by the aid of which we learn that there are two causes, one absolute, and the other not absolute; that God, as a cause not absolute, is able to create; but as a cause absolute, he cannot but create; and that in creating the universe, he does not draw it from nothing, but from himself; just as a spider, we suppose, draws a web from its own body. Besides, if this theory be true, and God cannot but create, what is he but the slave of necessity? And thus we come back to the old doctrine to which Eschylus alluded, where Prometheus being asked-" Is Jove then weaker than the three-form Fates?" replies with a sneer, " If not, he will of course escape his Fate?" And is then Lord Brougham content to follow this ignis fatuus of a Frenchman, whose pseudophilosophy is the hybrid offspring of the supermundane dreams of Proclus, and the transcendental reveries of Kant? Poor Thomas Taylor, who would have admired any fool, that pretended to admire his dear Proclus, was doubtless carried into superessential ecstasies by the revival of the eclectic philosophy; but that Lord Brougham, the very antipodes of Thomas Taylor, should be likewise one of the Eclectics, is indeed marvellous. It appears, however, that the hierophant Taylor, and the neophyte Brougham, are merely the inside and outside of the Leyden alias Leaden jar, and that Cousin is the connecting rod of the eclectic, or negative-electric, philosophy. But though Lord Brougham has swallowed some of Cousin's psychological pills, some seem, like Macbeth's "amen," to have stuck in his throat, as being too large for his powers of deglutition. Besides, he had already been under the hands of Dr. Crombie, with whose manner of treating the subject nearest his heart he was so well pleased, as to carry off in his head the general method of the Dr.'s treatment of the science, as we learn from Dr. Turton, p. 192; and as Dr. Crombie has given, says the Quarterly Reviewer, a clear and complete vindication of the immateriality of the soul, it is a pity that his Lordship did not borrow the matter as well as the manner of his discourse: for then, to use the Noble writer's own language, "we should have had the proof so much desiderated" on this interesting topic. Enough, however, of Cousin's drugs have entered the system to produce a partial aberration of intellect. For his Lordship has been led to believe that while inductive science in physics, if it be worth any thing, leads to the certainty of truth, in metaphysics it leads only to the possibility; and hence, as Dr. Wallace has remarked, should his Lordship's reasoning be inconclusive, he who cannot admit the inductions of a man, and even a member of the French Institute, must reject the revelation of the Deity, and give up all his hopes of a future life founded on a fact, unless he can also acknowledge "the baseless fabric" of his Lordship's dreams. In thus applying the language of Shakespeare's seer to the unprosperous result of his Lordship's speculations, we are fully borne out by the sentiments of the Westminster Review, the organ of that very school of which Lord Brougham is not indeed the founder, but the most distinguished pupil. "Opinions," says the Benthamite, "about his Lordship's work are divided and opposed. The majority of what is called the reading public seem to consider it an admirable and scientific production; subtle thinkers and close reasoners seem agreed in denying that it possesses any very high merit, either for originality of matter or logical argumentation."-" Call you this backing your friends? A plague on such backers," cried his Lordship, when he read the preceding paragraphs; but when he saw what follows-" Perhaps there is an intermediate class, amongst whom it is accounted a hasty assumption of dogmatic proof* with regard to subjects beyond the range of human faculties "--what could his Lordship do but exclaim," Save me, oh, save me from a candid friend!" For the noble Lord could not fail to perceive that the reading public is just now, what the political public was in the time of Aristophanes—an animal with very long ears and with very little senseif it can relish the food prepared by the patent chaff-cutter of the scientific Peer, who has hitherto been the great purveyor of intellectual fare to his darling public. Since then his Lordship's admirers are to be found amongst those who can neither think acutely nor reason closely, it must be highly consolatory for him to hear that "in tolerably general opinion he is one of the first men of his age;" and of whom it has been said by a friend, that "the originality and common-place contained in his Lordship's Discourse the acute and laborious reasoning, with a frequent feebleness and carelessness-here the elaborate erudition, and there the substitution of declamation for its absence-the satisfactory moral courage in one page, and the vexatious submission to conventional prejudice and ignorance in the next"-are sufficient to show