schemes conducive to the peculiar purposes of particular sciences, but no scientific system.

ei nai

But though I can not enter on the proof of this assertion, I dare not remain exposed to the suspicion of having obtruded a mere private opinion, as a fundamental truth. The authorities are such, that my only difficulty is occasioned by their number. The following extract from Aristocle's (preserved with other interesting fragments of the same writer by Eusebius of Cæsarea) is as explicit as peremptory. Εφιλοσόφησε δὲ Πλάτων, εἰ καὶ τις ἄλλος τῶν πώποτε, γνησίως καὶ τελείως. Ηξίου δὲ μὴ δύνασθαι τὰ ἀνθρώπινα κατιδεῖν ἡμᾶς, εἰ μὴ τὰ θεῖα πρότερον ὀφθείη.* And Plato himself in his Republic, happily still extant, evidently alludes to the same doctrine. For personating Socrates in the discussion of a most important problem, namely, whether political justice is or is not the same as private honesty, after many inductions, and much analytic reasoning, he breaks off with these words—καὶ εὖ γ ̓ ἴσθι, ὦ Γλαύκων, ὡς ἡ ἐμὴ δόξα, ἀκριβῶς μὲν τοῦτο ἐκ τοιούτων μεθόδων, οἵαις νῦν ἐν τοῖς λόγοις χρώμεθα, οὐ μή ποτε λάβωμεν· ἀλλὰ γὰρ μακροτέρα καὶ πλείων ὁδὸς ἡ ἐπὶ τοῦτο ἄγουσα† -not however, he adds, precluding the former (the analytic and inductive, to wit) which have their place likewise, in which (but as subordinate to the other) they are both useful and requisite. If any doubt could be entertained as to the purport of these words, it would be removed by the fact stated by Aristotle,‡ that Plato had discussed the problem, whether in order to scientific ends we must set out from principles or ascend towards them: in other words, whether the synthetic or analytic be the right method. But as no such question is directly discussed in the published

*Præparat. Evangel. xi. c. 3.-Ed. Plato, who philosophized legitimately and perfectively, if ever any man did in any age, held it for an axiom, that it is not possible for us to have an insight into things human (that is, the nature and relations of man, and the objects presented by nature for his investigation,) without a previous contemplation or intellectual vision of things divine; that is, of truths that are to be affirmed concerning the absolute, as far as they can be made known to us.

De Republica, iv. But know well, O Glaucon, as my firm persuasion, that by such methods, as we have hitherto used in this inquisition, we can never attain to a satisfactory insight for it is a longer and ampler way that conducts to this.

† Εὐ γὰρ καὶ Πλάτων ἠπόρει τοῦτο καὶ ἐζήτει, πότερον ἀπὸ τῶν ἀρχῶν, ἢ ἐπὶ τὰς ἀρχάς, ἐστιν ἡ ὁδός.—Ethic. Nicom. I. c. 2.—Ed.

works of the great master, Aristotle must either have received it orally from Plato himself, or have found it in the ayçaqa dóɣuara, the private text-books or manuals constructed by his select disciples, and intelligible to those only who like themselves had been intrusted with the esoteric, or interior and unveiled, doctrines of Platonism. Comparing this therefore with the writings, which he held it safe or not profane to make public, we may safely conclude, that Plato considered the investigation of truth à posteriori as that which is employed in explaining the results of a more scientific process to those, for whom the knowledge of the results was alone requisite and sufficient; or in preparing the mind for legitimate method, by exposing the insufficiency or self-contradictions of the proofs and results obtained by the contrary process. Hence, therefore, the earnestness with which the genuine Platonists afterwards opposed the doctrine (that all demonstration consists of identical propositions) advanced by Stilpo, and maintained by the Megaric school, who denied the synthesis, and, like Hume and others in recent times, held geometry itself to be merely analytical.

The grand problem, the solution of which forms, according to Plato, the final object and distinctive character of philosophy, is this for all that exists conditionally (that is, the existence of which is inconceivable except under the condition of its dependency on some other as its antecedent) to find a ground that is unconditional and absolute, and thereby to reduce the aggregate of human knowledge to a system. For the relation common to all being known, the appropriate orbit of each becomes discoverable, together with its peculiar relations to its concentrics in the common sphere of subordination. Thus the centrality of the sun having been established, and the law of the distances of the planets from the sun having been determined, we possess the means of calculating the distance of each from the other. But as all objects of sense are in continual flux, and as the notices of them by the senses must, as far as they are true notices, change with them, while scientific principles or laws are no otherwise principles of science than as they are permanent and always the same, the latter were appropriated to the pure reason, either as its products or as implanted in it. And now the remarkable * Which of these two doctrines was Plato's own opinion, it is hard to In many passages of his works, the latter (that is, the doctrine of in

say.

fact forces itself on our attention, namely, that the material world is found to obey the same laws as had been deduced independently from the reason; and that the masses act by a force, which can not be conceived to result from the component parts, known or imaginable. In magnetism, electricity, galvanism, and in chemistry generally, the mind is led instinctively, as it were, to regard the working powers as conducted, transmitted, or accumulated by the sensible bodies, and not as inherent. This fact has, at all times, been the stronghold alike of the materialists and of the spiritualists, equally solvable by the two contrary hypotheses, and fairly solved by neither. In the clear and masterly* re

nate, or rather of connate, ideas) seems to be it; but from the character and avowed purpose of these works, as addressed to a promiscuous publie, therefore preparatory, and for the discipline of the mind, rather than directly doctrinal, it is not improbable that Plato chose it as the more popular representation, and as belonging to the poetic drapery of his philosophemata.

