other of which all thinking men feel themselves necessarily determined, I. That which can be known, and that which alone exists, is one thing, viz., MATTER.

II. That which may be known, and that which alone exists, is one thing, viz., MIND.

III. Two things essentially diverse and opposite exist, the one active and the other passive- MATTER and MIND; and both are known separately and independently.

IV. Matter and mind both exist, but in such necessary interaction and intercommunion that they cannot be separated, and are not separately knowable. Nothing exists truly, or is knowable, but the conjoint concrete action of these two elements of all existence.

Of these schemes the reader will at once recognise in the first the system which is usually denominated MATERIALISM. Of all schemes of the philosophy of existence, this certainly is the most unsatisfactory and absurd; for it starts with ignoring that which we know better than anything else, viz., the spiritual unity within, and ends by turning the perplexing, but certainly not orderless, multiplicity without, which we can never directly know, into a chaos. We much doubt, indeed, whether a thoroughly consistent believer in mere matter ever existed; for mere matter, as we commonly conceive it, is something that does not and that cannot originate motion. The question, then-dev apyn Tηs KimJews—whence the beginning of motion?-with which Aristotle pressed the early metaphysicians of his country, the materialist can only answer by assuming along with matter, or rather inherent in matter, a motive power or force, which altogether contradicts and annihilates the idea of matter as vulgarly conceived; and a materialist will then be, not a person who believes in mere matter, but in matter combined with blind, unintelligent, and purposeless force. Thus stated, this system, though altogether inadequate for the interpretation of the laws of a world where order is everywhere manifest, and confusion only occasional, at least takes a form which is not utterly nonsensical in the mere statement of it; and, in fact, nothing

is more easy than to point out how such a disorderly way of viewing the universe may arise. When a man's inner life has got into a habit of mere whim, freak, impulse, and ephemeral passion, and he has thus, by real experience, become acquainted with a little world of disorder within his own breast, it is not difficult, but rather extremely natural and easy, to suppose a similar chaotic state of the great world of which he is a part. Men are accustomed to make their gods after their own likeness. A confused microcosm-to borrow the phraseology of some of our old mysticswill not readily conceive, or may not willingly admit, the idea of a wellordered macrocosm. The broken surface of a troubled pool will not reflect the clear image of the one unbroken sun. An ill-governed mind and a disorderly life, joined to a loose habit of thinking and a love of paradox, will generally be found sufficient to account for the existence of a thorough and consistent system of materialism such as we have described. But the fact is, that no word is used in a more loose way than Materialism; and as the most pious pantheists are in common parlance often slumped into the same category with insane and godless atheists, so we have no doubt that many an honest thinker has been branded as a materialist, who, if his maligners had understood the meaning of their own language, would have been sent adrift floating in the limbo of an unsubstantial Spiritualism with Bishop Berkeley.

The second of the four schemes above indicated is even this Idealism, or transcendental Spiritualism, regularly associated in this country with the name of the pious Bishop of Cloyne and the long-forgotten virtues of tarwater. This philosophy, in its pure and unmixed form, is more noble than the other, but not a whit more reasonable. Using the word "mind" in the sense naturally belonging to the word, as a permanent, central, intangible force, capable of projecting ordered schemes of thought and action, to say that nothing exists but mind, is to speak mere nonsense; for the world is made up not merely of motions, but of things that move and are moved. Pure idealism, therefore, like

pure materialism, starts with a glaring contradiction to its own terms; and it is not to be supposed that a sensible and sane man would be satisfied with such a baseless phantom of a theory of the Tò övтws öv even in a dream. Professor Ferrier accordingly denies that Bishop Berkeley refused his belief to the existence of matter; he only said that it was not knowable to the mind except through the medium of ideas, and does in fact derive all its worth and all its truth from mind, just as the solid many-nurturing earth derives all its form, all its colour, all its blossom, and all its fruitage from the divine power that walks aloft in the sky, which the oldest Greeks called Hyperion, and their later children Apollo. In this sense, also, we shall see that Professor Ferrier himself is an idealist; while to materialism, and every possible form and modification of the sensuous philosophy, from Epicurus down to Locke and Condillac, he presents a front of irreconcilable and internecine hostility.