that "the vulgar abuse with which his Lordship's maligners assail him, is at least a negative proof of his superiority"-as if the bitterest foe of his Lordship could pourtray in more vivid colours the modern Margites, * We once thought that dogmafism was one thing, and proof another. But men write so fast now-a-days that they have no time to think. We must therefore leave this oxymoron, worthy of Æschylus himself, to the sagacity of our younger readers. On his Lordship's "elaborate erudition " we shall have something to say by and by. -- What may be the value of a negative proof of superiority we know not. Algebraists have attempted to explain the meaning of 1, and : with what success let others tell. For ourselves, we would rather have one positive proof of superiority than an infinity of negative ones. "Who all things knows, but all things wrong." But even allowing that Lord Brougham has, by proofs not dogmatical, approximated to the possibility of the soul's immateriality, we ask, What is the utility-and his Lordship, once an ultra-utilitarian, though somewhat cooled by age, if not by reflection, since he can now speak in raptures of the intellectual pleasures of science, totally unconnected with the opes humanæ of his fancied prototype Lord Verulam, is the person most proper to answer the question-What, we repeat, is the utility of any arguments, physical or metaphysical, not rigorously exact? for unless they are so, what can they lead to but uncertainty? and this too in a case where, if the resurrection of our Lord does not prove the immortality of the soul, all attempts to prove its possibility by psychology are worse than useless, absolutely mischievous; for "it requires no ghost to tell us that these idle speculations of a politician out of place will give rise to reflections first and actions afterwards, such as his Lordship cannot fail to foresee, blinded though he be with the vanity of being hailed as the inventor of Natural Theology by induc tion. The Discourse itself is ushered in with an Introduction, evidently written by a hand that feels itself fettered by a nonfamiliarity with the subject. For it wants all that charm of ease that strikes us so forcibly in the pages of Paley-and we will add of his Lordship too, whenever he wishes to practise, what he is so fond of prescribing, a popular style. If then Lord Brougham can with a felicity almost peculiar to himself, when speaking upon physical subjects, convey his ideas in language so simple, that the most intricate piece of machinery becomes intelligible to the meanest capacity, how does it happen that he has failed so egregiously in conveying his ideas with equal felicity in metaphysical subjects, which, evanescent in themselves, required the double compound lens of his Lordship's intellect to exhibit them as clearly, as some men have seen the mountains in the moon? The answer is obvious. The noble writer is at home in physics, but not in metaphysics. In the former he * We have to beg his Lordship's pardon for thus attributing to him the Encyclopædia knowledge of a Margites; for Sir Edward Sugden is reported to have said of the Ex-Chancellor, "What a pity it is he did not know a little of equity! for then he would know a little of every thing." † Dr. Wallace too, with every desire to think highly of Lord Brougham's talents and of the honesty of his intentions, laments " that his Lordship should, by aiming to attain what is not within the fair scope of his pursuit, or from a desire to display his address in controversy, have frustrated possibly the very end he had in view." * trusts to his own eyes,' or to those the best able to impart information; in the latter he looks only through the spectacles of others, and those not the best of their kind. Had his Lordship devoted to the perusal of Plato and Aristotle in the original + only half the time he has unfortunately misspent * Witness the attention his Lordship is said to have paid to the Scotch Cook's Lecture on Egg-frying; a subject on which there will doubtless appear, in the Penny Cyclopædia, an article under the head of Oology, "the science of things relating to eggs," and divided into its two branches; one, psychology, by which we learn the possibility of the immateriality of the soul of the chick; and pancakeology, by which we discover" all the evils" of the material pancake, according to the theory of Abernethy, who said, that unless the human kitchen (i. e. the body) was kept in a proper state, the attics would be filled with the fumes of indigestion, and the skull be another Pandora's box, the receptacle of all evils, and without even hope at the bottom of it. We say the original; for though the Latin translation of Ficinus, and the English one of Sydenham, which was unfortunately never completed, are sufficiently faithful for ordinary readers, yet they will repress rather than excite that mental exercise, by which alone a metaphysician can obtain the