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indeed, by which the thinking principle is designated in all languages bears evidence to the inveteracy of the superstition that the conception of mind might be formed by conceiving a material substance of extreme fineness and tenuity. Many circumstances have conspired to keep this fanaticism in life. The supposed visibility of ghosts helps it on considerably; and it is still further reinforced by some of the fashionable deliraments of the day, such as clairvoyance and (even A. D. 1854, credite posteri!) spirit-rapping. These, however, are not to be set down-at least so it is to be hoped-among the normal and catholic superstitions incident to humanity. They. are much worse than the worst form of the doctrine of materiality. These aberrations betoken a perverse and prurient play of the abnormal fancy-groping for the very holy of holies in kennels running with the most senseless and god-abandoned abominations. Our natural superstitions are bad enough; but thus to make a systematic business of fatuity, imposture, and profanity, and to imagine, all the while, that we are touching on the precincts of God's spiritual kingdom, is unspeakably shocking. The horror and disgrace of such proceedings were never even approached in the darkest days of heathendom and idolatry. who make shattered nerves and depraved sensations the interpreters of truth, the keys which shall unlock the gates of heaven, and open the secrets of futurity --ye who inaugurate disease as the prophet of all wisdom, thus making sin, death, and the devil, the lords paramount of creation-have ye bethought your selves of the backward and downward course which ye are running into the pit of the bestial and the abhorred? Oh, ye miserable mystics! when will ye know that all God's truths and all man's blessings lie in the broad health, in the trodden ways, and in the laughing sunshine of the universe, and that all intellect, all genius, is merely the power of seeing wonders in common things!"

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What say you to this, gentle reader? Surely the man that wrote these sentences has blood in his veins; and that's more, one sometimes thinks, than could be said of Aristotle. Professor Ferrier, indeed, seems in his whole make and type to fraternise more largely with Plato than with the Stagyrite. What a fine compliment to the grand architect of the ideal philosophy is paid in the following short passage:

Not

"Nevertheless, if Plato was confused and unsystematic in execution, he was large in design, and magnificent in surmise. His pliant genius sits close to universal reality, like the sea which fits in to all the sinuosities of the land. a shore of thought was left untouched by his murmuring lip. Over deep and over shallow he rolls on, broad, urbane, and unconcerned. To this day all philosophic truth is Plato rightly divined; all philosophic error is Plato misunderstood."

But there are other things about Plato, in Mr Ferrier's book, well worthy of very serious consideration. What, for instance, will Professor Thomson of Cambridge, and his brother Platonists, say to the following exposition of the dooŋròv and the VonTóv?

"We have had expositors of Plato, commentator after commentator, talking of their great master's super-sensible world as something very sublime-something very different from the sensible world in which the lot of us poor ordinary mortals is cast-insinuating, moreover, that they had got a glimpse of this grand supramundane territory. Rank impostors. Not one of them ever saw so much as the

fringes of its borders; for there is no such world for them to see; and Plato never referred them to any such incomprehensible sphere. This terra incognita is a mere dream-a fable, a blunder of their own invention. Plato's intelligible world is our sensible world. We shall see byand-by in the ontology that this announcement may require a very slight modification, but one so slight that meanbroadest terms, that Plato's intelligible while it may be proclaimed, in the just the material universe which we see or super-sensible is our sensible worldand hear and handle: this, and nothing but this, is Plato's ideal and intelligible home. But then, his sensible world must be moved a peg downwards. It must be thrust down into the regions of nonsense. It must be called, as we have properly called it, and as he certainly meant to call, and sometimes did call it, the nonsensical world, the world of pure infatuation, of downright contradiction, of unalloyed absurdity; and this the whole material universe is, when divorced from the element which makes it a knowable and cogitable thing. Take away from the understood the element which renders it understandable, and nonsense must remain behind. Take away from the intelligible world-that is, from the

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system of things by which we are surrounded the essential element which enables us, and all intelligence, to know and apprehend it, and it must lapse into utter and unutterable absurdity. It becomes not nothing-remember thatnot nothing, for nothing, just as much as thing, requires the presence of the element which we have supposed to be withdrawn; but it becomes more than nothing, yet less than anything; what the logicians term 'an excluded middle.' The material world is not annihilated when the intelligible element is withdrawn-as some rash and shortsighted idealists seem inclined to suppose. Very far from that but it is worse, or rather better, than annihilated: it is reduced to the predicament of a contradiction, and banished to the purgatory of nonsense."

