assume and admit the existence around him of rational beings like himself, whereas such beings are by no means immediately revealed to him in consciousness?" Now let us hear him addressing an assembly of his students. "Gentlemen," said he, "collect yourselves, go into yourselves; for we have nothing here to do with things without, but simply with the inner self." Thus summoned, the auditors, we are told, appeared really to go into themselves. "Some, to facilitate the operation, changed their position and stood up; some drew themselves together and cast their eyes upon the floor; all were evidently waiting, under high excitement, for what was to follow this preparatory summons. 'Gentlemen,' continued Fichte, think the walldenken Sie die Wand.' This was a task to which the hearers were evidently all equal: they thought the wall. • Have you thought the wall?' asked the philosopher. Well then, gentlemen, think him who thought the wall.' It was curious," adds the narrator, "to see the evident confusion and embarrassment that now arose. Many of his audience seemed to be utterly unable any where to find him who had thought the wall."

As we have taken this great transcendentalist for presenting occasionally an instance of what our subject requires us to pourtray, we may continue to hear him, when he is in one of these fits, for a few moments longer. He maintains, then, “that in the perfect man the Ego disappears in the pure divine existence. That there are no longer two existences and two wills, but now one existence and one and the same will is all in all, and that this entire self-renunciation is the entrance into the higher life." He admits "that his opponents do not wish to cast aside the spirit altogether, though neither will they give up aught of the flesh;" but he neither will nor can accommodate the matter, and he maintains "that whoever would possess the one must renounce the other." He says, again, "All personal, individual being is but non-being and obstruction of the true being, and therefore unblessedness, as in the case of sensuousness. After this can we wonder at Coleridge for saying of him, when addressing persons accustomed to such philosophic language, which we may not be, that "his theory degenerated into a crude Egoismus, a boastful and hyperstoic hostility to nature, as lifeless, godless, and altogether unholy; while his religion

consisted in the assumption of a mere ordo ordinans, which we were permitted exoterice to call God; and his ethics in an ascetic mortification of natural passions and desires."

But enough of such gibberish. Let us leave all this muck, as one of our "little natural philosophers" would playfully qualify it. "There is," says a French orator, "an invincible power with which Providence has armed us to defend primordial truths against the seductions and aggressions of sophists of every description-good sense, common sense, wisdom anterior to all philosophy, surviving all systems; sense which has been well called the genius of humanity, which never deceives us.”

The main faults that seem consequent in philosophy on a rejection of common thoughts may be summed up briefly as consisting in scepticism and mysticism, or, to use other words, in what is conventionally termed rationalism and a superstitious exaggeration of the qualities to which that state of mind is opposed. Philosophy, while it agrees with common ways of thinking and admits the general convictions of mankind, can no doubt diffuse an admirable influence by the clear and noble manner in which it expresses those thoughts, and state motives for these convictions: neither you nor I pretend to compete with it there; but all that is of great value in it is common and even familiar to both of us. "These necessary truths," says Leibnitz, after enumerating them, "contain the determinative reason and the regulative principle of all existences and of the laws of the universe. I do not know how a man can render perfectly an account of his ideas otherwise than by ascending, with the unconscious instinct of mankind in general, to the first ideas of which no account can be given, that is, to the absolute attributes of God." "It is certain," says Bossuet, "that God is the primitive reason of all that exists, that He is the original truth, and that all is true in relation to his eternal idea; and Socrates said, that as the sun produces in the physical world light and life, so intellectual beings derive from the sovereign good not alone what renders them intellectual, but their being and their essence. Truth, again," says Bossuet, "must be somewhere perfectly understood. Man, whether he considers himself or extends his view on the creatures that surround him, sees every thing subjected to certain laws and to the immutable rules of truth; and he sees that he, who understands only a

part, must recognize an eternal wisdom where all law, all order, all proportion has its primitive reason; for it is absurd to suppose that there could be such a continuity in truths, such proportion in things, so much economy in their assemblage, that is, in the world, and that this continuity, this proportion, this economy should be no where perfectly understood; and man, who has created nothing and who knows only in part, ought to judge that there must be some one who knows it in its perfection, and that it must be Him who has created all things." This is admirable philosophy, but it is only the common, however latent, thought of mankind scientifically and eloquently expressed. It is only what we at the bower think. The ordinary mind of the uneducated teaches every one to say, "I do know that I live in a world which belongs to the supreme Wisdom and Goodness, who thoroughly comprehends its plan and will infallibly accomplish it; and in this conviction I rest, and am blessed." But when philosophy rejects the common thoughts, convictions, and traditions of mankind, when it scouts our views of truth taken from the Lover's Seat, the first of the two deplorable consequences which ensue is scepticism as to this great fundamental truth on which the happiness, virtue, and wisdom of life depend. Not to speak of the sophists of the last century, who directly and avowedly gave this direction to their influence, it is clear that much of the German philosophy leads to scepticism by raising problems that are superhuman, chimerical, and extravagant, and which of course it cannot solve. It ends by leaving men with the opinion of Protagoras, extended even to things known for a certainty by the common conscience of men, “Qui putet id cuique verum esse quod cuique videatur." So if I think it right to betray or wrong you, simple little creature, I am quite justified in doing so. What think you of that philosophy? How should you like to have a friend with a mind so formed? What think you of the wisdom which departs from common thoughts? It is something worse than being made uncomfortable, I think. If you wish to reply grandly, you may qualify it as a land of darkness and of dreams,—

