are within the sphere of the senses, and cognizant by them. It is, however, important to remark, whether in our philosophical inquiries we proceed from the facts of experience, or from pure principles and ideas; for only in the latter case is philosophy, in a strict sense, called transcendental. "I call all knowledge transcendental," says Kant, "which is occupied not so much with objects, as with our mode of thinking about them, in so far as this is possible, à priori; and a system of such ideas would be called transcendental philosophy, that is, a system of all the principles of pure reason."* Kant also makes a distinction in meaning between the terms transcendental and transcendent, but to enter upon this distinction would occasion too nice and too tedious a disquisition for our present purpose. As the term transcendentalism is, at the present time, much employed, it may be acceptable to some of our readers to see it explained from its original source. As to eclecticism, this is too commonly known to need explanation. Those who selected what they considered to be good and true from the various systems of philosophy, were called eclectics; Cicero was a striking example of this school, although in most things he gave the preference and the palm to Plato. Syncretism means the mixing up together of the various materials of thought, so as to construct a new system in which all thinkers may find something to admire and to adopt. To call this new school of thinking men, of which Carlyle and Emerson may be considered as the representative types, either transcendentalists, or eclectics, or syncretists, is what they would probably disclaim; but to designate them as all together, is what they would probably admit. And indeed every independent thinker is of the same school, whether he knows it or not. For does he not endeavour to form ideas by which he can see into the causes and grounds of things-he is not at rest until he transcends the sphere of the senses and comes into the aura of pure intelligence-does he not choose and select, by an eclectic process, his materials of thought for the nourishment and support of his mind, as he does his viands for the nourishment and support of his body? And does he not submit those materials to a process analogous to digestion, mixing them up together as a syncretist, extracting their principles and incorporating them, according to his peculiar genius, and powers of thought and analysis, into his own mental life and constitution? This, indeed, is the true order of mental development. That we are to prove all things, and hold fast that which is good," is a maxim which lies

66

* Ich nenne alle Erkentniss transcendental, die sich nicht so wohl mit Gegenständen, sondern mit unserer Erkentnissart von Gegenständen, so fern diese à priori möglich seyn soll, überhaupt beschäftigt.

at the root of all mental growth, and of all moral power. Every thing that sets the mind in motion, and arouses it to perception and feeling, is a great benefit, since there is nothing so pernicious as mental stagnation, and the taking up of ideas and opinions, not because we have, by the exercise of our own powers, an intuitive perception of their truth, but because they came down to us stamped with the seal of authority, or invested with the insignia of ancestral dignity. In this way the mind has been too long crippled, bandaged, and imprisoned. And the thinker, the writer, and the lecturer, who arouses us to a free and independent action of thought,-who opens the door of our prison; and who enables us to remove the bandage and to throw aside the crutch of extraneous support, and casts us upon our own resources of mental life and power within, and especially if he leads us from a slavish dependence on creeds, formulas, and externals without, to Him who is the Life and the Truth itself, and whose kingdom is within,-(Luke xvii. 20.)—such a man deserves our inmost gratitude, because he is a medium of great good to us. The Lord says, "Why even of yourselves judge ye not what is right?"-(Luke xii. 57.)-plainly to teach us that we ought to cultivate, in dependence on Him, our own powers of thought and of judgment, that we may, with the eyes of our own understanding, see what is right. To this end He hath given us those powers, and it is doubtless His divine will that we should employ them for this end. We can never enter into the kingdom of truth, until "of ourselves we judge what is right"—until we see truth from the diligent employment of our own faculties, and interiorly rejoice in its light.

