ment to our immediate relatives and friends, who from this intercommunity of thoughts and feelings may more truly be said to be a part of ourselves than from even the ties of blood. Moreover, a man must be employed more usually in providing for his own wants and his own feelings than those of others. In like manner he is employed in providing for the immediate welfare of his family and connexions much more than in providing for the welfare of those who are not bound by any positive ties. And we accordingly find that the attention, time, and pains bestowed on these several objects give him a proportionable degree of anxiety about, and attachment to his own interest, and that of those connected with him; but it would be absurd to conclude that his affections are therefore circumscribed by a natural necessity within certain impassable limits, either in the one case or the other. It should not be forgotten here that this absurd opinion has been very commonly referred to the effects of natural affection as it has been called, as well as of self-interest; parental and filial affection being supposed to be originally implanted in the mind by the ties of nature, and to move round the centre of selfinterest in an orbit of their own, within the circle of our families and friends. This general connexion between the habitual pursuit of any object and our interest in it, will account for the well-known observation, that the affection of parents to children is the strongest of all others, frequently overpowering self-love itself. This fact does not seem easily reconcilable to the doctrine that the social affections are all of them ultimately to be deduced from association, or the reputed connexion of immediate selfish gratification with the idea of some other person. If this were strictly the case we must feel the strongest attachment to those from whom we had received, instead of those to whom we had done, the greatest number of kindnesses, or where the greatest quantity of actual enjoyment had been associated with an indifferent idea. Junius has remarked that friendship is not conciliated by the power of conferring benefits, but by the equality with which they are received and may be returned.

I have hitherto purposely avoided saying any thing on the subject of our physical appetites and the manner in which they may be thought to affect the principle of the foregoing reasonings. They evidently seem at first sight, to contradict the general conclusion which I have endeavoured to establish, as they all of them tend either exclusively or principally to the gratification of the individual, and at the same time refer to some future or imaginary object, as the source of this gratification. The impulse which they give to the will is mechanical, and yet this impulse, blind as it is, constantly tends to and coalesces with the pursuit of some rational end. That is, here

is an end aimed at, the desire and regular pursuit of a known good, and all this produced by motives evidently mechanical, and which never impel the mind but in a selfish direction: it makes no difference in the question whether the active impulse proceed directly from the desire of positive enjoyment, or a wish to get rid of some positive uneasiness. I should say then that, setting aside what is of a purely physical nature in the case, the influence of appetite over our volitions may be accounted for consistently enough with the foregoing hypothesis, from the natural effects of a particularly irritable state of bodily feeling, rendering the idea of that which will heighten and gratify its susceptibility of pleasurable feeling, or remove some painful feeling, proportionably vivid, and the object of a more vehement desire than can be excited by the same idea, when the body is supposed to be in a state of indifference, or only ordinary sensibility to that particular kind of gratification. Thus the imaginary desire is sharpened by constantly receiving supplies of pungency, from the irritation of bodily feeling, and its direction is at the same time determined according to the bias of this new impulse; first, indirectly by having the attention fixed on our own immediate sensation; secondly, because that particular gratification, the desire of which is increased by the pressure of physical appetite, must be referred primarily and by way of distinction to the same being, by whom the want of it is felt, that is, to myself. As the actual uneasiness which appetite implies can only be excited by the irritable state of my own body, so neither can the desire of the correspondent gratification subsist in that intense degree, which properly constitutes appetite, except when it tends to relieve that very same uneasiness by which it was excited, as in the case of hunger. There is in the first place the strong mechanical action of the nervous and muscular systems co-operating with the rational desire of my own belief, and forcing it its own way. Secondly, this state of uneasiness grows more and more violent, the longer the relief which it requires is withheld from it: hunger takes no denial, it hearkens to no compromise, is soothed by no flattery, tired out by no delay. It grows more importunate every moment, its demands become larger the less they are attended to. The first impulse which the general love of personal ease receives from bodily pain will give it the advantage over my disposition to sympathise with others in the same situation with myself, and this difference will be increasing every moment, till the pain is removed. Thus, if I at first, either through compassion or by an effort of the will, am regardless of my own wants, and wholly bent upon satisfying the more pressing wants of my companions, yet this effort will at length become too great, and I shall be incapable of attending to any thing but the violence of my 161

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own sensations, or the means of alleviating them. It would be easy to show from many things that mere appetite (generally, at least, in reasonable beings) is but the fragment of a self-moving machine, but a sort of half organ, a subordinate instrument even in the accomplishment of its own purposes; that it does little or nothing without the aid of another faculty to inform and direct it. Before the impulses of appetite can be converted into the regular pursuit of a given object, they must first be communicated to the understanding, and modify the will through that. Consequently, as the desire of the ultimate gratification of the appetite is not the same with the appetite itself, that is mere physical uneasiness, but an indirect result of its communication to the thinking or imaginative principle, the influence of appetite over the will must depend on the extraordinary degree of force and vividness which it gives to the idea of a particular object; and we accordingly find that the same cause which irritates the desire of selfish gratification, increases our sensibility to the same desires and gratification in others, where they are consistent with our own, and where the violence of the physical impulse does not overpower every other consideration.

MADAME DE STAËL'S ACCOUNT OF GERMAN PHILOSOPHY AND LITERATURE.

