human reason cannot pass. We have seen that the co-existence of the infinite and the finite, or the question, how it is to be explained that anything can exist which is not infinite, contains an incomprehensible element. From this primordial mystery is derived, at every step, at every stage of the human reason, corresponding obscurities. The coexistence of a supreme good and of evil is an example. This question is the first transformation of the problem of the co-existence of the infinite and the finite; and we must not, therefore, be surprised at the obscurities which it involves, since, touching immediately upon the generative source of all other mysteries, it falls within the thickest shadows which that mystery of mysteries casts."-History of Philosophy, vol. i, p. 244.

Unable to explain the origin of evil, men have attempted to escape from the difficulty by persuading themselves that it has no existence. The Vedantist takes refuge in the bosom of the Infinite, and declares all else illusion. Valentinus, a Gnostic pantheist, taught that evil is but good taking a false direction, and striving after something higher than the limitations of its nature permit it to attain. According to Manes, evil impels beings toward goodness, and therefore contains some portion of good, by which its power, like that of a house divided against itself, is diminished, and will be at last overthrown. The Alexandrians assert that "the world is perfect, everything is good. Evil is nothing but the inequality of souls, or the manifestation of that inequality." Several of the Christian fathers deny the positive existence of evil, and regard it either as the privation or the imperfection of good. Augustine declares that "everything which is, is good; and evil, of which I sought the origin, cannot be a substance." Ambrose says, "Evil is only the destitution of good." According to Dionysius, "evil can exist only as something not absolutely evil, as containing some portion of good, which is all there is positive." The modern optimists take a still bolder position, and contend that evil is such only in appearance; and that, really and actually, it is absolute good. Seeming evil is neither more nor less than a means of producing some positive good which never could be realized without it.

"All discord, harmony, not understood;
All partial evil, universal good."

Now revelation, though it declines to answer our inquiries as to the origin of evil, emancipates us from these and kindred errors. Everywhere in the sacred writings, from the history of the expulsion of our first parents, and the placing of "cherubims and a flaming sword which turned every way, to keep the way of the tree of life," down to the prediction that Satan "shall go out to deceive the na

tions which are in the four quarters of the earth, Gog and Magog, to gather them together to battle" against the saints, evil is recognized as something positively existing, which disturbs the order and harmony of the world, and which, being hostile to the will of God, and destructive to his creatures, he requires men to subdue. No clear knowledge of the destiny of men after the present life was ever attained by the ancient philosophers. The salvation promised by the Brahminical teachers to those who should conform to the precepts of the Vedas was a virtual annihilation; for absorption of the soul into God, which was the highest aim of their religion and science, necessarily implied the utter extinction of individual consciousness. Plato's principal argument in favor of a future life rested on a false theory of man. Concisely stated, it runs thus: The divine substance is imperishable; the soul of man, being united to ideas of which God is the substance, partakes of that substance; therefore the soul is imperishable. The error lies in the minor proposition. Cicero, who loved to contemplate the doctrine of immortality, admitted that he was able to believe it only when all the arguments in its favor were present in his mind at the same time. These sages failed to exalt the undefined and feeble hope of an endless existence, which, whether obtained by intuition or derived from primitive tradition, seems to have been almost universal among men, into anything like that invincible belief which might be called the "full assurance of faith." Even the earlier revelations throw but an uncertain light into the abyss of futurity, and lay but an insecure foundation on which to build the doctrines of the resurrection and immortal life. The rewards promised, in the Old Testament, to the good, and the punishments denounced against the wicked, generally relate to the present world. A numerous sect among the Jews, at the time of our Saviour, though they professed faith in the Hebrew Scriptures, denied the existence of spirits and the possibility of a resurrection. But in the New Testament every doubt on these subjects is set at rest. That truth which philosophy had toiled in vain, through long centuries, to demonstrate, awaited the sublime confirmation, pregnant with hope and fear, that "all that are in the graves shall hear His voice, and shall come forth; they that have done good, unto the resurrection of life, and they that have done evil, unto the resurrection of condemnation."

The doctrine of future retributions for the deeds of the present life has a profound significance. It implies a plan and purpose, conceived in the Infinite Mind, in the accomplishment of which men are the agents of God in this world. Rewards and punish

ments in a future life would be incomprehensible on any other supposition, than that a portion of mankind perform their part of some work which God has assigned to the human race, and thus obey the divine will by helping forward the divine purpose; while another portion either neglect their allotted work, or act in opposition to the divine plan.

Here a new problem is presented for solution. What is the destiny of the human species in time; or, so far as the present world is concerned, what is the final cause of the continued existence of the race? What has humanity gained by its ceaseless and laborious efforts? What may it hope to gain hereafter? What means this wonderful fact which we call civilization? Does human activity contribute to its progress, and improve its condition? If so, according to what law; and how far may the improvement extend? In a word, we have here the problem of humanity, the solution of which is the end and aim of the philosophy of history.

