the validity of the external universe; and in so doing had achieved a triumph for scepticism which implied clearly enough those other victories that it was afterwards to gain in the hands of David Hume and his continental admirers and successors.

"The Scotch metaphysician took the matter up where the bishop left it, and, as it is supposed by learned philosophers, proved that the law of cause and effect was without foundation in the nature of things, and was but a prejudice, useful enough in common life, but not valid in philosophical argument. It was therefore the glory of this thinker, that he had repealed or rather disproved all real cohesion in man and nature, and made of the universe an incoherent nulliverse, a whirl of fleeting sequences, and a delirious' chase of Pan.'

"At this stage his own countrymen, Reid and others, very properly rejected his whole theory, centre, antecedents, consequents, and all, as a useless and fruitless thing, one of the entities over the number requisite for mankind; and they betook themselves to common sense, as an asylum from monstrous ratiocinations, and a heavy check to absurd principles and conclusions. Not so the continental philosophers. On the contrary, Germany produced a mind, in the person of Immanuel Kant, that thought it worth while to accept this progeny of scepticism, thus self-condemned by its fruits, and to give it grave consideration, a positive form, and a life-long education and development. It grew up into transcendentalism, a system worthy of its seed, and directly perpetuating the powers and qualities of its parent scepticism.

"The point of Transcendentalism was this, that whereas the arguments against the possibility of our seeing an external world, are unanswerable, let our world be freely conceded to consist of our own sensations, valid for us, though not for itself; time and space being 'forms of sense,' true of man, but not of objects. Furthermore, as the law of cause and effect, and several other fundamental notions, are found to have no abiding place in the surfaces of sensation, Transcendentalism says here again, These laws are the forms of thought, true for the understanding, though not for objects, and therefore you may fairly declare that they are valid within the circle of that faculty, but not to be predicated or defended beyond it. For instance, we have a right to say that the universe has a cause in God, if we thereby mean that such is the way in which our minds are obliged to think; but if we further mean that our proposition is an outward or objective fact, independent of our own minds, we become guilty of an inconsequence. It is true that we have the idea of God, but how do we prove that there is a real object existing out of us, corresponding to that idea; that there is a God as an outward or inward object of reason? May not God be only the pruritus of our own uneasy faculties?

"In a word, the upshot of Transendentalism was, to regard all sensation, knowledge, and thought as subjective, and to make the individual believe all the manifestations of God, nature, or humanity which are made in his mind, as so many presentations of his own being. In this way each man becomes shut in the case of an opaque and impenetrable selfhood, which not only absorbs and destroys all outward truth, but makes it impossible to have any confidence in the existence of our brother man. To accept these consequences is the manner in which Transcendentalism has answered scepticism!

"It will easily be seen, that on the foregoing principles Transcendentalism utterly ignores all those reasonings which are based upon the truth of outward nature, and that it shews a long list of subjects of which the investigation is declared 'impossible.' Never, in fact, did any one man proclaim so many things impossible' as Immanuel Kant to limit the human faculties was his glory; to accumulate impossibilities was

his science. Theology was impossible, and ontology especially was impossible; and, indeed, scarcely anything possible was left, saving nonentity and terminology.

"Thus metaphysics, after dreaming awhile in Berkeleyism, became rambling and delirious in Hume, and sank into confirmed idiocy or Cretinism in Kant, who, to the false movements and functions of past scepticism, gave a corresponding false organization or body, and endowed the monster with a power of propagating its kind, and filling the world with a lineage of abominable inventions."

"Now we do not think it just to charge upon Transcendentalism (whose distinctive feature is the recognition of innate ideas and a necessity of the mind for believing in more than the senses furnish any notion of ab extra) a merely sceptical tendency. Kant, it is true, does not prove the objective reality of things; he considers all such proof impossible. He confines himself within the sphere of Psychology, and leaves Ontology alone. All that can be demonstrated, according to him, is that we, by the very constitution of our nature, by the very forms of thought inseparable from our every act of consciousness, must see things so; that such and such things are realities to us, and that we abnegate our very identity when we suppose them not real. One already a sceptic, may find confirmation perhaps in this, and doubt more strongly than ever before, whether anything exists. But Kant, it seems to us, assumes that the objective reality of things is above proof, and not that they have no objective reality. He limits philosophy to the only province which to him seems practicable for it, to the ascertaining of the laws and forms of thought, assuming, not the unreality, but the existence of objects corresponding with these forms. And certainly, it has been the effect of the transcendental movement, so called in modern history, to nourish and to save much faith in higher things; it has been the antidote to scepticism, and to low utilitarian materialism. It has kindled enthusiasm, poetry, heroism, the love of liberty, of beauty, of mankind, of God. The warmest and most hopeful side of human progress has been more or less identified with it, so far as it would go. But in these last words begins its proper censure. Transcendentalism stops short with the vague and unlimited; it shrinks by an habitual tendency from any positive system; it is afraid of mathematics, afraid of mechanism, of orders and degrees; positive organic method, such as reigns in nature, it is reluctant to accept into life.

