is a sufficient answer, that one main object of my attempt was to demonstrate the vagueness or insufficiency of the terms used in the metaphysical schools of France and Great Britain since the revolution, and that the errors which I propose to attack can not subsist, except as they are concealed behing the mask of a plau sible and indefinite nomenclature.

But the worst and widest impediment still remains. It is the predominance of a popular philosophy, at once the counterfeit and the mortal enemy of all true and n.anly metaphysical research. It is that corruption, introduced by certain immethodical aphorisming eclectics, who, dismissing not only all system, but all logical connection, pick and choose whatever is most plausible and showy; who select, whatever words can have some semblance of sense attached to them without the least expenditure of thought; in short whatever may enable men to talk of what they do not understand, with a careful avoidance of every thing that might awaken them to a moment's suspicion of their ignorance. This, alas! is an irremediable disease, for it brings with it, not so much an indisposition to any particular system, but an utter loss of taste and faculty for all system and all philosophy. Like echoes that beget each other amongst the mountains, the praise or blame of such men roll in volleys long after the report from the original blunderbuss. Sequacitas est potius et coitio quam consensus: et tamen (quod pessimum est) pusillanimitas ista non sine arrogantia et fastidio se offert.†

I shall now proceed to the nature and genesis of the Imagination; but I must first take leave to notice, that after a more accurate perusal of Mr. Wordsworth's remarks on the Imagination, in his preface to the new edition of his poems, I find that my conclusions are not so consistent with his as, I confess, I had taken for granted. In an article contributed by me to Mr. Southey's Omniana, On the soul and its organs of sense, are the following less of sharpness and precision than is suitable to scientific explanation; or to their having grown stiff in the school-language and method of Wolf.—S. C.] * ["Finally, the last of all, through the impotent sham philosophy of some waterish authors, or the pandect wisdom of aphoristic eclectics, had lost all sense and taste, not perhaps for a determined system, but for philosophy in general, before Kant had published a syllable of his philosophy.” Transl. (Abhandlungen, Phil. Schrift. p. 204.) S. C.]

Franc. Baconis de Verulam, NOVUM ORGANUM. [Aphorisms LXXVII and LXXXVIII -S. C.]

sentences These (the human faculties) I would arrange under the different senses and powers as the eye, the ear, the touch, &c.; the imitative power, voluntary and automatic; the imagination, or shaping and modifying power; the fancy, or the aggregative and associative power; the understanding, or the regulative, substantiating and realizing power; the speculative reason, vis theoretica et scientifica, or the power by which we pro duce, or aim to produce unity, necessity, and universality in all our knowledge by means of principles à priori;* the will, or practical reason; the faculty of choice (Germanice, Willkühr) and (distinct both from the moral will and the choice) the sensation of volition, which I have found reason to include under the head of single and double touch." To this, as far as it relates to the subject in question, namely the words (the aggregative and associative power) Mr. Wordsworth's "objection is only that the definition is too general. To aggregate and to associate, to evoke and to combine, belong as well to the Imagination as to the Fancy." I reply, that if, by the power of evoking and combining, Mr. Wordsworth means the same as, and no more than, I meant by the aggregative and associative, I continue to deny, that it belongs at all to the Imagination; and I am disposed to conjecture, that he has mistaken the co-presence of Fancy with Imagination for the operation of the latter singly. A man may work with two very different tools at the same moment; each has its share in the work, but the work effected by each is distinct and different. But it will probably appear in the next chapter, that deeming it necessary to go back much further than Mr. Wordsworth's subject required or permitted, I have attached a meaning to both Fancy and Imagination, which he had not in view, at least while he was writing that preface. He will judge.

*This phrase, à priori, is in common, most grossly misunderstood, and an absurdity burdened on it, which it does not deserve! By knowledge à priori, we do not mean, that we can know any thing previously to experience, which would be a contradiction in terms; but that having once known it by occasion of experience (that is, something acting upon us from without) we then know, that it must have pre-existed, or the experience itself would have been impossible. By experience only I know, that I have eyes; but then my reason convinces me, that I must have had eyes in order to the experience.

[Preface to the Poetical Works, Vol. i. p. xxxiv.)

Would to Heaven, I might meet with many such readers! 1 will conclude with the words of Bishop Jeremy Taylor: "He to whom all things are one, who draweth all things to one, and seeth all things in one, may enjoy true peace and rest of spirit.

CHAPTER XIII.

ON THE IMAGINATION, OR ESEMPLASTIC POWER.

O Adam, One Almighty is, from whom
All things proceed, and up to him return,
If not deprav'd from good, created all
Such to perfection, one first matter all
Endued with various forms, various degrees
Of substance, and, in things that live, of life;
But more refin'd, more spiritous and pure,
As nearer to him plac'd, or nearer tending,
Each in their several active spheres assign'd,
Till body up to spirit work, in bounds

Proportion'd to each kind. So from the root
Springs lighter the green stalk, from thence the leaves
More aery last the bright consummate flower
Spirits odorous breathes: flowers and their fruit,
Man's nourishment, by gradual scale sublim'd,

To vital spirits aspire: to animal :

To intellectual !—give both life and sense,
Fancy and understanding; whence the soul
REASON receives, and reason is her being,
Discursive or intuitive.t

"Sane si res corporales nil nisi materiale continerent, verissime dicerentur in fluxu consistere, neque habere substantiale quicquam, quemadmodum et Platonici olim recte agnovere.

