though very often not much in his praise, looking at his natural capacity of mind and pretensions to science. Yet I am under the greatest obligations to him; for Jack, although he has a business of his own to manage, namely, the ironmongery concern of Smith and Son in the Edgeware Road, finds time to manage my business also somebody, he says (I wish it to be observed how impertinent he is), must manage it for me, for my wits are always wool-gathering; which, he adds, would be no mischief if the wool could be made into mops, but, being gathered, it is worth nothing. I am obliged to put up with observations in this style on account of the help he gives me, and his business-like advice: it was by his recommendation I wrote the note at the foot of the previous page; and what he said when I had written it was this: "He would answer for it that it was the only sensible thing I should write throughout the whole of my part of the volume." In short, Jack thinks me a fool, and I think him a fool. The difference of our education will in some degree account for this, though the difference of our natural capacities much more. When my father sent me to Germany, his father sent him to Birmingham, where he remained, with occasional holiday visits home, till he was of age. In that busy town he lived in the family of a master ironfounder, a friend of his father. Before our separation we used to accompany each other over Hyde Park to a grammar-school at Brompton; and here, among other things, we learned Latin so as to construe Cæsar. Cæsar's Latin no doubt is very fair; but I kept up my Latin by reading and very deeply studying a much more profound author, namely, Aldrich, whose

Rudimenta Artis Logica was procured for me by an Oxford friend. As to Jack, when he got to Birmingham he seems to have studied everything, but of course it was all very shallow. The only part of what he learned which I envy him, is the smattering he seems to have obtained of Greek: for I was always desirous of being better acquainted with those Greek terms which occur in transcendental philosophy. If I am to believe what Jack tells of himself, he contrived to become well acquainted with the processes in the foundry; he studied at spare hours Greek and Latin; he attended lectures of chemistry, geology, botany, and Heaven knows how many other of those shallow experimental sciences as they call them, which we transcendentalists look upon as mere pebbles in the groundwork of our all-comprehensive schemes; and not satisfied with these extensions of his early schooling, he became a politician by mingling in the different political societies with which Birmingham abounds. He was by turns an old whig, a liberal whig, a radical, a chartist, an old tory, a modern tory, and a conservative of the Young England school. Then in religious views he was alternately high-church and low-church, a puseyite and a calvinist; in short, everything in turn, and nothing long. At present, indeed, he pretends that his opinions are settled, and that he wavered no longer than was necessary to the conclusions he

came to.

Having thus far trespassed on my reader with what I deemed necessary to state concerning my antecedents, my present condition, and my connections, I will now say what my motives are for publishing this Memoir.

My brother-in-law and myself never meet, which we have occasion to do several times every day, but we fall to scientific disputation,-scientific, I mean, as regards my share in it. Now these contests always end in the opinion of each other which I have stated above; Jack saying to me when he draws off, " Franz, your heart is good, but your head is muddy ;" and I saying to him, "Jack, your head is shallow, though your heart is sound." I am no longer able to bear this unsatisfactory state of things; I am determined, being confident of the result, to make the public judge between us; nor does Jack, though he laughs at the project, offer any objection, if, which I have agreed to, I will let him see what I put into his mouth before I print it. Our respective acquirements being in this way brought before the world, it will soon be seen which of us draws truth from the depths of the PURE REASON, and which of us only skims it from the shallows of the CONTINGENT and CONDITIONAL.

It is Mr. Drake, the writer of the other memoir, who kindly affords me the opportunity of coming before the public. Both my brother-in-law and myself are already under great obligations to him. We supply his town and his country establishments with all such articles as are furnished by our respective trades; and he often honours us by his conversation on subjects of speculative and moral philosophy. He says of my brother's views, that they are in unison with those of his deceased friend Mr. Fremdling, and he is glad to find in him a champion of those opinions less lukewarm than he feels himself to be, bound as he is to promulgate them. The fact is, I believe Mr. Drake to be, in

his own mind, more inclined to my way of philosophizing than my brother's. At all events, he allows that my way goes down much better with the world at large, and (though I think the epithet inappropriate) is more amusing. With regard to the other memoir, which he now republishes, he declares that he stands unwillingly before the public to acquit his conscience of an obligation. That it unfolds a tragedy with a revolting catastrophe he cannot help, and he is glad to have my memoir as a companion of more lively character. My brother says my morals are practically right, but my speculative notions wrong; while, with regard to the subject of the other memoir, the speculative notions are right, while the morals issue practically in a miserable failure. The story which Mr. Drake puts forth exemplifies (so Mr. Drake bids me say) the important truth that man does not stand upon this earth an immortal being because endued with reason, if by this gift of reason he seek no other good than that which fits him for a denizen of earth; for then he does but use his reason-his means of immortality-as brutes use their infallible instinct. Let it be granted that he fulfil, while thus limiting his views, every duty of the earth-born man, yet he is not fit for heaven, since his aspirations soar not thither, and his affections are not correspondently trained. It is the especial duty of Poetry, a daughter of the skies as she appears in Milton's 'Comus,' to enforce the momentous truth thus imperfectly indicated, and to show that the love which leads to heaven cannot be that over which the terrestrial Venus presides. But if Poetry, forgetful of her high calling, has too often lent her hues to the

terrestrial Venus and made her seem lovelier than she is, it may be permitted to Prose to step forward, and, however revolting the exhibition, however with the same purposes it may differ from Milton's poetry, to

show her as she is, a brute in human form.

My brother thinks that Mr. Drake's performance should stand first in the volume, and so do I; but his reason for this is an impertinence of the usual kind—the tragedy, he says, ought of course to go before the farce. Now, I really should advise the reader to go at once to the other memoir before he proceeds with this; because, as my brother's philosophy (philosophy indeed!) and Mr. Fremdling's are the same, and mine is a confutation of theirs, I could wish the confutation to come in its proper place, namely, after the promulgation of the error. I promise my reader such openings of transcendental truth as shall quite eclipse the shallow experience of the Locke school. And I have my experience too: I have facts to unfold as well as arguments. I can give proofs that, while we live among phenomena, the mere creations of Time and Space, which are parts of the mind while the mind is connected with matter, yet the mind is itself identical with the absolute unconditional NOWMENON,* that is with the eternal Now to which Cowley adverts in his immortal distich.

It provokes me beyond measure that my brother, while he feels, as I am sure he does, my arguments

* Jack says this is properly spelled noumenon. Such indeed I find to be the spelling on consulting Kant; but, adopting the term as an English word, I think my spelling more to the purpose.