to IMMEDIATE certainty as a position at once indemonstrable and irresistible, and yet on the other hand, inasmuch as it refers to something essentially different from ourselves, nay, even in opposition to ourselves, leaves it inconceivable how it could possi bly become a part of our immediate consciousness; (in other words, how that, which ex hypothesi is and continues to be intrinsic and alien to our being,) the philosopher, therefore, compels himself to treat this faith as nothing more than a prejudice, innate, indeed, and connatural, but still a prejudice. The other position, which not only claims, but necessitates the admission of its immediate certainty, equally for the scientific reason of the philosopher as for the common sense of mankind at large, namely, I AM, cannot so properly be entitled a prejudice. It is groundless, indeed, but then in the very idea it precludes all ground, and separated from the immediate consciousness, loses its whole sense and import. It is groundless; but only because it is itself the ground of all other certainty. Now the apparent contradiction, that the former position, namely, the existence of things without us, which from its nature cannot be immediately certain, should be received as blindly and as independently of all grounds as the existence of our own being, the transcendental philosopher can solve only by the supposition, that the former is unconsciously involved in the latter; that it is not only coherent, but identical, and one and the same thing with our own immediate self-consciousness. To demonstrate this identity, is the office and object of his philosophy. If it be said, that this is Idealism, let it be remembered that it is only so far idealism as it is at the same time, and on that very account, the truest and most binding realism. For wherein does the realism of mankind properly consist? In the assertion, that there exists a something without them, what, or how, or where, they know not, which occasions the objects of their perception? Oh no! This is neither connatural or universal. It is what a few have taught and learnt in the schools, and which the many repeat without asking themselves concerning their own meaning. The realism common to all mankind is far elder, and lies infinitely deeper than this hypothetical explanation of the origin of our perceptions, an explanation skimmed from the mere surface of mechanical philosophy. It is the table itself, which the man of common sense believes himself to see, |