The third scheme is not the scheme of any particular school of philosophers, so much as it is everybody's scheme, and the catholic categorical declaration of common sense. It is that scheme which, in his famous article on the theory of perception, Sir William Hamilton designates natural realism, or natural dualism. According to this doctrine, the existence both of mind and matter is assumed as the great primordial fact given in the act of consciousness, which no man ever doubts of but philosophers; because philosophers are the only race of men subject to the disease of attempting to prove every thing, and who, with their feet firmly planted upon a rock, are guilty of the madness of being curious to demonstrate that they are not floating in the air. 'Tis an old story. "Nihil est tam absurdum quod non dixerit aliquis philosophorum." But, on the other hand, common sense, when pronouncing on such matters, must not be allowed to be over-conceited. Common sense was given us to judge of common matters; but surely ontology, or the science of the rò ri eiva, is not so very simple and superficial a matter, but that "vulgar

thinking" may possibly err in pronouncing definitely thereon. There are mysteries about the connection, and inter-dependence of mind and matter, which no common sense ever did explain. While, therefore, we would by no means quarrel with those philosophers who assume mind and matter as two opposite and separable entities, which we are bound religiously to believe and take cognisance of as contrary, distinct, and separate, we cannot, on the other hand, charge with any flagrant absurdity the thinker who refuses to take cognisance of matter or mind separately, but insists pertinaciously on the fact, that what we know and what we are is not so properly an opposition of two separate and contrary things, as a combined concrete action of two things contrary, indeed, but always conjoined (like the opposite poles in a magnet), inseparable, and not even to be conceived of as separate. This view of the matter is the fourth of the four schemes, and also the theory of Professor Ferrier; to whom-whatever may be thought of its valueunquestionably belongs the merit of having been the first among our Scottish metaphysicians, clearly, distinctly, and elegantly to set it forth. No doubt "vulgar thinking" will be apt to be startled at a doctrine so directly in the teeth of its dearest and most familiar dogmas; but vulgar thinking would annihilate metaphysics altogether if it could; and it is the special mission of such thinkers as Professor Ferrier to teach common sense to take in a reef from its highblown conceit, and confess, with Socrates, how much wisdom lies sometimes in a confession of ignorance. That a man of Professor Ferrier's subtlety and learning should profess himself not thoroughly satisfied with the received doctrine of the relation of mind to matter, may teach selfsatisfied Common Sense that there may possibly be more things in Heaven and Earth, and in the human brain, than are dreamt of in the philosophy of the shop and the market-place. If a mouse, capable of living in a hole, and nibbling cheese, were to project a theory of political economy, this, placed side by side with Plato's Commonwealth and Aristotle's Politics, would

present an instructive sample of the "vulgar thinking" current among mice, no doubt; but men would object to many things, and perhaps find the whole attempt ludicrous. So the "vulgar thinking" of our wisest men of the field and the forum may contain many maxims at which angels smile, and which to a god shall appear sheer delusion. There is a vulgar notion, for instance, that gravitation is a property of matter, that attractions and repulsions of all kinds are properties of matter; but when this vulgar notion comes to be analysed, it will be found that there can be no attraction without the permanent action of a force; and that a force permanently acting according to a law, is the proper function, not of matter, but of mind, even according to the ideas of "vulgar thinking" itself. There is, therefore, in the whole extent of the external world, nowhere to be found anything corresponding to that which "vulgar thinking" calls matter per se; but always and everywhere that matter is presented to us in organic combination with mind working according to a law. In other words, as old Anaxagoras saw, more than two thousand years ago, to talk of a mass of ordered An without a vous to put it into order, and to keep it in order, is just as absurd as to suppose an organ playing without wind. So in all existence and in all knowledge where "vulgar thinking" supposes that there is an object, separably and distinctly known. Professor Ferrier, as a metaphysician, says that cognition is not the mere apprehension of an object, but the result of an action between the object and the knowing mind. As when an acid is brought into contact with an alkali, it is impossible for the keen fluid ever to lay hold of the acrid solid in such a way as that the alkali shall still be an alkali, and the acid an acid-but the action of the two is only possible on the condition that both shall lose their separate identity, and co-operate towards the production of a new compound; so knowledge is not possible of a thing, but only as the product of two things which two things, for aught that we know, may be as inseparable and indispensable to one another, as the numerator is to the denominator of a

fraction. It is not the sun that gives light, when we see, nor the eye that sees; but seeing is the product of a living eye and a quickening sun, and, except as the expression of the conjunct action of these two factors, has no meaning.