I can conceive no better remedy for the overweening self-complacency of modern philosophy than the annulment of its pretended originality. The attempt has been made by Dutens (Récherches sur l'origine des découvertes attribuées aux Modernes. 1766.-Ed.), but he failed in it by flying to the opposite extreme. When he should have confined himself to the philosophies, he extended his attack to the sciences, and even to the main discoveries of later times; and thus instead of vindicating the ancients, he became the calumniator of the moderns; as far at least as detraction is calumny. A splendid and most instructive course of lectures might be given, comprising the origin and progress, the fates and fortunes of philosophy from Pythagoras to Locke, with the lives and succession of the philosophers in each sect; tracing the progress of speculative science chiefly in relation to the gradual development of the human mind, but without omitting the favorable or inauspicious influence of circumstances and the accidents of individual genius. The main divisions would be, 1. From Thales and Pythagoras to the appearance of the Sophists: 2. And of Socrates; the character and effects of Socrates' life and doctrines illustrated in the instances of Xenophon, as his most faithful representative, and of Antisthenes or the Cynic sect as the one partial view of his philosophy, and of Aristippus or the Cyrenaic sect as the other and opposite extreme: 3. Plato, and Platonism: 4. Aristotle and the Peripatetic school: 5. Zeno and Stoicism, Epicurus and Epicureanism, with the effects of these in the Roman republic and empire: 6. The rise of the Eclectic or Alexandrian philosophy, the attempt to set up a pseudo-Platonic polytheism against Christianity, the degradation of philosophy itself into mysticism and magic, and its final disappearance, as philosophy, under Justinian: 7. The resumption of the Aristotelian philosophy in the thirteenth

view of the elder philosophies, which must be ranked among the most splendid proofs of his judgment no less than of his genius, and more expressly in the critique on the atomic or corpuscular doctrine of Democritus and his followers as the one extreme, and in that of the pure rationalism of Zeno the Eleatic as the other, Plato has proved incontrovertibly that in both alike the basis is too narrow to support the superstructure; that the grounds of both are false or disputable; and that, if these were conceded, yet neither the one nor the other scheme is adequate to the solution of the problem,—namely, what is the ground of the coincidence between reason and experience; or between the laws of matter and the ideas of the pure intellect. The only answer which Plato deemed the question capable of receiving, compels the reason to pass out of itself and seek the ground of this agreement in a supersensual essence, which being at once the ideal of the reason and the cause of the material world, is the pre-establisher of the harmony in and between both. Religion therefore is the ultimate aim of philosophy, in consequence of which philosophy itself becomes the supplement of the sciences, both as the convergence of all to the common end, namely wisdom; and as supplying the copula, which, modified in each in the comprehension of its parts in one whole, is in its principles common to all, as integral parts of one system. And this is method, itself a distinct science, the immediate offspring of philosophy, and the link or mordant by which philosophy becomes scientific, and the sciences philosophical.

ESSAY VI. .

Απάντων ζητῶντες λόγον ἔξωθεν ἀναιρᾶσι λόγον.

THE second relation is that of theory, in which the existing forms and qualities of objects, discovered by observation or experiment, suggest a given arrangement of many under one point of view; and this not merely or principally in order to facilitate the century, and the successive re-appearance of the different ancient sects from the restoration of literature to our own times.

remembrance, recollection, or communication of the same; but for the purposes of understanding, and in most instances of controlling them. In other words, all theory supposes the general idea of cause and effect. The scientific arts of medicine, chemistry, and physiology in general, are examples of a method hitherto founded on this second sort of relation.

Between these two lies the method in the fine arts, which belongs indeed to this second or external relation, because the effect and position of the parts is always more or less influenced by the knowledge and experience of their previous qualities; but which, nevertheless, constitutes a link connecting the second form of relation with the first. For in all that truly merits the name of poetry in its most comprehensive sense, there is a necessary predominance of the ideas, that is, of that which originates in the artist himself, and a comparative indifference of the materials. A true musical taste is soon dissatisfied with the harmonica or any similar instrument of glass or steel, because the body of the sound (as the Italians phrase it), or that effect which is derived from the materials, encroaches too far on the effect from the proportions of the notes, or that which is given to music by the mind. To prove the high value as well as the superior dignity of the first relation, and to evince, that on this alone a perfect method can be grounded, and that the methods attainable by the second are at best but approximations to the first, or tentative exercises in the hope of discovering it, forms the first object of the present disquisition.

These truths I have (as the most pleasing and popular mode of introducing the subject) hitherto illustrated from Shakspeare. But the same truths, namely the necessity of a mental initiative to all method, as well as a careful attention to the conduct of the mind in the exercise of method itself, may be equally, and here, perhaps, more characteristically, proved from the most familiar of the sciences. We may draw our elucidation even from those which are at present fashionable among us; from botany or from chemistry. In the lowest attempt at a methodical arrangement of the former science, that of artificial classification for the preparatory purpose of nomenclature, some antecedent must have been contributed by the mind itself; some purpose must be in view; or some question at least must have been proposed to nature, grounded, as all questions are, upon some idea of the