tem. KANT's followers, however, on whom (for the greater part) their master's cloak had fallen, without, or with a very scanty portion of, his spirit, had adopted his dynamic ideas only as a more refined species of mechanics. With exception of one or two fundamental ideas, which cannot be withheld from FICHTE, to SCHELLING we owe the completion, and the most important victories, of this revolution in philosophy. To me it will be happiness and honour enough, should I succeed in rendering the system itself intelligible to my countrymen, and in the application of it to the most awful of subjects for the most important of purposes. Whether a work is the offspring of a man's own spirit, and the product of original thinking, will be discovered by those who are its sole legitimate judges, by better tests than the mere reference to dates. For readers in general, let whatever shall be found in this, or any future work of mine, that resembles, or coincides with, the doctrines of my German predecessor, though contemporary, be wholly attributed to him: provided, that the absence of distinct references to his books, which I could not at all times make with truth as designating citations or thoughts actually derived from him, and which, I trust, would, after this general acknowledgement, be superfluous, be not charged on me as an ungenerous concealment or intentional plagiarism. I have not indeed (eheu! res angusta domi!) been hitherto able to procure more than two of his books, viz: the first volume of his collected Tracts, and his System of Transcendental Idealism; to which, however, I must add a small pamphlet against Fichte, the spirit of which was to my feelings painfully incongruous with the principles, and which (with the usual allowance afforded to an antithesis) displayed the love of wisdom rather than the wisdom of love. I regard truth as a divine ventriloquist: I care not from whose mouth the sounds are supposed to proceed, if only the words are audible and intelligible. "Albeit, I must confess to be half in doubt, whether I should bring it forth or no, it being so contrary to the eye of the world, and the world so potent in most men's hearts, that I shall endanger either not to be regarded or not to be understood."-MILTON: Reason of Church Government.

And to conclude the subject of citation, with a cluster of citations, which, as taken from books not in common use, may contribute to the reader's amusement, as a voluntary before a sermon.

"Dolet mihi quidem deliciis literarum inescatos subito jam homines adeo esse, præsertim qui Christianos se profitentur, et legere nisi quod ad delectationem facit, sustineant nihil: unde et disciplinæ severiores et philosophia ipsa jam fere prorsus etiam a doctis negliguntur. Quod quidem propositum studiorum, nisi mature corrigitur, tam magnum rebus incommodum dabit, quam dedit Barbaries olim. Pertinax res Barbaries est, fateor: sed minus potest tamen, quam illa mollities et persuasa prudentia literarum, quæ si ratione caret, sapientiæ virtutisque specie mortales misere circumducit. Succedet igitur, ut arbitror, haud ita multo post, pro rusticana seculi nostri ruditate captatrix illa communiloquentia robur animi virilis omne, omnem virtutem masculam profligatura, nisi cavetur."

SIMON GRYNEUS, candido lectori, prefixed to the Latin translation of Plato, by Marsilius Ficinus. Lugduni, 1557. A too prophetic remark, which has been in fulfilment from the year 1680 to the present, 1815. N. B. By" persuasa prudentia," Grynæus means self-complacent common sense as opposed to science and philosophic

reason.

"Est medius ordo et velut equestris Ingeniorum quidem sagacium et rebus humanis commodorum, non tamen in primam magnitudinem patentium. Eorum hominum, ut ita dicam, major anSedulum esse, nihil temere loqui, assuescere labori, et imagine prudentiæ et modestia tegere angustiores partes captus dum exercitationem et usum, quo isti in civilibus rebus pollent, pro natura et magnitudine ingenii plerique accipiunt."

nona est.

BARCLAII ARGENIS, p. 71.

“As, therefore, physicians are many times forced to leave such methods of curing as themselves know to be fittest, and, being over-ruled by the sick man's impatience, are fain to try the best they can; in like sort, considering how the case doth stand with the present age, full of tongue and weak of brain, behold we would, (if our subject permitted it,) yield to the stream thereof. That way we would be contented to prove our thesis, which, being the worse in itself, notwithstanding, is now, by reason of common imbecility, the fitter and likelier to be brooked."—Hooker.

If this fear could be rationally entertained in the controversial age of Hooker, under the then robust discipline of the scholastic logic, pardonably may a writer of the present times anticipate a

scanty audience for abstrusest themes, and truths that can neither
be communicated nor received without effort of thought, as well as
patience of attention.

