some persons to whom they are of the most vital importance, and even more practical than those which the men of activity, rather than reflection, regard as the most practical.

It is, moreover, a historic fact, and one which gives to this general subject an importance of the gravest character, that in all cases the solution which has been given to these fundamental problems, by any one of those leading minds that have possessed enough of depth and of energy to constitute it the formula of a school of philosophy, has brought forth its appropriate fruits, and that, too, in its most practical forms; in their influence upon the views of life, of duty, and of character, which constitute the practical rule of action for the massesthose very masses who never had a thought of the seminal principle, whose fruits they are daily bringing forth, and eating, too, in the joys or sorrows of their daily and hourly experience of life. These things may seem to be but small matters in themselves; but like a slight turn in the rudder of a ship, they may give a different direction to the whole mass, and land the crew, with all on board, to a haven very different from that which they would have reached if no such change had been made.

To a man of trained insight in such matters, these consequences and developments may be foreseen and predicted as inevitable. We say the men of "trained insight," and we use the words advisedly. We desire, moreover, to dwell upon them a moment and to fix attention upon their import.

Without insight man can see nothing more than the mere animal sees; he has, and can have no intellectual life above mere animal instinct. But insight is not by any means, or any necessity of its nature, universal in its objects. One may have. insight for the relations of numbers and forms, and we have a mathematical genius. Another may have insight into colour, melody, etc., and we have a painter or a musician. Another may have an insight into character, the springs and motives of action, and we have the popular leader, who becomes a patriot or a demagogue, just according as his will may direct the activity of his intellectual gifts. But a most surpassing insight in any one of these kinds, does not of necessity imply any superiority to other persons in any other kind. And the

insight into metaphysical truths and relations is as marked and as exclusive in its character as either of those just mentioned; and withal it is, we believe, an endowment which is much more rarely found among men.

But even this insight, like all others, must be trained. The painter, the musician, the mathematician, all see that at an advanced stage of their professional career-they can see, and see into at a glance, what bothered and bewildered them for a long time at the earlier stages of their experience. So with leadership. Age and experience are considered indispensable to the highest attainments, although beyond all doubt the young man with great insight may surpass the old man with only great experience or training. The two are, to use a mathematical expression, functions of each other-variable and dependent functions-requiring both to be at their maximum, in order to the maximum of resultant.

But over and above this gift of a priori foresight and prediction, we have before us some four thousand years of history within which these systems or solutions have been working out their results in all the varied circumstances of mental training, religious dogma, national peculiarities of character, political influence, advancement of natural science, and even the light shed from the experience of the past; thus fulfilling the second great law of elimination, "uniform disagreement in all except one of the elements of a series of complex antecedents, with uniformity in the result," giving the certainty that that one element in the antecedent which is common to them all, must be the cause of whatever is common or uniform in the result.

This law of the development of systems sheds, moreover, a very important light upon one other very obscure fact in the philosophy of life and of history. It shows that the extent and the limits of the sphere of freedom are widely different in man's control over the events of his own individual and personal life, from what they are over the course of historic events in the life of the nation or community of which he is a part. It seems that freedom, like individuality, is lost so soon as man enters a mass; so that while he is free to do as he pleases, the mass is guided by laws and moved by forces over which neither

individual, nor the whole community as individuals, have much, if any control. Like travellers on the ice of our northern ocean, move which way soever they will themselves and individually, they are floating southward (and quite possibly without knowing it); because the ice beneath them, and all around them as far as the eye can see, is moving with the most majestic and irresistible stride in that direction.

Now the history of Philosophy-when properly conceived and written-is a detailed narrative of these experiments. It describes the solution of these great problems, which are introduced as a dogma into the intellectual life of the school or sect of which the author of the solution becomes the founder, exhibits the successive stages of its workings and of its developments until the matured fruit shows, even to those who have. but little or possibly none of the forecasting insight of which we have spoken, of what sort was the tree from which they were grown. And to carry the figure a little farther: there is no doubt that the soil-the intellectual peculiarities of the people will modify this fruit both in character and in quantity. But if, notwithstanding these variations, it remains essentially the same, no reasonable doubt can be entertained of the nature of the seed-thought from which it sprung. Thus the sensationalism, which is so fully and so beautifully developed in Locke's Essay on the Understanding, differed somewhat widely in its ultimate fruits in England, France, and Germany. In England it was restrained to a very great extent by the stern, sober, earnest good sense of the English mind. In Germany it was hardly received at all, being precluded by the German tendency to mysticism. But in France it produced. Voltaire and the Encyclopedists, and gave its character to the French Revolution. Yet in all these cases, and with all these modifications, it produced in its latest developments and popular influences, an irreligious worldliness-a hard, cold, calculating selfishness-substituted prudence for virtue, subjected everything to materialistic views and a mere worldly policy. Nay, in many cases it completely closed the eyes of individuals, and of whole communities, against whatever is above or beyond the visible and tangible realities of this world, and the pleasures and pains of the passing hour. It even went, in some

