development to that of Greece is demanded; commencing in religion, and becoming afterwards developed, independently of this, in ontological, psychological, and eclectical systems. Upon this subject, M. Cousin remarks, "Hitherto, both in India and in Greece, we have constantly seen philosophy spring from religion; and, at the same time, we have seen that it springs not from it at once, that a single day is not enough for it to raise itself from the humble submission by which it begins to the absolute independence in which it terminates. Modern philosophy presents the same phenomenon. It is also preceded by an epoch which serves it as an introduction, and, thus to speak, as a vestibule. This epoch is Scholasticism. As the middle age is the cradle of modern society, so scholasticism is that of modern philosophy. What the middle age is to the new society, scholasticism is to the philosophy of the new times. Now, the middle age is nothing else than the absolute reign of ecclesiastical authority, of which the political powers are only the more or less docile instruments. Scholasticism, or the philosophy of the middle age, could not then be any thing else than the labor of thought in the service of faith, and under the inspection of religious authority. Well, here again philosophy is philosophy; and scarcely has it fortified itself by time, scarcely is the hand which was over it removed or become less weighty, when philosophy resumes its natural course, and produces again the four different systems which it has already produced both in India and in Greece."

Although this is relatively the self-conscious period of philosophical development, in which ontological laws are to be conceived from a conscious, intellectual, instead of being represented from an unconscious, rational point of view; in which psychological phenomena are to be realized in a supernatural, instead of a natural, condition of the consciousness; and the conception of Marriage, or the union of opposites, from a supernatural and self-conscious point of view, is the principal object of both Philosophy and Theology, — its foundations were necessarily laid in a condition of society in which the sentimental were the ruling powers of the mind, and the philosophic capacity was consequently made entirely subservient to religious conceptions and recognitions: so that no independent action of the mind, and no philosophic development, were at this time possible. Upon this account, and also because this is relatively the eclectical period of philosophical development in which all previous theories are to be used in the attempt to construct a universal science, both the phi

losophers and the churchmen were at first compelled to make use of the Eastern and Grecian systems in the establishment of the theories of the Church upon an intellectual basis, notwithstanding these belonged to a natural order of thought and experience antagonistic to the great ideas of Christianity, of which the Church is the representative and natural exponent. We therefore find, that, during the twelve centuries which followed the introduction of Christianity, the old systems of philosophy were used exclusively in the defence and inculcation of the doctrines and precepts of the Church. Brucker says, "Notwithstanding the proofs with which the writings of the Christian fathers abound of their enmity to Pagan philosophy, considered as a system of doctrines opposed to the Christian faith, it is, however, certain that these Christian philosophers did not scruple to avail themselves of all the helps which their learning afforded them in the exercise of the arts of logic and rhetoric. They industriously enriched their writings with the moral doctrines and precepts of the ancients, as far as they would coalesce with the Christian institutes. Without addicting themselves to any sect of heathen philosophers, they selected from each whatever they judged to be consistent with the doctrine of their Divine Master, and capable of forwarding the great end of their office as teachers of Christianity. In fine, from the time that the simplicity of the apostolic age was forsaken, the Christian fathers studied the writings of the ancients, first, to furnish themselves with weapons against their adversaries; next, to support the Christian doctrine, by maintaining its consonancy to reason, and its superiority to the most perfect systems of Pagan wisdom; and, lastly, to adorn themselves with the embellishments of erudition and eloquence. Basil wrote a distinct treatise upon the benefits which young persons might receive from reading the writings of the heathens. His pupil, Gregory Thaumaturgus, in his panegyric on Origen, insists largely upon the same topic; highly commending him for having, after the example of his preceptor, Clemens Alexandrinus, industriously instructed his pupils in philosophy. And there can be no doubt, that Greek learning of every kind was, at a very early period, admitted into the Christian schools; not, however, without repeated cautions to young persons to distinguish carefully between the true and the false, the useful and the pernicious, in the writings of the ancients; and always to keep human learning in due subordination to Divine wisdom."

Even in the more independent attitudes which philosophy

afterwards assumed, it was principally a revival of old theories, and not the promulgation of new ideas, which occupied the attention of philosophers. The first independent action of the mind upon the subject of philosophy is to be witnessed in the disputes of the Nominalists and the Realists, which continued with great violence during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and which furnish the external side of Ontology in the philosophical development of this period. The commencement of this movement is thus described by Cousin: "Everywhere a movement of independence was making itself manifest. This independence was also to be marked in philosophy; and it produced, little by little, the separation of philosophy from theology by the enfeebling and destruction of scholasticism. How did this great event take place? How was war declared between the form and the foundation? — between philosophy and theology, which, until then, had lived in such perfect agreement?- and what was the battle-field? It was the old quarrel of the nominalists and the realists."