Metaphysics have generally been accused of being useless; and Sir William Hamilton, in one of his massive and masterly essays in the Edinburgh Review, has favoured this idea so far, as to limit the utility of metaphysical thinking to the gymnastic which it supplies to the faculties; but in the doctrine which Professor Ferrier in this book presents, elaborated with such ingenious and erudite care, we are made familiar with a principle than which none that we know exercises a wider influence on the growth of opinion and the formation of character. The sophism of hasty generalisation has been often alluded to by logicians as the great source of error in our common reasonings; that is to say, our tendency from a few carelessly collected and inaccurately observed facts to draw sweeping conclusions, which may seem to us as a hobby-horse with which we shall override the universe. But take the other grand sophism of "vulgar thinking," which Mr Ferrier has exposed, viz., the imagination that the object of thinking is an object separate from the mind that knows it, and we shall soon see what a litter of lame Vulcans this haughty Juno, apart from her male and legitimate lord, has brought to light. A painter never pretends to give you the object which he represents-he only gives you his view of it; that is, in Professor Ferrier's phraseology, the object plus his point of view, his faculty of vision and representation-that is, notwithstanding the plus, something always considerably less than the whole object: but in our moral, political, and religious judgments of all kinds, we continually forget that the thing on which we give judgment is one thing, and the point of view from which we judge it another thing. Not that we would articulately declare ourselves infallible -we leave it to the Roman Pope to do that; but we do not deliberately and clearly see, perhaps never wish or care to see, how much the result which

we present as a purely extrinsic and objective something, is inoculated with a strange virus which comes from our own bad blood. We quietly assume that our judgment of the thing is really identical with its inmost nature and character; we drop the EGO out of the account, and calculate very valiantly that 5 — 2 is still equal to 5! Hence arises the gigantic pretence, the dogmatism, the despotism, and the intolerance of opinion in individuals, but specially in great masses and associations of men. Hence church rages against church, and dogma tramples dogma on the ground; hence the Czar of Russia styles himself the alone orthodox, and does not care to know anything of the claims of John Knox and other orthodox personages in this quarter of the world. For why? simply because they have ignored Professor Ferrier's great proposition, that all cognition is a compound of the object known and the mind which knows it; and that some fragment of every belief, not yet purged by philosophy, must be a figment of him who holds it. So much for the amount of error, which the untutored Ego may impart into cognition; but the Ego, when separated from the disturbing elements of crude passion that envelop it, is the foundation of the most important familiar truth; in which capacity also, however, it is too often disregarded, and becomes the source of another class of errors, which Professor Ferrier has, in the following passage, very forcibly and elegantly set forth.

"That the common, permanent, and necessary constituent of all knowledge should not have been brought clearly to light, and turned to good account, and had all its consequences pressed out of it long before now, is not a little remarkable. It has scarcely, however, been even enunciated certainly not emphatically dwelt upon. There cannot be a doubt that speculation, from a very early period, has aimed at the ascertainment of the immutable and universal feature which all cognitions present. It might have been expected, therefore, that the first consideration which would have occurred to the inquirer would have been this, that the factor in question must be that which we are more familiar with than we are with anything else-must be that, to find which we must have a very short way to

go. For, surely, that which we always know, and cannot help knowing, must be that which we are best acquainted with, that which lies nearest to our hand, and which may be most readily laid hold of. This reflection might have been expected to bring him to the question, What, then, is that which we are most familiar with, and cannot help knowing, during every conscious moment of our lives? And this question would have been followed, one might have thought, by the prompt answer, It is ourselves. Nevertheless, both the question and the answer were missed. The common element has indeed been

sometimes obscurely indicated, but its importance has never been sufficiently proclaimed; its fruits have never been gathered in. The words inscribed over the porch of the temple at Delphi, v TIAUTOY- -which, properly interpreted, must mean "Consider well; it is thyself, oh man, that thou art conscious of, in and along with all that comes before thee "have been oracular in vain.

"Several causes might be pointed out in explanation of this oversight they are, however, mostly, if not entirely, reducible to the one great and leading cause which has been already referred to; principle in deadening the activity and to wit, familiarity. The influence of this susceptibility of the mind is overwhelming to an extreme. Drugged with this narcotic, man's intellect turns with indifference from the common and the trite, and courts only the startling and the strange. Every one must have remarked, both in his own case and in that of others, how prone we are to suppose that little advantage, and no valuable result, can accrue from a careful study of that to which we custom," says Cicero, "makes the mind are thoroughly habituated. "Perpetual callous, and people neither admire nor require a reason for those things which they constantly behold." Rare events are the natural aliment of wonder; and, when it cannot be supplied with these, our inquisitiveness is apt to languish and expire. Abundant examples of this tendency-this proneness to prefer the unusual to the customary, and to conceive that things are marvellous in proportion to their rarity, and that the seldomer they appear the more are they entitled to our regard-might be drawn from the practice of mankind in the daily conduct of life, as well as from the history of science in all periods, but especially in the earlier stages of its development. The Science of an untutored age passes by unheeded the ordinary appearances of nature; but her interest is easily aroused, her attention is readily enchained, by such