adopted his ethical heresy as the basis of all morals. Some, who could not take the system in its gross form, feceived it under that modification, which appears in the theology of President Dwight. Long, therefore, before the mask was completely cast away by Bentham, Mill, and the Utilitarians of England, there were hundreds of young men who had imbibed the quintessence of the poison through their college text-books, or through the introduction of the same principles into the received authorities of law-schools and courts of justice. We think it possible to show, that the prevalence of this degrading view of the nature of holiness, namely, the view which allows to virtue no essence but its tendency to happiness, has directly led to a laxity in private morals, to a subtlety of covert dishonesty, to an easy construction of church symbols and of other contracts, and to that measurement of all things divine and human by the scale of profit, which is falsely charged upon our whole nation by our foreign enemies. We think it possible to show that such is the tendency of Utilitarianism. And such being its tendency, we should despair of ever seeing any return from this garden of Hesperides, with its golden apples, were it not for a safe-guard in the human soul itself, placed there by allwise Providence. For the system runs counter to nature. Reason about it as you will, the soul cannot let so monstrous an error lie next to itself; the heart will throb forth its innate tendency, and conscience will assert its prerogative. Nor will men believe concerning virtue, any more than concerning truth, that it has no foundation but its tendency to happiness; even though such tendency be as justly predicable of the one as of the other. The very consideration of what is involved in the monosyllable OuGht, is sufficient to bring before any man's consciousness the sense of a distinction between virtue and utility, between that which it is prudent to do, and that which it is right to do. In process of time, as more adventurous and reckless minds sailed out further upon this sea of thought, especially when some theologians went so boldly to work as to declare, that, in turning to God, we regard the Supreme Being in no other light than as an infinite occasion of personal happiness to ourselves; when this began to be vented, thoughtful men were taken aback. They queried whither they were going. They remembered that their religious emotions had included other elements. They reconsidered the grounds of the adhesion they had given in to Paley, to Epicurus, and to self. They paused in their rapid career and looked at the system of general consequences. And in a good number of instances, they were ashamed of the way in which they had been trepanned out of their original ideas, and sought for something to put in the place of the idol they were indignantly throwing down. We know such men; we know that they will read these pages; men who have gone down after their guides into the vaults of the earthborn philosophy, hoping to see treasures, and gain rest to the crav ings of their importunate inquiring, but who have come up again

lamenting their error, and mortified that they had been abused. These things we have said concerning the Utilitarian ethics, now prevailing under different forms in America, and chiefly in the Northern and Eastern States, as furnishing an additional reason for the eager search that undeniably exists, after a more spiritual, elevating, and moral philosophy.

In tracing the irresistible progress of thought and opinion, as it regards philosophy, we have seen two sources of that dissatisfaction which, for several years, has prevailed with respect to hitherto reigning metaphysics; namely, a disrelish for the coldness, heartlessness, and fruitlessness of the New England methods, and a dread of the doctrine of Utilitarianism. It might have been happy for us, if the proposal for a change had come ab intra, if one of our own productive minds had been led to forsake the beaten track, and point out a higher path. But such has not been the case. It has so happened, that no great native philosophical leader has as yet arisen to draw away one scholar from the common routine. This has been very unfortunate. If we are to make experiment of a new system, we would fain have it fully and fairly before our eyes, which can never be the case so long as we receive our philosophemata by a double transportation, from Germany via France, in parcels to suit the importers; as fast as the French forwarding philosopher gets it from Germany, and as fast as the American consignee can get it from France. There is a great inconvenience in the reception of philosophical theories by instalments; and if our cisatlantic metaphysicians import the German article, we are sometimes forced to wait until they have learned the language well enough to hold a decent colloquy in it. Such, however, is precisely the disadvantage under which the young philosophers of America now labour. We hear much of German philosophy, and of the revelations which have been made to its adepts; much very adroit use of certain disparaging terms, easily learned by heart, and applied to the old system, as "flat," "unspiritual," "empirical," and "sensuous;" we hear much of the progress made in ontological and psychological discovery, in the foreign universities. But, if we hear truth, the hierophants of the new system among us are not so much more intimate with the source of this great light than some of their silent readers, as to give them any exclusive right to speak ex cathedrâ about transcendental points. Some of them are busily learning French, in order to read in that language any rifacimento of Teutonic metaphysics which may come into their hands. Some are learning German; others have actually learnt it. He who cannot do either, strives to gather into one the Sibylline oracles and abortive scraps of the gifted but indolent Coleridge, and his gaping imitators; or in default of all this, sits at the urn of dilute wisdom, and sips the thrice-drawn infusion of English from French, and French from German.