fire and the force of an intellectual thunderbolt. Of Schleiermacher's German translation Heindorf seems to have been too lavish in the praise. At least, from the English translation of his Introduction, it is easy to perceive that he did not come to his author, as Mitchell the editor of Aristophanes truly says every one ought to do, fresh from the wit of the dramatist, if he wishes to enjoy the wisdom of the philosopher. Ast, too, we perceive, has done Plato into German, and, we should think, not badly; for in his edition of the original, he has made criticism and interpretation go hand in hand, which Bishop Marsh, in his Lectures, said ought never to be separated. Hence, as Thomas Taylor had a thorough contempt for verbal criticism, and would not change a letter, or adopt a meaning, unless backed by his dearly-beloved Hermias, Olympiodorus, Proclus, or Plotinus, he naturally did in England, what Hulsemann is said to have done in Germany, obscure the transparent empyreum of philosophy with the gas that escaped from the overheated retorts of a sublimated mysticism. To the preceding list of modern translations, must be added the French one of Victor Cousin, which we suspect is the Plato that Lord Brougham uses-not only out of regard for a fellow-member of the Institute, but from a fellow-feeling towards a superficial scholar; for both equally affect the character of a Grecian, to which neither can lay the least claim. For speaking thus slightingly of Cousin's scholarship, we have the authority of Creuzer; and it is only necessary to compare the two editions of the same author by the two parties to be convinced, that though the Frenchman talks most about ancient philosophy, the German knows most about it. But of Victor Cousin, whose talents are cried up and his opinions cried down in the Edinburgh Review for October 1829, we have said something already, and might say more, if we chose to touch upon Lord Brougham's plagiarisms; about which over Scotch metaphysicians, he could not have failed to imbibe a portion of the spirit that animated those twin stars of philosophy. For while the Stagirite would have taught him how to arrange his thoughts with all the order and precision of a mathematical demonstration, from the Athenian he would have learnt how to invest his ideas with what Cicero, speaking of Plato, calls the lumina verborum. His Lordship, however, disdaining the slow and sure pace of the tortoise of science, has chosen to roam from the facts in one ology to those in another, as "the busy bee" of Horace did from flower to flower; and while he is dancing round, but never approaching, his subject, as the satellites of Jupiter do about their primary, he leaves his reader as much in the lurch as Mercury does a star-gazer, when the quicksilver planet hides itself in the rays of the Sun. To this obscuration of his sublimated self must we attribute the hallucination of his Lordship, noticed by the Quarterly Reviewer, who asks whether the schoolmaster is dead or out of office, when he permits Lord Brougham to tell the world that there are twenty-three planets, including satellites, instead of twenty-nine, and only six or seven comets; although astronomers think that as many hundred have appeared in our system, always excepting the one predicted by La Place, which by its collision with the earth was to produce another deluge, and thus afford to Bucklands unborn the antediluvian remains of an Oological biped found in a new specimen of Oolite. But granting the obscurity complained of to be inherent in the subject, or, if Lord Brougham pleases, in our want * of per*of his Lordship has perhaps some consciousness, though apparently no conscience; and naturally so; for as the Noble metaphysician, in his enumeration of the powers of the mind, has omitted, what Dr. Turton considers the most important of psychological phenomena, the power of conscience, it is probable that in thus appropriating to himself the ideas of others, he is unconscious of the very existence of a conscience. So, too, his Lordship's omission of another faculty of the mind,imagination,-will be a proof of our metaphysician's consciousness of the truth of our remark a little further on, that his Lordship cannot think for himself; merely because he wants imagination; a remark sufficiently evidenced by the fact, that Lord Brougham has neither in science, politics, or jurisprudence, ever broken up fresh ground, or in a single instance taken up a new position, conspicuous either for its originality or truth. His whole and sole merit has been to fill up the outline already sketched by some master minds; although, like a clever Nimrod, he has contrived to get "the brush" by dashing through a gap, in the breaking down of which a more adventurous rider had, very luckily for his Lordship, broken his neck. The Quarterly Reviewer seems, however, to have been equally dense; for he observes, that "there is through the whole of his Lord |