48 LITERARY NOTICES. Lord Eglintoun has just celebrated | tian Young Men's Association (amongst the anniversary of the Glasgow Athe- others) presented an address, and of næum; and in a speech complimenting course got snubbed by the " Thunderer," and therefore pleasing everybody, who wanted to know who they were, touching upon the Duke of Argyle, the and felt rather surprised at the pre"Historian" of Europe, Sherriff Bell, sumption of clerks and shopmen. the inimitable Dickens, and the talents of the Lord Advocate, he yet found time to tell the Glasgow students that reading was better than smoking and drinking, which was about the sum total of the whole speech. A new edition of the works of Buffon, by M. Flouveny, of the Académie Francais, and one of the permanent secretaries of l'Académie des Sciences. It is preceded by a memoir of Buffon and his writings. Cardinal Wiseman has delivered a lecture at the Hanover Square Rooms, on the "Perception of Natural Beauties by the Ancients and Moderns," trying, as usual, in his modest and insinuating style, to identify the papacy with art; and, perfect at least in the art of dissimulation, he has been telling the world that the uninitiated have no right to form any opinion upon the Austrian Concordat; that it is written in a sort of language not known to the vulgar, and that it must not be interpreted according to the ordinary signification. "The inimitable" Dickens has favoured the world with the first number of the history of "Little Dorrit," and though not sufficiently advanced to let us see what it is to be, it is yet far enough for us to trace the hand and genius of a Boz." His Christmas round of stories, "The Holly Tree Inn," is fully up to the mark, and will repay the yearly investment. แ Though not a literary event, we must briefly notice the visit of Victor Emmanuel, King of Sardinia, the representative and the hope of Italian freedom and independence; as our firm and faithful ally he was received with uproarious demonstrations. The Chris In our summary of the events of the month, we must not forget to chronicle the demise of the Rev. Robert Montgomery, a preacher and a poet of some pretensions; but as a poet, at least, he has never risen above the position assigned him by Macaulay in the “Edinburgh Review." The literary world has been startled by the melancholy death of Mr. Leopold James Lardener, assistant librarian at the British Museum-well known and respected as a linguist of no ordinary acquirements. In a fit of temporary insanity he threw himself from a window, and shortly afterwards expired; it is attributed to physical disease. Dr. Liddell's promised "History of Rome" is out. It has all the merits of the lexicographer, but few of the historian. Dates, references, &c., are accurate, but dry; and events the most important in the annals of the greatest empire of the world, are dismissed with the courtesy and the quietness of everyday life. The next on our library table is "A Lady's Second Journey Round the World," by Ida Pfeiffer; and is worthy of notice chiefly from the fact that it is her second journey, and safely accomplished; for though it has considerable humour, and evinces the writer's mental culture, it is slovenly and inaccurate, and is not entitled to any very high place in travelled litera European Philosophy. BY SAMUEL NEIL, Author of" The Art of Reasoning," " Elements of Rhetoric," &c. THE ITALIC SCHOOL-THE PHILOSOPHY OF IF in the wondrous alchemy of the physical universe there is no waste, but, contrariwise, an eternal ebb and flow of death and life, decay and reproduction—a ceaseless cycle of change, in which, with magical ubiquity, the old is ever becoming the new, and the secret essences of creation, in ever continuous transmutation, throw off one set of forms only to assume other modes of manifest existence, how much more probable is it, that by an equally real, though equally inscrutable process, each human thought, endowed with eternal re-organizability, is and becomes but the causal generative of another. Is not this the fact which underlies and potentiates progress, unites the past and present, and encompasses with glory the memory of the world's thinkers ? Civilization is thought transformed into fact; and the facts of to-day are only the germs of the speculations of to-morrow. Each new fact widens the circumference of thought, and each new and true thought extends the dominion of fact into other regions of utility and beauty. Thought is the inner life of science and history, and they are the developments, results, and manifestations of thought. To know the thoughts out of which these grow, and whence their fertility arises, is to comprehend the secret springs by which the life of humanity is put and kept in motion; or, rather, is to become acquainted with the ultimate elements of discoveries. But if it is difficult from the timedistance of twenty-five centuries to bring forth into distinct perceptibility the details of the mere exterior life of men,-those items of their doings which strike all eyes, and form the integers in the sum of the estimates of contemporaries, how much more critical the task of reducing to a truthful and intelligible statement the traditionary teachings of those who, in earth's early youth, strove "To elevate the more than reasoning mind!" To attain even the possibility of success in such an effort, one must, throw his life back into the ages in which Thought was H young-the times in which ideas, affinitive but not definitive, struggled into being, and remained in shivering, single isolation, until some larger minds arising, collected them into the foci of their respective systems, and gave them a oneness and a strength which before they had not. The era of the Heptad was such a time. Then the mysteries of being were first made the topics of serious, earnest, intellectually-directed thought. Then philosophy became a pursuit, and the anxieties of men were devoted to other and nobler ends than the enjoyment of life's brief, uncertain day. In the immediate aftertime the contemplative Pythagoras was born. Already had the enigmas of human life been stated for unriddlement. Already had the talents of the wise and good been exercised for their solution. Already had the corner of that vast sheet of mist which over-canopies the ocean of truth" been raised, though but as it were only a spanbreadth, and the idea of 'the Infinite" had been attained. Already had one factor of philosophy-Physics-been postulated as thinkable; and now the other-Ethics-was required to show how man may and should be raised above those narrow bounds within which all that is merely earthly is held. This Pythagoras essayed. 66 We note this down here just as a tide-mark of the progress of philosophic thinking up till his era. We recall to mind what had been accomplished, that from this we may judge of the greatness of the thoughtsman who extended the circumference of reflection into new regions, wherein the rivers of thought had not previously cut out their channels. Taking this distinction for our start-point, we shall endeavour to give a brief comprehensive and comprehensible resumé of the chief teachings of the philosophy of Pythagoras, supplemented by such remarks as seem requisite to connect his speculations with the utilities of our own age. EXPOSITION.