Before concluding, we must make one remark on a phasis of Professor Ferrier's philosophy, not the least important in a practical point of view,-we mean the remarkably concrete and real character which it presents. The shallow conclusion, from a first glance at the Professor's book, that some persons may have made-viz., that he is a transcendental idealist, who will have nothing to do with matterwill be sufficiently checked by the following extract:

"It may be proper at this place to remark, parenthetically, that the discussion respecting matter per se is interesting and important, not so much on account of any conclusion as to the independent existence or non-existence of matter which the inquiry may lead to, as on account of the truths in regard to knowing and thinking which the research brings to light. Philosophers have been too apt to overlook this consideration, and to suppose that the main object of the research was to prove something either pro or con respecting material existence. That, however, is a point of very secondary importance, and one which, at the outset, ought not to be attended to at all. The inquiry should be gone into as if it were merely the smelting process, by which the most secret and essential laws of cognition and of thought are to be extricated from the dross of ordinary opinion, and submitted to the attention of mankind. Viewed in this light, the importance of the discussion cannot be too highly estimated. The agitation of no other question can make known to us the fundamental laws of all knowledge-the binding necessities of all

reason.

If any other topic will answer this purpose, let it be announced: philoVOL. LXXVII.-NO. CCCCLXXII.

sophers will very readily proceed to its examination. Would people inquire directly into the laws of thought and of knowledge, by merely looking to knowledge or to thought itself, without attending to what is known, or to what is thought of? Psychology usually goes to work in this abstract fashion; but such a mode of procedure is hopeless, -as hopeless as the analogous instance by which the wits of old were wont to typify any particularly fruitless undertaking,-namely, the operation of milking a he-goat into a sieve. No milk comes in the first instance, and, even that the sieve will not retain! There is a loss of nothing twice over. Like the man milking, the inquirer obtains no milk in the first place; and, in the second place, he loses it, like the man holding the sieve. Modern wit has not equalled that intolerable jest, which describes exactly the predicament of our psychologists, in their attempts to ascertain the laws of thinking and knowing, by merely looking to these, considered as mental operations. Our Scottish philosophy, in particular, has presented a spectacle of this description. Reid obtained no result, owing to the abstract nature of his inquiry; and the nothingness of his system has escaped through the sieves of all his successors. They drag for abstractions in nets composed of abstractions; and, consequently, they catch very few fish. If we would avoid this termination to our toils; if we would protect ourselves against the unpleasantness of losing no result twice over, we must go to work in a very different way. It is of no use inquiring into the laws of knowing and thinking, considered as abstract operations. We must study the contents, and not the mere form of knowledge; for the form without the contents, the law without that which the law determines,-is elusory as the dream of a shadow. We must ask, and find out, what we know, and what we think ;-in other words, we must inquire whether matter per se be what we know or think, or whether we have not, all along, been practising an imposition upon ourselves in imagining that this was what we knew, when, in truth, this was not what we knew. If any important conclusions are to be reached, the concrete, and not the abstract, must be the object of our investigation, and this is what these Institutes have endeavoured to keep constantly in view."

In these observations is brought out a point of the utmost importance for all metaphysical inquirers. "They drag for abstractions in nets composed