Truth, however, is the great and mighty principle of all things. It is the grand substantial principium of the universe. It is the WORD by which all things are created, and by which "all things consist." He, therefore, who would convey Truth to us, must himself be principled in Truth. Now what we lack in the school in which Emerson and Carlyle are the chief teachers, are solid, broad, fixed principles of truth. There are many sparklings, flashings, and corruscations of truth in their writings and essays, which arouse us, for a time, to active thought; but which, like meteoric fires, soon become extinct, because we cannot trace them to some fixed principle whence they emanate. All the rays which lighten our day are beams of splendour, which, although night may intervene, are never lost, because we can trace them to the great source and first principle of their existence whence they comethe sun. So ought it to be with every ray of truth which strikes and enlightens the mind. We must trace it to Him who, as the Truth, enlightens every man that cometh into the world. As the world of

N. S. No. 96.-VOL. VIII.

2 M

matter depends, in the hands of Providence, upon the Sun and its wondrous forces for its preservation, and for the accomplishment of its destined uses; so the world of mind depends upon the Sun of Truth for its development and its growth in wisdom and salvation. By that universal symbolism,--the science of correspondences,—(of which Mr. Emerson spoke in his recent lecture in such' glowing terms) the mind can be guided in its search after Truth, and can rejoice in the clear perceptions of its light. But the Word of God is the Sun of the moral, spiritual, and religious world. The earth could as well dispense with the Sun on which it depends, as the mind in its relation to everything purely intellectual, moral, and religious, could dispense with the Word of God; because this is the divine medium by which love, wisdom, goodness, truth, charity, and faith-in short, by which everything holy, spiritual, and heavenly-is conveyed to us from the Lord, as the Sun of Righteousness. Swedenborg has demonstrated the divine nature and uses of the Word, has shown more clearly and more powerfully than all other theological writers from the age of the apostles, put together, in what its divinity consists. He has rescued the Scriptures from the iron grasp of rationalism, and from the scoffs of infidelity, more triumphantly than any other writer. He has consequently made the disciple of Revelation love the Bible with a loftier, holier affection, and with a veneration more profound and solemn than has ever yet been the case amongst men. He has proved it to be the great convenant of conjunction between man and his God,-the "ladder" (Gen. xxviii. 12) by which he can ascend from earth to heaven, by which the powers of hell, in all their insidious operations upon our souls, can be overcome and removed, and by which alone we can come into a blessed consociation with angels," the spirits of just men made perfect," the angelic kingdom itself. In short, he has demonstrated that we have no "spirit and life" in us but in proportion as the Word dwells within us as the universally enlightening, vivifying, and controlling principle of life. All our supposed philosophy and wisdom, derived from mere rationalism,from self-derived intelligence,-from mere worldly sources,-from the cogitations of merely natural mind, not enlightened, guided and influenced by the light of God's Word, is as a mere rushlight trembling and flickering for a moment in the beams of the meridian sun. wish to be emphatic on this point, because we feel ourselves coming in close contact with rationalism, which owes its origin partly to that strong tendency of the natural mind to seek the sources of intelligence and wisdom, not in the only fountain head-in Him who is the Truth itself as revealed in the Scriptures, but either in itself or in some

We

Egyptian territory, whose plains are watered from beneath, and where the rains of heaven never descend; and partly from the numerous false dogmas of mere human traditions, which have been fastened as the iron yoke of orthodoxy upon the oracles of God. We fear not the charge of Bibliolatry, or of an idolatry for the Bible, which is now becoming prevalent as an outcry against the disciple of Revelation. The great mission of Swedenborg was to shew the nature of the Word, as a revelation from God,-to prove its divine authority by shewing in what its life and spirit consist, and he demonstrated its imperative necessity, as the divine medium of conveying light, love, peace, and heaven to the human mind. That mission has been accomplished. The great desideratum of the age has appeared; the tide of rationalism may now be stemmed, and the powers of the mind may now be directed into the most healthy channels of intellectual and spiritual activity; instead of gravitating downwards, or centreing their ends and operations in self, they can, like the rays of light itself, radiate upwards, and concentrate themselves in the great Fountain of Truth.

Even prior to his arrival in this country, Mr. Emerson had been solicited by the literary institutions of London, Liverpool, Manchester, and other places, to give a course of lectures on the subjects peculiar to his usual train of thinking. A series of subjects on "Representative Men" was selected and announced for Liverpool and Manchester. The first, after the introductory lecture, was on "Swedenborg the Mystic," as the type of that class of thinkers and writers who dwell on the interiors of things, who enter into the penetralia of the temple of Knowledge,-who, not being satisfied with the sea-weed and scum which float on the ocean, dive into the depths and bring up the pearls and gems of beauty and lustre.