It might have been happy for us, we say, if the reformation_in our philosophy had some root of its own in our own soil. But

what is this vaunted German philosophy, of which our young men have learned the jargon? We shall endeavour to give an intelligible answer to so reasonable an inquiry. In attempting to offer a few satisfactory paragraphs on this, it is far from our purpose to profess to be adepts. We have seen a little, heard a little, and read a little respecting it. We have, even, during the last fifteen years, turned over one or two volumes of German metaphysics, and understood, perhaps, almost as much as some who have become masters; yet we disclaim a full comprehension of the several systems. The Anglo-Saxon dummheit, with which Germans charge the English, reigns, we fear, in us, after an inveterate sort. We have tried the experiment, and proved ourselves unable to see in a fog. Our night-glasses do not reach the transcendental. In a word, we are born without the Anschauungsvermögen: and this defect, we are persuaded, will "stick to our last sand." We once said to a German friend, speaking of Schleiermacher, "But we do not understand his book." "Understand it !" cried the other, with amazement," what then, but do you not feel it?" We deem ourselves competent, nevertheless, to give the plain reader some notices of the progress of transcendental philosophy.

The German philosophers whose names are most frequently heard in this country, and who indeed mark the regular succession of masters, are Kant, Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel. It would be easy to multiply names, but these are the men who have carried forward the torch, from hand to hand. Though there were German metaphysicians before Kant, it is needless to name them, as he borrowed nothing from them, and certainly has the merit of standing forth to propagate a system altogether underived from his countrymen. Perhaps the best way to put our readers in possession of the peculiar tenets of Kant, would be to direct them to an able syllabus of his system, by Professor Stapfer, translated for the Biblical Repertory for the year 1828. But to maintain the connexion of our remarks, we shall furnish further information; and if we enter somewhat more into detail here than in what follows, it is because the transition to Kant, from his predecessors, is more abrupt than from this philosopher to any who succeeded him. In order to get a glimpse of what he taught, we must, as far as possible, lay aside all the prepossessions of the British school. We must not only cease to attribute all our knowledge to sensation and reflection, as our fathers were taught to do, but we must lay aside, as unsatisfactory, all the explanations of Reid and his followers respecting first truths and intuitive principles. We must no longer regard philosophy as a science of observation and induction, and must dismiss all our juvenile objection to a purely a priori scheme of metaphysics. It is the first purpose of Kant, in his own terms, to inquire "how synthetical judgments a priori are possible, with respect to objects of experience;" as, for example, how the idea of necessary causal connexion arises, when it is conceded that nothing is given by experience but the mere succession