cases, as Bishop Berkeley for instance, so far as to deny the reality of an external world at all. And in the domain of theology it is undoubtedly the formal course of the Socinianism, or Unitarianism, which has become so prevalent among the English Dissenters at home, and their descendants in this country and the colonies.

All this was easily foreseen. If man has no ideas but those that are derived from sensation, then inasmuch as the senses give us cognition of only that which is visible and tangible, it can give us certain knowledge only of that which is materialof the world and worldly things. All else must be held to be a delusion, and a mere dream. But the philosopher who foresaw and foretold this, was, like Cassandra, doomed to predict what nobody would believe, or heed and obey. Individuals could take note of the tendency of things, and turn from the results towards which all around was moving; but the masses had no insight or foresight of what they were approaching. And even religion came to be something in the nature of bargain and sale, a calculation of the consequences, an estimate of the comparative gains and losses of what, by courtesy and long usage, had been called virtue as on the one hand, and of what by like usage had been called vice on the other? The old question, "Doth Job serve GOD for naught?" was thought to be the highest wisdom. We have spoken of "what by courtesy and long usage had been called virtue and vice"; for it must be remembered that this system had completely destroyed all other ground for the distinction, and virtue itself had been defined as "servipg GOD for the sake of everlasting happiness,"-making the very essence and formal character of virtue depend, not upon anything intrinsic to itself, but upon the necessary consideration of the reward that might be attached to the acts themselves.

Let us turn to another illustration. Kant, the celebrated philosopher of Konigsburg, seeing the tendency of Locke's solution of this problem of knowledge, set himself to correct it. Locke had denied the reality of the old fiction of "innate ideas" (a solution of the problem of knowledge, which, by the way, has a most interesting history of its own), and regarded the mind as a piece of blank paper, exerting no control over

either the essence or the form of its knowledge, its content or its quality. Kant solved the problem by saying that though there be no innate ideas, yet the mind has a nature and constitution of its own, by which it gives the quality or formal character to its content of knowledge; just as the constitution of man's body determines what we call his gait or the peculiarity of his mode of walking. It is not, as he would say, from any internal choice or force of external circumstances that man walks on two feet instead of on all fours, and with his nose forward and protruding into the future instead of sticking out like a streamer behind; but it is because of the organic structure of his body, the muscles and bones of his limbs, the shape of his feet, and the structure of his tocs. So with the mind. It is not from choice, as any one may see, that a man believes that two and two are four, nor yet is it from any force of external circumstances, but it is rather from the structure of his mind, a subjective rather than an objective necessity.

But the consequences of this solution are obvious. It is indeed right, so far as it goes, and in its positive statements the mind has such a subjective constitution undoubtedly. But if that is all, we have no ground of certainty for any thing but the mere facts of consciousness. And when asked what ground we have for believing in the existence of GOD and the immortality of the soul, the only answer that his system could give is, that we are so constituted that we cannot help it. Believing in these-in short we have no philosophic ground whatever the belief may all be a delusion. The consequence is that all men are thrown back upon the merest subjectiveism -each man being a law and a standard to himself—and there can be no ground of choice, no practical difference in the value of those things which any one may honestly and sincerely hold to be true. And in the wake of this movement all positive institutions, all objective authority, fall prostrate, and we may have the subjective-idealism of Fichte, the mysticism of Mendelssohn and Jacobi, or the mere illuminism of Schelling and Hegel. In theology we have neology and rationalism.

The latest speculator, and one the effects of whose solutions are as yet but little more than matter of foresight, is Cousin. His eminent services as a malleus philosophorum, deserve the