We will now adduce the substance of Mr. Emerson's Lecture, as reported in the Manchester Guardian of November 6, premising that this report contains only a very condensed abstract, consisting chiefly of objections to Swedenborg's theological writings, and omitting the numerous eulogies he pronounced on the author's great genius, his prodigious intellectual powers, his sincere piety, and his high moral character. "A colony of ordinary men," said the lecturer, "would not suffice to constitute a Swedenborg, and a number of minds is required to fathom and explore what new things he has developed, what new discoveries he has anticipated in the fields of science, in the realms of philosophy, and in the hitherto unknown regions of the spirit world."

The second lecture of Mr. Emerson, says the Guardian, its subject "Swedenborg, the Mystic," was delivered on Thursday evening, to an auditory filling the

lecture theatre of the Athenæum. The abstruse nature of the subjects treated must be taken into account, if we fail in giving a fair abstract of the lecture as a whole. Mr. Emerson said :-Among the great persons of history, it is remarkable that those who are the most near and dear to men are not of the class which the political economists call producers. A higher class, in the estimation and love of this city-building, market-going race of mankind, are the poets, who, from the intellectual kìngdom, feed the thought and imagination with ideas and pictures, which raise men out of the world of corn and money, and console them for the short-comings of the day, and the meannesses of labour and traffic. Then the philosopher also has his value, who flatters the intellect of this labourer by engaging him with subtleties, which instruct him in new faculties, and acquaint him with the light of a new sphere. But there is a class who lead us into another region,—the world of morals, the world of will. There is somewhat commanding to all men in the saint. The privilege of this class has been, that they had some nearer access to the secrets and structure of nature than other men, and that by some higher method than by experience; not by particular experiment, but by an intuition of the elements of things. The Arabians say that the mystic and the philosopher having conferred together, the philosopher, on parting, said, "All that he sees, I know ;" and the mystic, "All that he knows, I see. If he that inquires have a holy and god-like soul,-if by being brought nearer unto and assimilated to the First Cause, or original soul, by whom and after whom all things subsist, easily and naturally the soul of this man does then flow into all things, and all things flow into it; they mix; and he is present and sympathetic with their structure and laws. The religious history of all nations contains traces of the trances of saints; "the flight," Plotinus calls it, "of the alone to the alone." The Greeks called it muesis, implying the shutting of the outer eyes; whence is derived our word mystic. The trances of Socrates, Plotinus, Behmen, Fox, Bunyan, Pascal, Guyon, and Swedenborg, readily come to mind; but what as readily comes to mind is the accompaniment of disease. This shocks and "o'er informs the tenement of clay," or oftener gives a certain violent bias to the judgment. No such remarkable example of this introversion of mind has occurred in modern times as the life of Emanuel Swedenborg. This man, who appeared to his contemporaries a visionary, an elixir of moonbeams, no doubt led the most real life of any man then in the world; and now he begins to spread himself into the minds of thousands. Whilst the kings and dukes who patronised him, and at whose expense some of his works were published, have sunk into oblivion, he is beginning to rise into eminence, and to attract the attention of multitudes. [Mr. Emerson then gave the outlines of Swedenborg's biography, and enumerated his numerous and voluminous works in so many different sciences, physical and theological.]

No one man is perhaps able to judge of the merits of his works on so many subjects. His books on mines and metals are studied to this day as of the highest authority; it seems he anticipated, in various departments, the science of the 19th century; in astronomy, the discovery of the planet Herschel, and the views of modern astronomers in regard to the generation of earths by the sun. In chemistry, the atomic theory was an anticipation of Swedenborg. In anatomy, he anticipated the discoveries of Munro and Wilson; and he first demonstrated the office of the lungs. His principal work, on the animal kingdom, published in 1744, but only recently Englished by Mr. Wilkinson, of London, was written with the highest end,-to put science and the soul (long estranged) at one again. Nothing could exceed his bold and brilliant