-The phenomenal world, the actual manifestations of being, form the data from which the philosophies of Ionia and Italia have been deduced. How could doctrines so decidedly opposed receive their origin from similar data? The query is pertinent, and reaches down into the under-currents of speculative thought. Phenomena constitute experience. Experience is the necessary start-point of science. But experience informs us only of facts, and leaves us ignorant alike of relations and reasons. So soon, then, as man sets out from the existent and real,-i. e., fact,-to attempt the construction of science, he enters into an infinite field of hypotheses, through which he must needs wander and search for ever, were there not developed in the initial acts of thought certain formative and regulative laws of thinking, which shape the problems of the reason, and control the efforts by which the mind aims at excogitating them. There arises thence an ego-consciousness, which inter polates itself into every speculation, and silently or pronouncedly affects all its results. Each philosophy, therefore, bears a primordial tendency, derived from, as it is dependent upon, the special capacities, original or cultured, of the mind of its author -a tincture of the individual ego of which he may, and indeed must, be unaware. The personal culture of Pythagoras was distinctly mathematical. To him tradition assigns the invention of our common multiplication table, the discovery of numerical proportions, and the construction of the earliest harmonical canon or monochordan instrument for ascertaining and demonstrating the ratios of musical sounds with scientific exactness. Among other geometrical theorems ascribed to him are those contained in Euclid's Elements," book i., prop. 32 and 47. He was the originator of the "theory of incommensurables," and the inventor of the musical scale. Nor did he limit himself to speculative mathematics alone. He projected the same principles of thought to those bodies which occupy the vast spaces of the infinite, and came pretty near-by guess, at least-to the true theory of astronomy; thus lighting, if he did no more, the lamp which, trimmed by subsequent investigators, has enabled man to map out "the heavens like a scroll.' He asserted the central position of the sun, the diurnal and annual revolutions of the earth, and the motions of the planets. He possessed a correct idea of the nature of comets, believed that the fixed stars were the central suns of other systems, and first taught that the evening and morning star was the selfsame body. Such being the bias of his mind, both by inherent tendency and subsequent culture, how could we anticipate otherwise than that the philosophy of Pythagoras should be one in which the ideas of quantity and form,-i. e., numerical and geometrical relations, should hold a prominent, if not indeed a pre-eminent position? And does not one " breathe the spirit of a purer air," when a great thought like this dawns for the first time upon the world? Is not the phenomenal also the variable and the nonessential; for essences are changeless? Are not the outward and ordinary things around us only the envisagement of the perfect essences out of which the universe is originally and primarily formed? Just as all our attempts at forming geometrical lines and figures involve some imperfection, although they are the embodiments of eternal and self-perfect truths; just as no items in the universe correspond to our notions of quantity, and no musical instruments, however perfect, impart to the organs of sense those everlasting consonances which the soul has knowledge of; may it not be also with the objects of sense as compared to thoughts of thought? How can it be otherwise concluded, then, since all phenomena changes, except in one relation, and that the numerical,-but in these words, employed by Aristotle to explain the doctrine of Pythagoras-" Nature possesses substantial existence through numbers"? As a first principle, then, Pythagoras postulates this-" Numbers are the causes of material being "the beginning-apxnof things the cause of their forth-forming, and of their different modes and conditions." It is thus that the mathematical tendency pronounces itself in his philosophy; so much so, that it is said he "fancied the principles of mathematics were the principles of things." Let us attempt to reach the truth lying in those utterances, however strange they outwardly seem. Anaximander had asserted, that beneath the countless appearances, external forms, and variabilities of Nature, there existed some infinite essence and unity. This idea of an Infinite Unity Pythagoras accepts and interprets. In his mind and system it becomes the most abstract notion which his time afforded-a number, i. e., the primary, formal, and material Unit, which is at once the basis, the essence, and original of phenomena-the One, the Many, and the All. In and as the very centre-core and life of all appearances Number stood. And this notion of number is not merely the synonym of being, but being itself; insomuch that being is less frequently brought before the mind in its true essence and reality than in its formal and external relationships and connections. Number is invisible, intangible, incorporeal, and yet real; what other idea have we which is so,—which combines reality, unity, multiplicity, harmony, self-development, and legislative prescience? It may indeed be, that in the degenerate after-time of his school the literal enwrapment of the truth may have been remembered alone, while the deep and living spiritual thought which it contained may have evaporated or been otherwise lost to humanity by a deficiency of philosophic insight in his followers, and that there was in this numeric theory a true and real conception of the modern doctrine of definite proportions, which his followers misconceived, by passing from the notion of a material atom to that of a geometric point, and thence to the more readily comprehended idea of a numerical unit. We say this may have been, and yet we hardly suppose so. We ground this opinion, not merely upon the inefficiency of the mode of conducting experiments in physics among the Greeks, nor even on the improbability of the rise of such a notion in the thoughts of anyone at the elementary stage of philosophic insight to which the Greeks had then attained, but more so on the fact that, did we so interpret his doctrine, we must perforce accept a material instead of an ideal monad or unity, and transform the whole Pythagorean thought-system into a materialistic rather than an idealistic philosophy. This exchange we reject, not merely from feeling, but from reason; for we know not how any fair exposition of |