"Oh! if all hearts were only lit like thine,

Night would not be, tho' stars should cease to shine!"

Fichte in one of his lectures reduces his hearers first to doubt

every thing; then he destroys their knowledge, and so hopes to restore them to life and reason by means of faith. "Strictly speaking," he says, "thou art not, for thou recognizest a personal existence in thyself." We are all exposed to the chance of hearing such speakers. I remember being taken when very young to a soirée in Paris where many distinguished men, disciples of Lamennais, were assembled: as the door opened, the words I heard from one of these extraordinary thinkers were these, "True, it is impossible by reason to prove the existence of God." Pretty doctrine for a common young man's ears! The sage was following up his theory about tradition and the universal reason as the only basis of knowledge. Such are the men who, by means of a half-philosophy and a whole bewilderment, esteem themselves enlightened when they deny what every ordinary person, man, woman, or child, thinks, believes, and to a certain extent acts up to. Now assuredly this result of rejecting what is common must be set down as deplorable, and a thing to be shunned as manifestly evil; for, as Roger Collard says, "One cannot allow its part to scepticism; since, as soon as it has penetrated to the human understanding, it invades it wholly. One thing is a severe circumspection; scepticism is another thing. Doubt, under certain conditions, is not only permitted but commanded by reason; but when it falls on the very legitimacy of our faculties, it no longer enlightens reason, it overthrows it."

The other consequence of wishing to be distinguished by extraordinary ways of thinking in philosophy may be said to consist in a false and irrational mysticism, which is often only a reaction proceeding from alarm or displeasure at the effects produced by the former error. Indeed, Fichte himself says that mysticism is the reaction of what he calls the third or worst age of the world against itself. "It proceeds,” he says, ́ "from deliberate opposition to the principle of this age—from dissatisfaction with the recognized emptiness and impotence of that age; and from the opinion that man can only save himself from it by means of the principle directly opposed to it, that is, by the inconceivable. Then it applies to the writings of former mystics, and often even abuses them. The more singular and the more despised these writings are the better; for, according to their principles, every thing is good in proportion as it

departs from the common prevailing spirit of the age." Then is verified, in men studious of singularity and courting it by extraordinary thoughts, what a great French author says, "That there is a kind of mysticism which involves a pusillanimous scepticism in regard to reason, and at the same time a blind faith, pushed to a forgetfulness of all the conditions imposed on human nature. Then follow systems discarding all ideas of justice, and referring all things to the fiat of an almighty power; which error the mediæval philosophers refuted, saying with St. Thomas, that we must reject the opinion of those who say all things proceed from God 'secundum simplicem voluntatem, ut de nullo oporteat rationem reddere nisi quia Deus vult;' which error they show is contrary to Scripture, where it is shown that God does all things 'secundum ordinem sapientiæ;' and which in many places contradict the error of those who say, 'omnia et simplici divina voluntate dependere Even when mysticism seems to approach the nearest to what the common consent of mankind would receive with reverence, there is reason to admire these common thoughts in accepting it in a more rational manner. "The conceit may stand," a person of common thoughts will say, "but I hope you have clothed the method in a more christianlike apparel." In most cases, however, it involves simply either the absurd or the impossible.

66

""Tis still a dream; or else such stuff as madmen
Tongue, and brain not: either both, or nothing;
Or senseless speaking, or a speaking such
As sense cannot untie."

This philosophy, in fine, is litigious of course, as Glanville says, "for storms are the products of vapours." Indeed, it is remarkable to find this character belonging to the philosophy of some of the most eminent men even among the ancients. Aristotle, for instance" as this author observes, "seems purposely to intend the cherishing of controversial digladiations by his own affectation of an intricate obscurity; he even acknowledged it when he said his Physicks were published and not so. In one place he advises his sectators to be ambiguous; and in another, to bring forth any thing that occurs rather than give way to

Advers. Gent. 87.