"Che s'io non erro al calcular de' punti,
Par ch' Asinini Stella a noi predomini,
E'l Somaro e'l castron si sian congiunti.
Il tempo d'Apuleio piu non si nomini:
Che se allora un sol Huom sembrava un Asino,
Mille Asini a miei di rassembran Huomini !"

CHAPTER X.

A chapter of digression and anecdotes, as an interlude preceding that on the nature and genesis of the imagination or plastic power-On pedantry and pedantic expressions-Advice to young authors respecting publication-Various anecdotes of the author's literary life, and the progress of his opinions in religion and politics.

"ESEMPLASTIC.

with it elsewhere."

The word is not in Johnson, nor have I met Neither have I! I constructed it myself from the Greek words 815 ev #λatteiv, i. e. to shape into one; because, having to convey a new sense, I thought that a new term would both aid the recollection of my meaning, and prevent its being confounded with the usual import of the word imagination. "But this is pedantry!" Not necessarily so, I hope. If I am not misinformed, pedantry consists in the use of words unsuitable to the time, place, and company. The language of the market would be in the schools as pedantic, though it might not be reprobated by that name, as the language of the schools in the market. The mere man of the world, who insists that no other terms but such as occur in common conversation should be employed in a scientific disquisition, and, with no greater precision, is as truly a pedant as the man of letters, who, either over-rating the acquirements of his auditors, or misled by his own familiarity with technical or scholastic terms, converses at the wine-table with his mind fixed on his musæum or laboratory; even though the latter pedant, instead of desiring his wife to make the tea, should bid her add to the quant. suff. of thea sinensis the oxyd of hydrogen saturated with caloric. To use the colloquial (and, in truth, somewhat vulgar) metaphor, if the pedant of the cloister, and the pedant of the lobby, both smell equally of the shop, yet the odour from the Russian binding of good old authentic-looking folios and quartos, is less annoying than the steams from the tavern or bagnio. Nay, though the pedantry of the scholar should betray a little ostentation, yet a well-conditioned mind would more easily, methinks, tolerate the fox brush of learned vanity, than the sans culotterie of a contemptuous ignorance, that assumes a merit from mutilation in the self-consoling sneer at the pompous incumbrance of tails.

The first lesson of philosophic discipline is to wean the student's attention from the DEGREES of things, which alone form the vocabulary of common life, and to direct it to the KIND, abstracted from degree. Thus the chemical student is taught not to be startled at disquisitions on the heat in ice, or on latent and fixible light. In such discourse, the instructor has no other alternative than either to use old words with new meanings, (the plan adopted by Darwin in his Zoonomia,) or to introduce new terms, after the example of Linnæus, and the framers of the present chemical nomenclature. The latter mode is evidently preferable, were it only that the former demands a two-fold exertion of thought in one and the same act. For the reader (or hearer) is required not only to learn and bear in mind the new definition, but to unlearn, and keep out of his view, the old and habitual meaning; a far more difficult and perplexing task, and for which the mere semblance of eschewing pedantry seems to me an inadequate compensation. Where, indeed, it is in our power to recall an appropriate term that had, without sufficient reason, become obsolete, it is doubtless a less evil to restore than to coin anew. Thus, to express in one word all that appertains to the perception considered as passive, and merely recipient, I have adopted from our elder classics the word sensuous ; because sensual is not at present used except in a bad sense, or at least as a moral distinction, while sensitive and sensible would each convey a different meaning. Thus, too, I have followed Hooker, Sanderson, Milton, &c. in designating the immediateness of any act or object of knowledge by the word intuition, used sometimes subjectively, sometimes objectively, even as we use the word, thought; now as the thought, or act of thinking, and now as a thought, or the object of our reflection: and we do this without confusion or obscurity. The very words objective and subjective, of such constant recurrence in the schools of yore, I have ventured to reintroduce, because I could not so briefly, or conveniently, by any more familiar terms, distinguish the percipere from the percipi. Lastly, I have cautiously discriminated the terms, the REASON, and the UNDERSTANDING, encouraged and confirmed by the authority of our genuine divines and philosophers, before the revolution :

"both life, and sense,

Fancy, and understanding: whence the soul
Reason receives, and REASON is her being,