itself had occasioned, and this, perhaps, is all it is good for. It casts no additional light on the paths of life, but disperses the clouds with which it had overspread them before. It advances not the traveller one step on his journey, but conducts him back again to the spot from which he had wandered." The child sees an apple on the table, and affirms an apple to be there. A Berkleian philosopher labours to disprove the assertion. A second metaphysician arises and repels the sophistry of the first. But it is not he who gives the law to the child -he but recognises and respects the law already planted in its constitution by the hand of nature. A sound metaphysics is not the fountain-head of all science. It is but the protector or guardian of the fountain-head, and stationed there to ward off the inroads of those who would vitiate or disturb it. The following sentences from Kant himself are altogether to our mind. "To deny its utility (of mental science) is to deny the utility of a police, because their only function is to prevent the outrages to which we should be otherwise exposed, and so as that everybody might in safety go about his own business." Had there been no perverse metaphysics to bewilder men, each of the sciences might have gone about its own business safely and prosperously; and, save for the interest which attaches to its own lessons, a counteractive metaphysics might never have been required.

But on this subject let us hear Mr. Morell himself, and the more that his arguments, or rather his illustrations, in favour of the mental philosophy, are somewhat peculiar. It is high time, indeed, that he should speak in his own person; and there is scarcely a paragraph that we could quote from these masterly volumes, for the purpose of introducing him to the notice of our readers, which would not introduce him favourably. His phraseology is not always marked by the most rigorous precision; but throughout there is a charm of good writing which never fails us -yet in a philosophic style, too, and that of singular transparency, and expressiveness, and power. We have seldom read an author who can make such lucid conveyance of his thoughts, and these never of light or slender quality, but substantial and deep as the philosophy with which he deals. Even when not convinced by his reasonings, it is difficult to resist the impulse by which we feel ourselves carried along in the flow of his commanding and well constructed sentences. Yet there is nowhere the semblance of an elaborate construction; but altogether in the manner of one who wields the pen of a ready writer calamo currente-yet of meaning so patent and palpable, that the reader might follow him oculo currente. Even the hieroglyphics of the Kantian philosophy brighten into illuminated characters, at the touch of its accomplished historian.

The following is his reply to the objection against the practical utility of speculative philosophy :

"Such an objection, we reply, if insisted on, would prove fatal to the cause of almost every branch of human science. It is never expected, and indeed it is not possible, that the mass of mankind should be acquainted with the process, by which any kind of investigation whatever is carried on. The search after truth, even the truths of the phenomenal world, is a process to them completely enveloped in darkness; all they have to do is to reap the practical fruits of any discovery, when it is made, without casting one single thought upon the steps by which others have arrived at it. If we look for a moment at the law by which thought is propagated, we find that it always descends from the highest order of thinkers to those who are one degree below them; from these again it descends another degree, losing at each step of the descent something more of the scientific form, until it reaches the mass in the shape of some admitted fact of which they feel there is not a shadow of doubt, a fact which rests on the authority of what all the world above them says, and which, therefore, they receive totally regardless of the method of its elimination. Take, for example, any great fact or law of nature ascertained by means of physical science. Such a fact is first of all perchance wrung from the most close and laborious mathematical analysis; a few perhaps may take the trouble to follow every step of this process; but the mass even of natural philosophers themselves are content to see what is the method of investigation, to copy the formulas in which it results, and then put it down as so much further accession to their physical science. The mass of intelligent, educated minds, again, with a general idea only of mathematical analysis, accept the fact or law we are now supposing, as one of the many beautiful results of investigations, which they acknowledge to be far beyond the reach of their own powers;—and from them, lastly, it descends to the rest of the community as a bare fact, which they appropriate to their own use simply as being a universally acknowledged truth. The first school-boy you meet would very likely tell you with some accuracy what is the rapidity of light; but as to any observations on the occultations of Jupiter's satellites, or on the phenomena of aberration, or any other such method of computing it, on these he has never bestowed a thought. The commonest seaman that has learned the use of his sextant, applies to his own purposes all the necessary formulas of trigonometry; but as to the methods of investigating such formulas, such matters lie entirely out of his reach.

This law of the descent of thought, however, this gravitation of ascertained truth from the higher order of mind to the lower, is not confined to the mathematical sciences, nor is it here alone that the results of investigation are transmitted by what may be termed formulas. There are such things as historical formulas, as formulas for the various theories of the fine arts, and so also are there philosophical or metaphysical formulas. The results of long and patient reflection, in this last case particularly, embody themselves in some general principle, and this principle, after it has been tested, gradually spreads itself

downwards from mind to mind, until thousands act upon it every day of their life, to whom all philosophical thinking is completely foreign. When, therefore, the objection is raised, that metaphysical inquiries lie beyond the reach of the mass, and cannot practically subserve the general interests of mankind, it is entirely forgotten or overlooked, that the results of such inquiries are intelligible to all; nay, that they are amongst the most practically efficient and influential of all truths which can possibly exist in the mind of man.”—Vol. i., pp. 19-21.