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of abstractions; and, consequently, they catch very few fish." We would have this sentence written in letters of gold on the frieze of every metaphysical professor's hall. By all means, Mr Ferrier, let us have done with abstractions! If we are to have a reasoned system of first principles, let it be a system of the principles of our whole life in this complex order of things, not merely of one-half of it, imagined as separate from that from which it never is separated. From this distinct recognition of the essentially concrete nature of all knowledge, we anticipate the greatest benefits to metaphysical science. Under this form, it will no longer insist on standing alone, as it were, on a haunted tower, holding grey communion with itself, and with the ghosts of its own conceit; but it will go forth lustily, and lend itself to poetry, and history, and art, inhabited, like the eloquence of Plato, by the very soul of music, and clad with the beauty of green fields. We hope, also, at no distant day, from the fair promise of the present volume, to see Professor Ferrier engaged in a work affording a larger field for "concrete" philosophy than the subtle discussion of the present volume presents. We have already said that he wields the pen gracefully, and that he is anything but a dry bloodless speculator, a mere metaphysician;'

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which, like a mere mathematician, a mere lawyer, a mere theologian, a mere scholar, or a mere anything else, is a monster always with a most religious instinct to be shunned. Would Professor Ferrier, who evidently reads Greek-not at all a necessary accomplishment in a Scotch professor of Moral Philosophy-perhaps be so kind as work out for us an elegant exposition of the philosophy of Plato in its principles and its applications? Or shall we still be indebted for all our good books, on such subjects, to the Germans, with their eternal prosy interminable tomes, and complex overladen sentences, the very aspect of which in a healthy-minded Briton produces horror? Shall it be said that philosophical scholarship is to be found nowhere within the bounds of broad Scotland, save in the brain of Sir William Hamilton? After two such names as Dr ADAMS of Banchory, and Colonel MURE, may not Scottish scholarship at length aspire to rise from those "grammatic flats and shallows" in which it has been floundering, and dare to wing its way into those higher regions of thoughtful learning which have hitherto been swept almost exclusively by birds of German feather? Is it altogether beyond the power of our five universities to produce a STAHR, a BRANDES, or a SCHLEIERMACHER?

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SCHAMYL AND THE WAR IN THE CAUCASUS.

THE question has doubtless ere this been asked, How could it for a moment have entered into the heads of any of her Majesty's Ministers, that it was possible to remodel the constitution of the country by a new Reform Bill, and at the same time, by way of a light employment between its heavy readings, to conquer the Russian empire, a distance on the surface of which may be measured equal to half the diameter of the world at least, with a contingent of some twenty-five thousand men? The only answer to such a question must be, that Russia's powers of resistance have been greatly underrated, or at least that they have been measured by her apparent powers of aggression. And her powers of aggression have been measured by her inability to completely subdue a little mountainous corner of her vast dominions. It is quite true-while Russia was in amity with the Western powers, while England was busy spinning cotton and France was busy settling and unsettling her domestic affairs, as she is wont when she has nothing better to do, just as fastidious housekeepers move their furniture and rehang their pictures, never satisfied with the last arrangement-that all this time the whole military power of this monster empire, unbroken and undistracted, was kept at bay year after year by a ridge of mountains, and a handful of semi-barbarous tribes garrisoning them. And this fact appears the more surprising when we consider that the Caucasus has been for a long time nothing more than a large fortress completely invested, having Russian land to the north and south of it, and Russian lakes to the east and west of it; nor even thus a compact fortress, but a long line requiring defence cut through the middle by the pass of Dariel, and dividing diagonally the trapezoid figure formed by a line drawn from the

Caspian to the Black Sea on the north, by the coast of the Caspian on the east, by the coast of the Black Sea on the west, and the Russian province of Georgia on the southwest and south, and thus assailable by sea or by land by a power possessing the resources of both, in every part of it.

Nor must it be forgotten that Russia has long established her garrisons in the outer works of this great fortress; that many of its original defenders have succumbed to her, and co-operated with her have even against their neighbours; and that it is only, as it were, the central keep or natural donjon which has held out in so If we exaunparalleled a manner. mine the conditions which have made such a state of things possible, our attention is primarily directed to two facts. The first is the easy defensibility of a country which is both mountainous and wooded; the second is the overwrought and uncompromising religious fanaticism of the inhabitants.

Now, it appears that there is but one way of effectually subduing a country that is both mountainous and wooded. This is to pierce the mountains with military roads and destroy the bush. But as the country must be subdued to a great extent before either of these measures can be taken, we are reminded of a means of birdcatching familiar to all nurseries. That even mountains comparatively bare present great military obstacles, has been abundantly proved, as they constitute natural fortresses of the very strongest kind-the deficiencies of which, where they exist, the very rudest kind of art is capable of supplying.