of events. Indeed, it was Hume's speculations on cause and effect which, as Kant tells us, first "broke his dogmatic slumbers." Proceeding from this to all the other instances in which we arrive at absolute, necessary, universal, or intuitive truths, he proves that these are not the result of experience. No induction, however broad, can ever produce the irresistible conviction with which we yield ourselves to the belief of necessary truth. "Experience (and this is the concession of Reid himself) gives us no information of what is necessary, or of what ought to exist." In such propositions as the following: "A straight line is the shortest between two points: There is a God: The soul is immortal," &c., there is an amalgamation (synthesis) of a subject with an attribute, which is furnished neither by the idea of the subject, nor by experience. These synthetical judgments therefore are a priori, or independent of experience; that is, there is something in them beyond what experience gives. There is, therefore, a function of the soul prior to all experience, and to investigate this function of the soul is the purpose of the Critique of Pure Reason. "Let us," says Stapfer, in a happy illustration, "imagine a mirror endued with perception, or sensible that external objects are reflected from its surface; let us suppose it reflecting on the phenomena which it offers to a spectator, and to itself. If it come to discover the properties which render it capable of producing these phenomena, it would find itself in possession of two kinds of ideas, perfectly distinct. It would have a knowledge of the images which it reflects, and of the properties which it must have possessed previous to the production of these images. The former would be its a posteriori knowledge; whilst in saying to itself, "my surface is plain, it is polished, I am impenetrable to the rays of light," it would show itself possessed of a priori notion, since these properties, which it would recognize as inherent in its structure, are more ancient than any image reflected from its surface, and are the conditions to which are attached the faculty of forming images, with which it would know itself endowed. Let us push this extravagant fiction a little further. Let us imagine that the mirror represented to itself, that external objects are entirely destitute of depth; that they are all placed upon the same plane; that they traverse each other, as the images do upon its surface, &c., and we shall have an example of objec tive reality attributed to modifications purely subjective. And if we can figure to ourselves the mirror as analysing and combining, in various ways, the properties with which it perceived itself invested (but of which it should have contented itself to establish the existence and examine the use); drawing from these combinations conclusions relative to the organization, design, and origin of the objects which paint themselves on its surface; founding, it may be, entire systems upon the conjectures which the analysis of its

* Kritik d. reinen Vernunft. Essay on the Active Powers. Powers, Essay vi., c. 6.

Leipzig, 1818, p. 15.

Edinb. quarto, 1788, p. 31, p. 279, also Intellectual

properties might suggest, and which it might suppose itself capable of applying to an use entirely estranged from their nature and design; we should have some idea of the grounds and tendency of the reproaches which the author of the critical philosophy addresses to human reason, when forgetting the veritable destination of its laws, and of those of the other intellectual faculties; a destination which is limited to the acquisition and perfecting of experience, it employs these laws to the investigation of objects beyond the domain of experience, and assumes the right of affirming on their existence, of examining their qualities, and determining their relations to man."

Instead therefore of examining the nature of things, the objective world without us, Kant set himself to scrutinize the microcosm, to learn the nature of the cognitive subject. In pursuing this inquiry, he finds, not that the mind is moulded by its objects, but that the objects are moulded by the mind. The external world is in our thoughts, such as it is, simply because our thoughts are necessarily such as they are. The moulds, so to speak, are within us. We see things only under certain conditions; certain laws restrain and limit all our functions. We conceive of a given event as occurring in time and in space; but this time and this space are not objective realities, existing whether we think about them or not: they are the mere forms a priori. Our minds refuse to conceive of sensible objects, except under these forms. Time and space therefore are not the results of experience, neither are they abstract ideas; for all particular times and spaces are possible, only by reason of this original constitution of the mind.*

According to this system, all that of which we can be cognizant is either necessary or contingent. That which is necessary is a priori, and belongs to the province of pure reason. That which is contin gent is a posteriori, and belongs to the province of experience. The former he calls pure, the latter empirical; and it is the circle of knowledge contained in the former which constitutes the far-famed Transcendental Philosophy.†

Every English and American reader must fail to penetrate even the husk of German and mock-German philosophy, unless he has accepted the distinction between the reason and the understanding. We are not aware that the distinction ever obtained any footing in our modern English science, until the time of Coleridge, who in several of his works has striven pugnis et calcibus to instal it into our philosophical terminology. "The understanding," says Kant, "is the faculty judging according to sense." "Reason," says Coleridge, "is the power of universal and necessary convictions, the source and substance of truths above sense, and having their evidence in themselves." Resuming, then, the thread which we

* Kritik d. R. V., pp. 28-43.

† Ibid., p. 19.

Even in German, this distinction between Verstand and Vernunft was not always recognised. See a philological analysis of the latter term in Herder's Metakritik, vol. ii., p. 11. See Kritik d. R. V. Elementari., ii. Th., ii. Abth., i. Buch.