Now between the mathematical formula as convertible into popular use, although the product it may be of the rectifications and discoveries of many successive ages-between this and the mental, or as perhaps our author would rather term it, the metaphysical formula, there might be one most important difference. The former supplies a new instrument of observation, which but for the labours of the mathematician, could never have been formed or brought into operation. Whereas the service of the latter formula, and for which we are indebted to the labours of the mental analyst, might only be as follows,-not to supply a new, but only to certify and authenticate an old instrument of observation, given ready-made to all men by the hand of nature; and which all men could have confidently and successfully made use of, without the necessity of being told so by a right metaphysics, had not a wrong metaphysics cast obscuration over the dictates, and disturbed the confidence of nature. And this view is in perfect keeping with the historical illustrations which are subjoined to the extract that we have now made from our author. What was it that displaced the formula of Aristotle? Was it not the formula of Lord Bacon? And what is to displace the formula of Locke, as aggravated since into the worse formulas of Condillac and Cabanis? It will not, I fear, be the formula of Kant, which itself stands in need of correction, and has fallen short of the achievement by Dr. Reid, whose formula it was that displaced the formulas of Berkeley and Hume? But must we first study Berkeley and Hume upon the one hand, and then, to rid us of their scepticism, make a study of Dr. Reid upon the other, ere that we make the confident use which nature bids us of our senses, and proceed on the reality of an external world? Or, to go further back, must we first learn the metaphysics of Aristotle, which tyrannized for nearly two thousand years over the understandings of men, and then unlearn them by the corrective metaphysics of the Novum Organum?-whose whole lesson it is, that ere we can ascertain the visible properties of any thing, we must look at it, or the audible, we must listen,—or the tangible properties, we must handle, or the dimensions, we must measure it, or the weight we must weigh it; or, in short, whatever other property falls within the range of observation, we must take the proper observational method for the determination

of it. Now that we have been recalled from the wrong to the right direction, there seems no practical necessity for taking up our heads, either with the disturbing force which turned us away, or with the counteractive force which took us back again. Bacon was the vigorous policeman who drove away Aristotle; but now that the service is effected, is it aught more incumbent to study him ere that we enter upon any of the experimental sciences, than to take lessons at the Scottish school of metaphysics ere we venture upon the every-day use of our eyes? Most assuredly we have no wish to depreciate the mental philosophy, or, still less, to banish it from the high place which it deserves to occupy in the encyclopædia of human knowledge. Yet might it not be true, that, but for its perversities, and so the needful correction of them, as men could have gone aright about their ordinary business, so philosophers could have gone aright about the business of all the other sciences, although both the right and the wrong metaphysics had vanished for ever from the remembrance of the world?

The use of our right mathematical formula is not to displace or set aside a wrong mathematical formula, by which men had been formerly misled in their computation of longitudes; but it is to point out a method wholly unknown till the period of its discovery, and without which no sound computation could possibly have been made. On the other hand, the main use of a right metaphysical formula is not to supply us with any new method of investigation; but to vindicate the old and natural methods from which we should never have been tempted, save for the wrong metaphysical formula which a better metaphysics have now superseded. The mathematical formula supplies a new lesson till then unheard of. The metaphysical but restores our confidence in the old lessons of common sense, old as human nature itself, and which we never had deserted, or in which we should never have lost our confidence, had not a perverse metaphysics arisen to disturb and darken it. Now that this service has been rendered, the sciences might be prosecuted with all vigour and effect, although the right and the wrong metaphysics were alike forgotten.

And, besides, it should not be forgotten that Bacon's Novum Organum is properly not a product of the mental philosophy after all. His main converse was with the outer world, with scarcely, if ever, a reflex look on the world that is within. A few pages, comparatively, says Mr. Morell," would suffice to contain every thing he wrote of a strictly metaphysical character."-(Vol. i., 79.) A pretty good evidence this of what can be achieved for science without the aid of that philosophy which claims to be the source of all and the regulator of all. It is

worthy of all consideration, that, in contradistinction to those of Descartes, Bacon's views were chiefly of an objective character, and that upon them he constructed that method of philosophizing to which all the observational sciences are so indebted, not even excepting the science of mind itself. Surely if, at the commencement of that great epoch in the history of science, the mental philosophy had so little to do with it, we might well believe, that, after the stream of investigation had been turned and men were set on the right path, what had thus begun without the aid of metaphysics, could also without its aid be continued and

carried forward.

But we must be done with these preliminary, and, as yet, very general observations, that we might address ourselves more closely to the work before us. We shall not attempt, however, even so much as an abstract of its multifarious contents; nor will our space, though enlarged to the maximum allowance, permit of more, than, first, our account and estimate of the leading systems which are here made to pass before us, and, secondly, our estimate of Mr. Morell's own philosophy, as far as this can be gathered from his commentaries. In the execution of this twofold task, its distinct parts may not always stand separately out from each other, but be occasionally blended into one; and throughout there must be a strenuous effort for the utmost possible condensation, that some room might be left for our views of the present state and future prospects both of the philosophy and the faith in our own land-so far as these might be affected by the growing admiration and interest which are now felt in the teeming speculations of Germany.

And, surely, we might well presume, that for the intelligent British reader, it is not required that we should dilate on the sensational philosophy of Locke, or tell how it ripened into the scepticism of Berkeley, and afterwards into the more thorough and consistent scepticism of David Hume. Nor need we to dwell long on the "common sense" philosophy, distinctive of the Scottish school, and first constructed by Dr. Reid for the overthrow of that scepticism. Yet as our argument mainly turns on a comparison between his system and that of Kant, and this in order to a precise reckoning of the additions made by the latter to the former, as well as of the divergencies between them—we must bestow a few sentences at least upon our own countryman, ere we venture our account of him who might well be styled the great Coryphaeus of German transcendentalism.

The main principles of Dr. Reid's philosophy are shortly as follows:-The first to be singled out is his doctrine of immediate perception, in virtue of which we have the instant belief of an