And here Dr. Wilkinson criticises it fairly. Transcendentalism, having burst the bonds of the old materialism, ought to have gone farther, and reconciled the material with the spiritual. It wanders in the vague, it hovers impracticable over the whole field of life, alighting nowhere, for the want of a science of correspondences, a doctrine of universal unity. It has dwelt so long upon the idea of the shaping mind, that it

has come to regard the mind as all, its objects nothing. It strives to forget that the individual soul is but a part among parts in a perfect whole; and that every intellectual faculty is likewise a sense,' having realities corresponding to it. We quote again:

"Thus much we feel it necessary to say to the readers of the Outlines, in rebuke of that exceedingly artful charge of materialism which the metaphysicians are so prone to make against all real views of the soul; in which views, as we said before, we fear it is the commanding reality that is repugnant, and not the materialism. For if the human mind is conversant with the gross bodies, forces, properties, and things of sensation, as it undoubtedly is; and if there is nothing in the higher faculties corresponding in palpable reality to sensation; if the understanding and the reason have no real, but only a formal validity in their ideas and conceptions; then how fearful the weight and preponderance of the five senses! They have all things on their side, with no counterbalance whatever. If, however, as we maintain, all the intellectual faculties are likewise senses, and if their objects are real, outward, forcible, and impressive, like those of the visible world, then there is some hope of an equilibrium between the inner and the outer man. In moral battles, reason may have sense with it as well as against it, and in hours of despondency, faith may find comfort in the endowment of sight.

"The failures of philosophy in the above respect, have in truth a simple root, and one which it is not difficult to discover by the light furnished in the writings of Swedenborg. Neglect of facts, internal and external, as the basis of certain very ordinary inductions,-this neglect, which Bacon came to signalize in his own day, is the source and cause of the shortcomings of metaphysicians ever since. 1. As a principal error, man has not been steadily regarded as a finite being; and consequently the investigation of forms, which is a path of fruitfulness, has been superseded by a barren quest after unformed matter, and disembodied life; both of which are necessarily inappreciable, and, finitely speaking, indeed, are non-entities. 2. God has been regarded otherwise than as given in revelation and experience, and consequently philosophical theology has had no basis, and has had no progress. 3. Nature has been limited to the phenomena presented to the senses, because its internal parts, like the human powers, have been considered divine and infinite, and consequently occult; in other words, nature has been emptied of series and degrees, and principles have consequently been deprived of their legitimate, unbroken connections, by similar means with effects and ends. These are some of the reasons for which philosophy has remained a blank, with much pretension on its side, and small human usefulness." "The writer is especially severe upon the main occupation of our impracticable philosophers, which is the study of their own consciousness.' It is a merited rebuke, and too good to be passed by:

"Yet we may, without deeply investigating the moral estate of the church, observe one fact with respect to the intellectual constitution of philosophy, which will go far to account for its inertia and incapability; we mean the lymphatic temperament it manifests,-the lazy attitude in which it performs its tasks, the easy-chair study of its own consciousness as the grand book and volume of instruction. The poor Hindoo, gazing into his navel for a resolution of difficulties, and a comprehension of mysterious things, is worthily engaged in comparison with those who are occupied year after year

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in 'probing their consciousness.' The only fact of which they are thoroughly conscious in their introspections, and which might be usefully recorded and remembered, viz., their flat ignorance of themselves, is, alas! not written among their discoveries. But what profit is there in studying a consciousness which does not involve among its conscious elements the knowledge which they seek? Or if it does involve this information, then the information is already obtained, and there is no need to seek it. We must be sorely pleplexed indeed when we do not know our own minds. "The notion of eliminating a philosophy from the analysis of consciousness, is so profoundly, so intimately absurd, that it is extremely difficult to discuss it without falling into truisms which it seems ridiculous to enunciate. The office of man is far other than at any point of his life to bring himself to a stand-still, that he may examine his own wheels and mechanism. The fact of motion, of action, of will, is the grand human potency, and this fact is necessarily abrogated to the last degree, and as far as may be, unnoticed, during the pretended examination of consciousness. The business of life, and especially of philosophy, is to alter and enlarge and improve the human knowledge or consciousness; by no means to fix its limits at any given or any possible stage. A philososophy which seeks to rivet a particular consciousness as a boundary upon the human mind, is the organon of a preposterous conceit, and would consistently nip childhood in the bud, prevent all improvement, and deny the possibility of education. Yet such a philosophy is the inevitable growth of that false view, that man is not finite but infinite, that he is a life, and not a recipient of life. "Had the latter point been thoroughly acknowledged, we should then have had before us a creation and a subject in which every thing was knowable; a universe of forms generating qualities, and adapted to uses, which was the object of science and organic philosophy in all its departments, from Theology to Cosmogony. On the other hand, the denial of form to the mind and soul, and the consequent tacit predication of infinity of both, has made knowledge cease with the senses, and the surfaces thereof, and has, in point of power and intelligence, finited man's reason in many respects to a degree much below the instincts of animals. In theology the same cause has degraded the Christian below savage tribes, and made the consolations of that Gospel which brought life and immortality to light, incomparably inferior in reality and distinctness to the poor Indian's belief in the Great Spirit and the happy hunting fields."