Nominalism, which was, as we have seen, the leading idea of the Aristotelian philosophy, was revived by Roscelinus, who maintained that there is no reality, except in individuals. Realism, which was the leading idea of the Platonic philosophy, was revived by Guillaume de Champeaux, who, going to the other extreme, maintained that genera are the only entities that exist. These two schools presented in every possible shape the two opposite sides of the great ontological questions of Being and of Existence from an internal, intellectual, and natural point of contemplation in self-conscious conceptions, instead of the external, representative, and poetical conceptions to which they had before been principally confined. And here we see distinctly the degradation in form, but advance in position, which attended philosophy in this sphere of its development. Although the symbolism by which Creation from infinite and finite substances was represented by the ancient schools has been abandoned, because it could no longer be realized by the mind through a spontaneous production, it has gained, as a substitute, conceptions of these same ideas from an internal, intellectual, and self-conscious point of view, which are more like psychological than ontological experiences. Until this period, nominalism and realism were represented, in the opposite sides of both Ontology and Psychology, as the natural and supernatural sides of thought: but now we find them introduced as internal and external sides

of the natural development of ontological thought; while the supernatural side of Ontology is realized as eclectical in a mystical representation of the relations of God to the Soul, or to Creation, not only as its Creator, but as its Saviour and Regenerator. The cause of this great change is, of course, the estab-· lishment of Christianity, and the development, in the soul, of supernatural mediums for the representation of Absolute Truth, and for the realization of an order of thought representing Marriage, or the union of opposites through voluntary sacrifice; for, although by the introduction of Christianity the separation between the divine and the human was infinitely increased, the idea of their marriage became at the same time the great idea of the age. It was not the spiritual itself, however, of which the mind at this time became conscious, for the reason that natural forms, first representing, then contradicting, and finally inverting, spiritual ideas, must be realized in the mind before the spiritual itself can be communicated to the Consciousness. It is only a natural form, representing in a discordant and anti-spiritual manner a spiritual order of thought and experience, that first becomes developed in the human constitution; and this is from a supernatural development of the Sentimental Nature, by which man becomes connected with the Church as a Christian Institution. The external and unconscious manifestations of this new sentimental power simply produce the recognition of what the Bible and the Churches teach with regard to the laws and phenomena of spiritual life, and an apprehensive recognition, through feeling, of the external symbolism in which these are represented; but through the internal and conscious manifestations of this sentimental nature are realized supernatural intuitions, which represent the nature of God, the nature of the soul, and the relations existing between the soul and God as its Creator, Redeemer, and Regenerator. The realization of these intuitions constitutes the supernatural side of Ontology in this sphere, where we find Religious Mysticism taking the place corresponding with Eleaticism in the Grecian sphere of philosophical development. According to M. Cousin, "It was in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, after the warm debates of nominalism and realism, that Mysticism, separating itself from all other systems, acquired consciousness of itself, was called by its own name, and exposed its theory. According to Gerson, mystic theology is not an abstract science; it is an experimental science: the experience which it invokes is neither the experience of the senses nor that

of the reason, but the consciousness of a certain number of sentiments and phenomena which occur in the inmost recesses of the religious soul. True science is, then, that of the religious sentiment, or of the immediate intuition of God through the soul. Immediate intuition is an operation of the soul, whose character is that of being accompanied with knowledge, and at the same time of not proceeding by successive argumentations, and of arriving directly at God, who, being once in contact with the soul, sends to it that light by means of which it discovers truth,— the principles of all truth and all certitude."

We have now come to the close of the ontological development of philosophy in this sphere; and we therefore expect to find, as at the close of the ontological development in Greece, a preparation for the realization of Psychology, in the cultivation of the natural understanding, and the consequent realization of Scepticism. We accordingly find that the sixteenth century was appropriated to this object, and did, in fact, produce these results. M. Cousin says, "At the close of the fifteenth century, ancient philosophy appeared almost entire. Platonism, Peripateticism, Pythagoreanism, Epicureanism, Stoicism, and the philosophy of the Academies and of the Alexandrians, seize equally the mind: Christians are scarcely any longer found, and philosophers are rare enough. The sixteenth century produced scarcely a single great man in philosophy. The entire utility, the mission of this century, was little else than to efface and destroy the middle age under the artificial imitation of antiquity. The philosophy of the revival prepared modern philosophy: it broke the ancient servitude, fruitful servitude, glorious even, so long as it was unobserved, so long as it was in some sort freely borne; but which, once felt, became an insupportable burden, and an obstacle to all progress. In this point of view, the philosophers of the sixteenth century have an importance very superior to that of their works: it is not their writings that interest us, it is their destiny, their life, and especially their death. They have not only been the prophets, but they have more than once been the martyrs, of the new spirit. When Descartes and Leibnitz, the two great philosophers of the seventeenth century, found under their pens the names of those bold thinkers of the sixteenth, they treated them with great disdain: they did not wish to be confounded with these turbulent spirits; and they forgot, that, without them, the liberty of thought which they enjoyed might, perhaps, have never been obtained."