Nowhere do we get a better notion of this than in the picturesque narrative of Xenophon, where he describes the march of the Ten Thousand through the mountains of Kurdistan before they debouched on the wintry table

Schamyl als Feldherr, Sultan und Prophet und der Caucasus.
Völker und Länder Kaucasiens. Von Dr FRIEDRICH WAGNER.
Die Kaukasischen Länder, mit Illustrationen und Karte,
Leipzig.

Schilderungen der Carl B. LORCK, in Leipzig, 1854.

lands of Armenia. Wherever there is a defile there are heights above it. The army must march through the defile, and the heights are in possession of the enemy; so it is necessary to storm the heights, in the face of all opposition, before the defile can be used; and even in case of the best success, when the heights are stormed and the main army has safely passed-unless the storming party are prepared to occupy the heights for ever-they must expect annoyance in retiring, as the enemy will probably immediately occupy the vantage-ground they have left. But difficult as it may be for a military power to act in a bare mountain country, this difficulty is incalculably increased by the existence of woods. In naked mountains, the enemy, though often difficult of access, may be found when looked for, and attacked; for where one man can climb, another can. Nor are even caverns an efficient protection, as a poor North African tribe once found to their cost, when, as has probably happened in more instances than one, they were smoked out. But it is otherwise in the case of woods. This any one who has been in the habit of fox-hunting may judge of from his own experience. Every sportsman knows the average extent of the largest covers, and how small they appear in comparison with a genuine continental wood. He also knows that he may have the bad luck to be kept in one a whole day, galloping in every direction, forwards, backwards, and sideways, pushing through thickets, plunging through quagmires, with his horse all thorns, and sweat, and excitement, pricking up his own ears at all kinds of strange noises which give alternate hope and disappointment, till at last his temper fails, and he begins to think Lord Chesterfield right, who, when asked why he did not go hunting, replied, "I have been." this will give no bad notion of Now, what war must be in the bush; the only difference being-and that no slight one, even to the strongest nerves that each party is pursuer and pursued. It is hunting an enemy, who will never break cover if he can help it, for the good reason, that his means both of offence and defence

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consist in keeping close to it, added before or behind, and a puff of smoke to the occasional whistle of a ball from from some tree or other; and as there may screen the next assailant. Thus, are trees everywhere, any one of them with instances of regular forces being as we should expect, history abounds bewildered and cut off in woods by irregular, who of course are the best suited to this kind of work. Besides most striking of which was the mismany modern instances, one of the damme, in a cul-de-sac of wooded fortune of the French general Vanhills at Culm in Bohemia, we have invention of firearms; such as the an abundance of such cases before the loss of the Athenian force,under Demosthenes the general, in the woods of Etolia; the defeat of the Roman army at the Caudine Forks; and the destrucphalian forest, which was part of that tion of the legions of Varus in the WestHercynian wood which then covered the face of half Germany. But supposing the wood to be on even ground, and of limited extent, it is possible to clear it of the enemy, by a line of skirmishers advancing across it. Not so covered ridge, and extends far away when it climbs the side of a snowgreatest condition of difficulty to an over the horizon. This is perhaps the attacking army; and it is with this that the Russians have had to contry of such a nature, it requires no tend in the Caucasus. With a coungreat amount of courage in the defending courage and resolution in the deers to give much trouble. But supposfenders superadded to the difficulties of the ground, the unequal nature of the contest is increased, and we do not wonder that, in this way, mere handfuls of men have often put to flight large battalions. striking case of this that occurs to us The most land, in which a large body of Austrian was the battle of Morgarten in Switzerthousands, was attacked and discommen-at-arms, amounting to some fited by a few hundred herdsmen of Schwytz, Uri, and Unterwalden. To arrive at Schwytz from the plain country of Switzerland, it was necessary the shore of the Lake of Egeri, at the for the invading army to pass along end of which they found the passage closed by a wooded mountain dipping

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