vital subjects of human thought. Of the several modes in which solution has been sought, the only tenable one is the utter denial that reason ever affirmed such contradictions, that they arise solely from the falsity of the system which adopts them.

Instead of exposing and vanquishing this fallacy forever, what has Hamilton done with it? He has conceded the premises and strangely sought to mitigate the gloom involved in the conclusion by referring the contradiction to the mind's imbecility, and not to its falsity. But this admission of the contradiction is a blow at the very root of thought.

Nor is Mansel less dangerous in adopting the principle which is exclusive of efficient cause, (pp. 47-53.) His statement “that the cause cannot as such be absolute, and that the absolute as such cannot be a cause, includes in its fatal grasp all for which the pantheist Spinoza would contend. Though the position of the French school was directly opposite to this, it was no less subversive of fundamental truth. It was this: "The infinite is

a necessary and eternal cause- -a cause which must pass into action." Thus while Mansel and the school of Spinoza make creation involve a contradiction, and thereby precluded its possibility, Cousin made that work an eternal necessity, and thereby placed the Divine omnipotence under a power above itself.

These perversions of first principles are mere specimens of those with which our century has abounded. The demand is therefore imperative for a sifting discussion of our primary convictions.

The author we review has aimed at supplying this desideratum; how he has achieved his object we now proceed to disclose to the reader.

Dr. M'Cosh exhibits our intuitions in the opposite characters of both the clearest and the darkest of the mind's objects. In the unborrowed light which flashes on intuitive objects they are clear as vision; but when the mind's eye turns itself back to investigate them in reflex light, they are mantled in the shades of dimmest twilight. The unerring certainty inseparable from these first apprehensions makes them the solid foundation of all our knowledge. It is only at some remove from them that apparent truth may be distrusted. But our author has shown that though these intuitive objects shine in the light of their

own evidence, too clear to be increased, and too strong to be vanquished, yet are they utterly inexplicable. If they yield to analysis and require induction, it cannot be in their simple state, but after they are classified. Had this distinction never escaped Dr. Reid, he would never have asserted "that there are principles in the constitution of the mind, and that they come forth in general propositions."

That the intuitive faculty appertains to the mind, no clearer proof can exist than our knowledge of the objects it apprehends. As another faculty could no more reveal these objects than a microscope or telescope could disclose colors to the blind, the fact of their being known is the proof of the intuitive faculty. The simplicity of the objects apprehended by intuition is a bar against their resolution into simpler elements, and equally so against referring them to higher principles from which they might be supposed to have derived their authority. But though these objects are never complex, they are ever concrete. In seeking simplicity in the complex, we must continue our regression till we return to that which has its evidence in itself, and the same law which forbids our stopping short of that point prohibits the slightest assurance beyond it. It is otherwise with the concrete. This is always united in nature but separable in thought; that is, it is ever perceived by a single intuitive glance, but is separable by a reflex mental act. Thus we cannot perceive what is not self without a co-existing knowledge of self, while we affirm of self which perceives that it is not the thing perceived. We perceive moral excellence, and then think it apart from all mere pleasure. We perceive the pain of guilt, but are never in danger of identifying it with physical pain. This separation in thought of what is apprehended together, is based on the concrete nature of our primary apprehensions.

The complex is the union of elements separately perceptible, and susceptible of reduction to simplicity by analysis. It is then obtrusively plain that by confounding the concrete with the complex, the utmost confusion must ensue; the former being the simple objects of primary apprehension, and the latter a combination of these objects by a reflex mental act.

Our author (in language our space permits us not to copy) has sent back a piercing glance at Greek psychologists, comparing their views of intuitions with those of modern cultiva

tors of the same field. He shows that Descartes affirmed of innate ideas, "that they were faculties ready to operate, but needed to be called forth." But that philosopher failed to clearly express the light of self-evidence, in which objects so apprehended shone, and only obscurely alluded to the abstraction and generalization by which alone higher principles may be reached. On another point vital to this inquiry Liebnitz is introduced as having distinguished more clearly than his predecessors between necessary truth and experimental truth, announcing for the first time the infallible test of necessary truth. But that writer strangely failed to discriminate between the faculties of apprehending individual objects, and those by which general principles are formed in the mind by the classification of those objects. The same defect is detected in Buffier, who seemed unaware of the self-evidence and necessity of primary convictions. At least his views of these deeper qualities of first truths were strikingly defective. While he maintained the original law of intuition, as exhibited in the common judgments of men, he made little distinction between them as single and as classified. Our author awards more definiteness to the views of Dr. Reid, who, under the name of common sense, recognizes the original and natural judgments of the mind as forming a part of our mental constitution. Reid is especially introduced in this connection as opposing the Lockean view of our intuitions, which restricted them to the relations of our ideas, and to the Kantian development of this theory of Locke, which reduced all the objects of intuition to the mere forms of the mind. Reid further maintained the double office of reason, that of judging of things self-evident, and that of drawing conclusions which are not self-evident from objects which are self-evident. But while these characteristics and others of great merit distinguished Reid, our author justly charges him with the want of rigid accuracy in the application of his tests of primary intuition. More than once he admitted merely experimental truth into that high class of first principles, and did not uniformly discriminate between the reflex and spontaneous uses of reason. (Pp. 448-450.) This betrayed him into the mistake, to which we have alluded, of referring principles to the constitution of the mind, and of asserting "that they come forth in the form of general propositions."