"Hinc igitur, præter pure mathematica et phantasiæ subjecta, collegi quædam metaphysica solaque mente perceptibilia, esse admittenda et massæ materiali principium quoddam superius et, ut sic dicam, formale addendum: quandoquidem omnes veritates rerum corporearum ex solis axiomatibus logisticis et geometricis, nempe de magno et parvo, toto et parte, figura et situ, colligi non possint; sed alia de causa et effectu, actioneque et

* Jer. Taylor's Via pacis. [Sunday. The First Decad. 8.—S. C.]
Par. Lost. Book v. l. 469.

passione, accedere debeant, quibus ordinis rerum rationes salventur. Id principium rerum, an évreλexɛíav an vim appellemus, non refert, modo meminerimus, per solam Virium notionem, intelligibiliter explicari.”*

Σέβομαι νοερῶν
Κρυφίαν τάξιν.
Χώρει ΤΙ ΜΕΣΟΝ
Ου καταχυθέν.

DES CARTES,‡ speaking as a naturalist, and in imitation of Archimedes, said, give me matter and motion and I will construct you the universe. We must of course understand him to have meant I will render the construction of the universe intelligible. In the same sense the transcendental philosopher says: grant me a nature having two contrary forces, the one of which tends to expand infinitely, while the other strives to apprehend or find itself in this infinity, and I will cause the world of intelligences with the whole system of their representations to rise up before you. Every other science pre-supposes intelligence as already existing and complete the philosopher contemplates it in its growth, and as it were represents its history to the mind from its birth to its maturity.

The venerable sage of Koenigsberg has preceded the march of * Leibnitz. Op. T. ii. P. ii. p. 53.—T. iii. p. 321.

[The first sentence of this quotation is from the treatise of Leibnitz De Ipsa Natura, sive de Vi insita Actionibusque creaturarum, § 8. ed. Erdmann. P. i. p. 157:-the second is from his Specimen Dynamicum, pro admirandis Naturæ legibus circa corporum Vires, et mutuas Actiones detegendis et ad suas causas revocandis. Ex Actis Erudit. Lips. ann. 1695. In the second extract Mr. C. has substituted the word phantasia for imaginationi, and, in the beginning of the last sentence rerum for formam. He quoted from the edition of Lud. Dutens, a Frenchman resident in Britain, as I learn from Erdmann's Preface, in which it is mentioned that neither his collection nor that of Raspe, who added posthumous works of Leibnitz, contains all his philosophical writings, and that both the one and the other frustro a bibliopolis quæres, imo in publicis bibliothecis desiderabis. The former, however, is at the British Museum, presented by himself in 1800. The new edition comprehends only the philosophical works,-the Specimen Dynamicum is classed among the mathematical,-but, as Erdmann himself observes, it is often very difficult to judge utrum scriptio aliqua philosophicæ indolis sit an non sit. See Appendix S.-S. C.]

+ Synesii Episcop. Hymn. iii. i. 231.

[This first paragraph of Chap. xiii. with the exception of the second sentence, is freely translated from Transse. Id. first § of Section C. p. 147. -S.C.]

this master-thought as an effective pioneer in his essay on the introduction of negative quantities into philosophy, published 1763.* In this he has shown, that instead of assailing the science of mathematics by metaphysics, as Berkeley did in his ANALYST,} or of sophisticating it, as Wolf did, by the vain attempt of deducing the first principles of geometry from supposed deeper grounds of ontology,‡ it behooved the metaphysician rather to examine whether the only province of knowledge, which man has succeeded in erecting into a pure science, might not furnish materials, or at least hints, for establishing and pacifying the unset tled, warring, and embroiled domain of philosophy. An imitation of the mathemetical method had indeed been attempted with no better success than attended the essay of David to wear the armor of Saul. Another use however, is possible and of far greater promise, namely, the actual application of the positions which had so wonderfully enlarged the discoveries of geometry, mutatis mutandis, to philosophical subjects. Kant having

* [Versuch, den Begriff der negativen Grössen in die Weltweisheit einzuführen. An attempt towards introducing the idea of negative magnitudes into philosophy, 1763. Works, vol. i. p. 19.-S. C.]

[The Analyst was published soon after Berkeley's promotion to the see of Cloyne, March 17, 1834. It is said that the Bishop addressed it to Dr. Halley on learning from Mr. Addison that he, "who dealt so much in demonstration," had brought Dr. Garth into a state of general skepticism or even unbelief on religious subjects, as appeared in the latter's last illness. Its whole title is The Analyst; or, a Discourse addressed to an infidel Mathematician: wherein it is examined whether the object, principles, and inferences, of the modern Analysis are more distinctly conceived, or more evidently deduced, than religious mysteries and points of faith. He endeavored to show that the doctrine of fluxions furnished a strong example of mathematical uncertainty and fallacy.]

[Cousin represents Wolf as having improved the Leibnitzian philosophy by qualifying it in some directions and filling it up in others. He seems to consider his mathematical method as at once his strength and his weakness—for he says—“ Son mérite principal consiste dans l'unité, la solidité et l'enchaînement systématique qu'il sut donner à tout l'ensemble à l'aide de la méthode appelée mathématique, méthode qui, selon lui, n'étoit autre chose que l'application la plus parfaite des lois du raisonnement." Then after enumerating the defects of his philosophy he sums them up thus—“ Enfin” il “négligea la distinction des caractères propres qui séparent la philosophie et les mathématiques dans leur forme et leur matière." (Manuel. vol. ii. 175–6.) I suppose that no man before Kant's day had seen this distinction so clearly, and laid it down so determinately, as did the sage of Koenigsberg.-S. C.]

[Kant says in his Preface to the Versuch already referred to: "The use