Man may be compared to a projectile, whose path and strikingpoint the mathematician proposes to investigate; or, changing the figure, he is a planet, whose orbit the astronomer seeks to determine. Within a year from the discovery of Uranus by the elder Herschel, Lalande calculated, with a close approximation to truth, the position, form, magnitude, and period of its entire ellipse. By observing the motion of the new planet, while it was passing through a few degrees of its curve, he obtained data from which he deduced the elements of its orbit. So, by observing the progress of humanity, as far as the records and monuments of its activity permit, philosophy endeavors to ascertain some fundamental facts and laws, which may serve as the basis of a generalization wide enough to embrace all the phenomena of history. Could such a generalization be made, we should have an inductive philosophy of humanity. But the author of the article which stands third on our list of titles, in whom we recognize a profound thinker as well as an elegant writer, has clearly shown that the difficulties of this problem are insuperable by the inductive method. The observer traces the footsteps of humanity but a short distance, before he discovers that its path is neither a straight line nor a simple curve, but a curve of double curvature, with involutions and evolutions so numerous and complicated as to transcend the powers of analysis. Add to this, that the phases of humanity are perpetually changing. We are unable to mark its lineaments with accuracy, because they are seen, not only in remote perspective, but also from an unstable standpoint. As the true and apparent motions of the planets, when seen from the earth, do not correspond to each other; so, in the still

more complicated movements of society, the seeming retrogradation may be an actual advance. Again, the observer of humanity is bewildered and disheartened by the multiplicity and complexity of the objects which claim his attention. These are nothing less than all the products of human thought and action;-religion and morals; politics and war; philosophy and literature; science and art; manners, customs, and laws; opinions, sentiments, and passions; in a word, the universal history of the species. And finally, copious as are the sources of information on all these subjects, they are still exceedingly defective, and present views of men and nations which are often partial, and always indistinct.

Discouraged by these difficulties, philosophers have either abandoned the problem as hopelessly insolvable, or sought to magnify some particular fact into a universal principle that might serve. them as a nucleus and centre, toward which all other facts should gravitate, and around which they should revolve. Hence the slender success which has attended this department of philosophy, and the unsubstantial theories of humanity which have been proposed.

The reviewer, already referred to, has left us nothing to say of Herder's scheme of man's perfectibility, nor of Hegel's theory of the progress of human freedom; both of which he has refuted with signal ability. He has also exposed the fallacy of that part of Herder's earlier theory, which made the progress of humanity analogous to the different ages in the life of an individual. But we understand him to assent to another part of the same theory, which may be expressed in the poetic formula,

"Westward the star of empire takes its way;"

not indeed as the central idea of history, but as an interesting and important historical fact. We believe that this opinion is popular, especially in America. A few years since, we heard the doctrine expounded before a learned society, in an address which appeared to be well received. The exposition was briefly as follows. That product of man's intellectual, moral, and physical activity, which we call civilization, has a westward and nearly circular movement of undulation. Starting into life in the remote east, in the land of Lao Tseu and Confucius, it gradually extended to India, Persia, and Egypt. From Egypt the great tide-wave took a lateral direction to Greece; thence it moved on to Rome, and from Rome to western Europe, where it is now high tide. From Europe the undulation will sweep across the Atlantic to the American continent, which is destined to be the theatre of its syzygystic altitude. Afterward, proceeding onward to the islands of the Pacific, or to a new

continent, which some geological catastrophe may upheave from the bosom of that ocean, and of which those islands will be the mountain summits, its cycle complete, it will revisit the land of its origin, and the world's great year begin anew.

Of course the reviewer is not responsible for so fanciful a scheme as this; but though it out-Herders Herder, it is only a generalization based upon the assumed fact, that there was a development of the human mind in China anterior to that in India, in India before Persia, and in Persia before Egypt. This order of succession, so far as we have been able to learn, has never been proved from history. The reverse seems equally probable; and a simultaneous development in those countries may be regarded as the most probable of all. Moreover, how are we to account for the reflex current to Alexandria in the second century of our era; and to Constantinople in the fourth; and from France and England to Germany in recent times? And why, at the present moment, is the reaction of European civilization more strongly felt in the remote provinces of the Ottoman Empire, and even on the banks of the Ganges, than its direct influence in poor fallen Spain?

This undulatory theory, whether we regard it as the expression of a great historical fact, or the key to the problem of humanity, opens no vista of hope to the race. Successive segments of mankind emerge from barbarism for a time, but the force which raised them up, passes by, and they sink down again into barbarism.

The theory of Cousin is far more profound and philosophical, but, when pushed to its consequences, not much more cheering. He makes humanity pass through three epochs, corresponding to the idea of the infinite, the idea of the finite, and the idea of the relation between the two. Having exhausted its cycle, it returns to its starting-point to go through the same eternal round, again and again, reproducing, with endless toil, the same series of ideas, and reconstructing the same civilizations.*

By this theory the individual is swallowed up and lost in the species, and both in God. So far as the movements of the race are concerned, the will of the individual, directed by his own personal and reflective reason, can accomplish nothing. The spontaneous and impersonal reason, that is to say, the Infinite Intelligence itself, urges round the ponderous wheel on which humanity is placed as in a tread-mill, and by the irresistible motion of which, every man, whether he will or not, is impelled onward. This system has been called, and we think not inappropriately, a refined rationalistic pantheism. Though the author declares himself the

* See Introduction to the History of Philosophy, by Victor Cousin.