Dr. M'Cosh rapidly glances at some of the weakest and strongest points in the critique of Kant, showing that he, more clearly than his predecessors, taught that a priori principles were in the mind prior to their being called into exercise. The powerful array of evidence which he furnished in support of this mental law was a contribution to psychology. This alone would elicit the thanks of posterity had not the same strong hand which established the law pervertingly appropriated it. But by restricting this faculty to the mental sphere alone, Kant allowed it no functions in the objective universe. He maintained that the mind imposed forms on space and duration; that the mind contained categories of quantity, quality, relation, modality, ideas of substance, totality of phenomena, and of Deity; that the mind imposed forms on the judgments reached by these categories. Or in other words, that all these objects and relations are in the mind solely, and nowhere else in the universe. That even self-consciousness is not a knowledge of self as it exists, but a mere form of thought. Things, therefore, are never the objects of intuition, but are created or supplied by that faculty. This excludes time, space, substance, relations, and God himself from every habitation out of the forms of thought; within the mind alone is the sole place of their existence. These are intuitions with a vengeance! They cram heaven and earth, God and the universe, into the magic chambers of a mortal mind! While these "ideas of pure reason" reduce the judgment to unity, they also reduce all reality to the perceptions of nothing.

After this German oracle had thus made reason criticise itself, according to laws arbitrarily imposed on that noble faculty, what could arrest in their amazing career his three famous successors? Making his gaol their starting point, and his logic their guide, they found it as facile to politely bow mind out of the great temple of the universe, as he did to reduce the objective universe to mind. This utter nihilism, into which these masters had conspired to engulf matter and mind, is the only possible legitimate result of falsifying a single intuition of the mind.

Dr. T. Brown is introduced by our author to illustrate both the excellences and defects of that writer on the mind's first convictions. (Cause and Effect, part 3.) Dr. Brown resolutely

maintained that our intuitions are principles-that they are immediately, universally, and irresistibly felt, and that the mind finds it impossible to doubt them. Still is he profoundly silent on the laws, and the nature and the tests of these intuitions.

Nearly the same defect is charged upon Cousin. While he did not overlook the distinction of reason in the spontaneous and reflective forms of its operations, while he insisted on the individuality of the former, he failed to disclose the induction indispensible to reach the latter, to reach necessary truth in its universal form. Though, in recognizing these twofold stages of reason, that writer did involve the observation, abstraction, and generalization indispensable to pass from the first stage to the second, he never attempted to evolve this process.

For the illustration of topics still more vital to his argument, Dr. M'Cosh draws more copiously from Hamilton. While he admits that this great metaphysician has with unsurpassed erudition collected testimonies from the deep thinkers of all ages and from all lands in support of our first principles, (Note A on Reid,) he still urges the charge that Hamilton is either deeply silent on the distinction between the facts of consciousness and generalized maxims, or that he expressly identifies them. This charge is sustained by extracts from his lectures, in such passages as the following. Speaking of general principles he says: "They seem to leap, ready made, from the womb of reason like Pallas from the head of Jupiter." "Sometimes they form the crowning, the consummation of all the intellectual operations." (Lec. 28.) In like manner, overlooking the induction, which can never be apart from the attainment of general truth, he alleges it to be revealed at once in consciousness, calling such truths "ultimate primary universal principles, facts of consciousness." (Lec. 15.)

Associated with this blunder is the much graver error of making the objects of our intuitions the laws of thought, and not the laws of things-making substance, space, cause, infinity, nothing but the mind's weakness, and thus divesting these intuitions of all trustworthiness. That so startling a proposition should be adopted by so comprehensive an intellect, is humiliating to human greatness.

Our author has excelled his predecessors in the accuracy