[Feb. 3, 1814.

The Morning Chronicle.] The most interesting part of Madame De Staël's very ingenious and elegant work on Germany is undoubtedly (to literary readers) that in which she has sketched with so much intelligence and grace, the present state of opinions with respect to philosophy and taste in that country. I have not yet seen any satisfactory abstract of her reasonings on either of these subjects. The article in The Edinburgh Review touches but lightly and incidentally on them, from the variety and pressure of other topics of a more lively and general interest. I shall attempt to supply this deficiency, and at the same time to offer some farther thoughts on each subject. The two points on which I wish to enlarge are the view which Madame De Staël takes of German poetry, as contrasted with the French, and secondly of the spirit and principles of the German philosophy, that of Professor Kant, as opposed to the French system of philosophy which is not indeed peculiar to them as a nation, but common to the age. I shall begin with the last first, not only because it is perhaps the most important, but because I think that as the English were the first to propagate the latter system (for the French have only adopted it from us, carrying

its practical and popular application farther), we ought not to be the last to disclaim and explode it. It may not be uninteresting as a branch of national literature, to take a general view of the rise and progress of their philosophy, before we come to examine Madame De Staël's account of the system which Kant has opposed to it, and to shew in what that system is well founded, and where it fails.

According to the prevailing system,-I mean the material or modern philosophy, as it has been called, all thought is to be resolved into sensation, all morality into the love of pleasure, and all action into mechanical impulse. These three propositions taken together, embrace almost every question relating to the human mind, and in their different ramifications and intersections form a net, not unlike that used by the enchanters of old, which, whosoever has once thrown over him, will find all farther efforts vain, and his attempts to reason freely on any subject in which his own nature is concerned, baffled and confounded in every direction.

This system, which first rose at the suggestion of Lord Bacon, on the ruins of the school-philosophy, has been gradually growing up to its present height ever since, from a wrong interpretation of the word experience, confining it to a knowledge of things without us; whereas it in fact includes all knowledge, relating to objects either within or out of the mind, of which we have any direct and positive evidence. We only know that we ourselves exist, the most certain of all truths, from the experience of what passes within ourselves. Strictly speaking, all other facts of which we are not immediately conscious, are such in a secondary and subordinate sense only. Physical experience is indeed the foundation and the test of that part of philosophy which relates to physical objects: farther, physical analogy is the only rule by which we can extend and apply our immediate knowledge, or infer the effects to be produced by the different objects around us. But to say that physical experiment is either the test, or source, or guide of that other part of philosophy which relates to our internal perceptions, that we are to look in external nature for the form, the substance, the colour, the very life and being of whatever exists in our minds, or that we can only infer the laws which regulate the phenomena of the mind from those which regulate the phenomena of matter, is to confound two things entirely distinct. Our knowledge of mental phenomena from consciousness, reflection, or observation of their correspondent signs in others is the true basis of metaphysical inquiry, as the knowledge of facts, commonly so called, is the only solid basis of natural philosophy. To assert that the operations of the mind and the operations of matter are in reality the same, so that we should always regard the one as symbols or exponents of the other, is to assume the very point in

dispute, not only without any evidence, but in defiance of every appearance to the contrary.

Lord Bacon was undoubtedly a great man, indeed one of the greatest that have adorned this or any other country. He was a man of a clear and active spirit, of a most fertile genius, of vast designs, of general knowledge, and of profound wisdom. He united the powers of imagination and understanding in a greater degree than almost any other writer. He was one of the most remarkable instances of those men, who, by the rare privilege of their nature, are at once poets and philosophers, and see equally in both worlds-the individual and sensible, and the abstracted and intelligible forms of things. The Schoolmen and their followers attended to nothing but names, to essences and species, to laboured analyses and artificial deductions. They seem to have alike disregarded all kinds of experience, whether relating to external objects, or to the observation of our own internal feelings. From the imperfect state of knowledge, they had not a sufficient number of facts to guide them in their experimental researches; and intoxicated with the novelty of their vain distinctions, learnt by rote, they were tempted to despise the clearest and most obvious suggestions of their own minds. Subtle, restless, and selfsufficient, they thought that truth was only made to be disputed about, and existed no where but in their demonstrations and syllogisms. Hence arose their logomachies'-their everlasting word-fights, their sharp debates, their captious, bootless controversies. As Lord Bacon expresses it, they were made fierce with dark keeping,' signifying that their angry and unintelligible contests with one another were owing to their not having any distinct objects to engage their attention. They built altogether on their own whims and fancies; and, buoyed up by their specific levity, they mounted in their airy disputations in endless flights and circles, clamouring like birds of prey, till they equally lost sight of truth and nature. This great man, therefore, intended an essential service to philosophy, in wishing to recall the attention to facts and experience which had been almost entirely neglected; and thus, by incorporating the abstract with the concrete, and general reasoning with individual observation, to give to our conclusions that solidity and firmness which they must otherwise always want. He did nothing but insist on the necessity of experience, more particularly in natural science; and from the wider field that is open to it there, as well as the prodigious success it has met with, this latter application of the word, in which it is tantamount to physical experiment, has so far engrossed the whole of our attention, that mind has, for a good while past, been in some danger of being overlaid by matter. We run from one error into another, and as we were wrong at first,