"In the passages which follow, (and we need not apologize for being liberal in our quotations) are many things which may be said of Fourier with not less justice than of Swedenborg. Indeed, they are said of the whole tendency of the age, and of the workings of God's truth in the minds of this generation. Let those who neglect the social problem, from the feeling that it involves too many mechanical considerations,— that there is too much mathematics in it for the mind's poetic liberty, and too much of the positive and definite for the soul that loves the infinite, and that would look down on circumstances;-let those who continually say, 'Consult your own soul, cherish the soul, meditate on God, and be all-sufficient in yourself, and let society and circumstances come round as they will; but do not begin at the wrong end-do not begin with setting the material right first;'-read and ponder well.

There is more hopeful speculation in these paragraphs than in a whole library of metaphysics :

"The reader will see at the first glance, that the work before us has a mechanical tendency, and aims at a reality of knowledge on the deepest subjects, such as the moderns themselves, often accused as they are of a mechanical spirit, would scarcely venture to hope for even in the sciences of chemistry and physics. Yet on account of this very tendency, we augur that it has a function in the busy world, and will be acceptable to its true citizens. It tells us not to be ashamed that we live in a mechanical age.' The laws of mechanics,-do not they, too, come from the infinite? May there not be superlative perfection in them as well as in any other laws? So long as the laws of the soul are unknown, how shall we be certain that the deeper analogies of mechanics are not those very laws? Let us, then, look for a moment at the privilege we enjoy, in that we are among the first to 'live in a mechanical age."

"Remark at the outset, that the question at present is not between the age of gold and the age of mechanics. Were we still living an undiseased generation, fresh from our Maker's hands, in his glorious primeval universe; at home in pure and most perfect love, in the celestial warmth of creation; reading the Word only in the works; suckled by the maternal earth, or fed with nectared fruit, in quick anticipation, by the obsequious trees; brotherhood and sisterhood, wedded love, and family nearness, the unfailing promise of a heavenly society; space not putting asunder those whom God had united ;-were we still enduring in this original estate, there can be no question how superfluous would be the officious ministrations of art; and with what well-founded composure we should repugn for ourselves the influences or offers of a mechanical age. But this first estate has gone, and it is the laziness of philosophy to regret it. That sensuality which was once the fall, has become the floor of a new heaven, and henceforth the natural man is infinite. The conditions are inverted. Natural truth has become the basis of all truth-the necessary foundation of society; and mechanical truth is the ultima ratio of natural truth. The question, then, lies between mechanics and rude, unskilled adaptations; between the casual and ignorant gratification of animal wants, and the steady maintenance and healthy expansion of the soul: between occult qualities in the sciences, abstractions in philosophy, and portentous mysteries in theology, on the one hand; and definite objects of all: degrees on the other; between the affections reduced to blind instincts, and separated by the chasms of space and time; and the same affections intellectualized, and combined naturally, and hereafter morally, into an indissoluble society, which the laws of creation, equally with the influences of the spiritual world, tend to perpetuate for ever. In a word, the dispute is between mechanics as an exponent of the inward sphere and an indication of the future time; and metaphysics, hanging in middle air over the fruitful earth, bewailing a superstitious past, dreaming of an unlikely future, and in the meantime leaving the present to the conduct of the abused spirit of mechanics. The issue is as certain as the triumph of capacity over incapacity, or as the preponderance of something over nothing.

"The first grand fruit of the mechanical spirit, is the infusion of industry into the soul of philosophy. For what is now required of philosophy! Simply this, that it shall be the Science of sciences. The mechanical spirit insists that philosophical teachings shall be equally definite and real with the facts of the senses, and the texture of positive knowledge. No umbilical contemplations, no non-sense, have the