mitted premises, was arriving, brought this school into being; they let loose instinct, as an indiscriminating bandog, to guard them against these conclusions; they tugged lustily at the logical chain by which Hume was so coldly towing them and the world into bottomless abysses of atheism and fatalism. But the chain somehow snapped between them; and the issue has been that nobody now cares about either, any more than about Hartley's, Darwin's, or Priestley's contemporaneous doings in England. Hartley's vibrations and vibratiuncles, one would think, were material and mechanical enough; but our continental neighbors have gone still farther. One of their philosophers has lately discovered that 'as the liver secretes bile, so does the brain secrete thought;' which astonishing discovery Dr. Cabanis, more lately still, in his Rapports du Physique et du Morale de l'Homme, has pushed into its minutest developments. The metaphysical philosophy of this last inquirer is certainly no shadowy or unsubstantial one. He fairly lays open our moral structure with his dissectingknives and real metal probes; and exhibits it to the inspection of mankind, by Leuwenhoek microscopes, and inflation with the anatomical blowpipe. Thought, he is inclined to hold, is still secreted by the brain; but then poetry and religion (and it is really worth knowing) are a product of the smaller intestines !' We have the greatest admiration for this learned doctor. With what scientific stoicism

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he walks through the land of wonders, unwondering; like a wise man through some huge, gaudy, imposing Vauxhall, whose fire-works, cascades, and symphonies the vulgar may enjoy and believe in, but where he finds nothing real but the saltpetre, pasteboard, and catgut. His book may be regarded as the ultimatum of mechanical metaphysics in our time; a remarkable realization of what in Martinus Scriblerus was still only an idea, that 'as the jack had a meat-roasting quality, so had the body a thinking quality,' - upon the strength of which the Nurembergers were to build a wood-and-leather man, 'who should reason as well as most country parsons.' Vaucanson did, indeed, make a wooden duck, that seemed to eat and digest; but that bold scheme of the Nurembergers remained for a more modern virtuoso."

I would not in any way weaken the force of this exposure of a mechanical and materialistic philosophy. But Carlyle, it seems to me, would be kept by precisely the same habit of mind which keeps him from seeing adequately how machinery is the means to greater freedom and spontaneity, and why democracy does not suppress individuality (though it does not keep him, on the religious side, from seeing that a miracle is a vagabond, and that there is no supernaturalism but "natural supernaturalism"), from acknowledging properly how absolutely free spirit expresses itself, and must do so, in and through the material. The parallelism of

the ideal and the material must be complete, and the legitimate and valuable investigations of the physiologists can only result in still more astonishing assurances of the physical equivalents of thought. These results may all be discounted from the beginning. Leibnitz put the whole matter in a nutshell, almost two centuries ago. "I find," he said, writing to a friend, in 1714, "that the philosophical parties are both right in a good part of that which they maintain, but wrong in what they deny. The Idealists, like Plato and Aristotle, are right, when they find the source of all things in final and formal causes; but they are wrong when they neglect the efficient and material causes and conclude as Henry More and other Platonists have done that there are phenomena which are incapable of mechanical explanation. The Materialists, on the other hand, are wrong in`engaging themselves simply with a mechanical philosophy, rejecting the metaphysical view and trying to explain everything by what affects the senses only. I flatter myself that I have penetrated to the harmony of the two realms and seen how both parties are right, if they would not exclude each other; that everything in the phenomenal world takes place at once mechanically and metaphysically, that the source of the mechanical, however, is in the metaphysical." I do not think that this statement of the case will require any immediate revision.

From all the Scotch and English and French

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mechanism and materialism, Carlyle turned to Germany, and his good friend was right in telling him that he would there find what he wanted. "From 1780 to 1830," says M. Taine, "Germany has produced all the ideas of our historic age; and for half a century still, perhaps for a whole century, our great work will be to think them out again. . . The philosophic German genius has engendered a new metaphysics, theology, poetry, and literature, and now descends into the sciences and continues its evolution. No more original spirit, more universal, more fertile in consequences of every scope and species, more capable of transforming and reforming everything, has appeared for three hundred years. It is of the same order as that of the Renaissance and of the classical age. It, like them, connects itself with the great works of contemporary intelligence, appears in all civilized lands, and is propagated with the same inward qualities, though under different forms." Wherein, continues M. Taine, does the German form of thought consist? "In the power of discovering general ideas. No nation and no age has possessed this in so high a degree as the Germans. This is their governing faculty; it is by this power that they have produced all they have done. This gift is properly that of comprehension (begreifen). By it we find aggregate or general conceptions; we reduce under one ruling idea all the scattered parts of a subject; we perceive under the divisions

of a group the common bond which unites them; we conciliate objections; we bring down apparent contrasts to a profound unity. . . . . By it the Germans have divined the involuntary and primitive logic which has created and organized languages, the great ideas which are hidden at the bottom of every work of art, the dull, poetic emotions and vague metaphysical intuitions which have engendered religions and myths. By it they have perceived the spirit of ages, civilizations, and races, and transformed into a system of laws the history which was but a heap of facts. By it they have connected God with the world, man with nature, spirit with matter, perceived the successive chain and the original necessity of the forms whereof the aggregate is the universe. . . . . In fact, all the ideas worked out for fifty years in Germany are reduced to one only, that of development, which consists in representing all the parts of a group as jointly responsible and complemental, so that each necessitates the rest and that, all combined, they manifest, by their succession and their contrasts, the inner quality which assembles and produces them. . . . . This is the doctrine which runs through the writings of the two chief thinkers of the century, Hegel and Goethe. They have used it throughout as a method, Hegel to grasp the formula of everything, Goethe to obtain the vision of everything."

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This is an admirable characterization of the es