THERE are few things in history more curious than the position which philosophy has occupied in the world since ever men began to think upon their thoughts. By general consent the title of a great philosopher has been allowed to represent the highest eminence to which the human mind can attain. Something more stable and not less divine than poetry, more lofty and comprehensive than mere science, more searching than theology, more profound than ethics-embracing and transcending common reason, common observation, all the best gifts of ordinary mortals-this noblest of pursuits has everywhere taken the foremost rank in the opinion of the world. It reveals itself out of the depths of antiquity the oldest of all studies. Before physical science had come into being, or when it existed but as a series of distorted guesses at the wonders of external nature, philosophy was. Though it has changed with every changing generation, developed, waned, undergone countless revolutions, there has been no break in

VOL. OV.-NO. DCXXXIX.

the thread of its continuous labour. How charming is divine philosophy! There is no intellectual occupation to which the common mind yields such unvarying reverence. Poetry is to some but a light art, a minstrel's song, half amusement, half waste of time. Of science, even at the present day, and much more in former ages, men have asked, Cui bono? but it is a kind of instinct in humanity (as appears) to respect philosophy. There is no educated man of the present or of many preceding generations, who would not take shame to himself if obliged to confess that he knew nothing of, or had no sympathy with, this science of the soul. We may scoff at the unpractical tendency of abstract thought, at its exaggerations, its unrealities, its want of a true hold upon the steady soil; but yet there is not one of us who is not more or less impressed by the often misapplied title of "the greatest thinker of his age." We may-nothing more probable-dislike the bearer of that title, disapprove of him, feel that by very ex

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cess of logic he makes himself futile; yet we cannot contest the supremacy it confers. And thus, looking back along the line of ages, there appears to us a line of great figures-figures almost more notable in their calm than those of the greatest practical agents the world has seen. Bacon, for example, in the rich Elizabethan age. The greatest of English poets is on the same scene, and with him a sovereign of personal note and mark, great statesmen, and some of the most picturesque and noble gentlemen-Sidney, Raleigh, Essex-that ever adorned England. Yet, even in presence of Shakespeare, it is difficult to say that Bacon is not the most illustrious-for his deeds alas! no-his deeds damn the man-but because of his transcendent eminence as a philosopher. It is thought, and thought only, that gives him his supremacy. It is needless to pursue through history the names of those who have won on the same ground a long-enduring fame. Yet the science which has conferred this fame has become in modern times the most unsatisfactory, the least beneficial, the most unpractical of all knowledges. Amid the busy world, in which every man has his work to do and his burden to bear, to walk over real thorns that tear his flesh, and burning ploughshares that penetrate to the bone, the greatest thinkers have but lived to prove that nought is everything and everything is nought. Their researches have only led them to the conclusion that nothing can be found out. It is the labour of Sisyphus, never ending, still beginning, which has cast over them the mist of splendour through which posterity beholds them. Instead of expanding our horizon and bringing new truths to our knowledge, the only practical issue of their labours has been to reduce the number of our beliefs and make us uncertain of all things. Each new thinker who has risen in the world of modern philosophy has taken something from us. Even

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the concession grudgingly made by one has been annulled by his successor. Let one man afford us the cheering certainty that our sciousness is a reality, and that we can know and be sure that we live; another comes after him to declare, no that Something lives of which we are a part; Something which we cannot understand, yet may believe; and that this Something is the sole reality in the universe. If one grants us the power of perceiving the image of things so truly as to be able to trust in our conception of them, another contradicts him with the assertion that the images alone exist, while of the things we can have no assurance; and a third follows with the still more disheartening warning, that we must not trust even those images, our minds being like a distorted mirror, full of false reflections. A discouraging, humiliating, unadvancing science, making progress, perhaps, in method and form, but, so far as result goes, arriving only at the conclusion that it is itself a delusion and impossibility. All other knowledges have contributed something to the common stock of human profit: philosophy alone has given us nothing. She has bidden us believe that we live as shadows in an unreal world-that nature and all her glories are but the phantasmagoria of a dreamthat the skies and the winds are but so many notions of our own uneasy, restless brain. While we, the ignorant, have been roaming, not uncheerily, about a world full of sunshine and of moonlight, she has groped on from one darkness to another, losing a faculty, a faith, a scrap of feeble certainty, at every step. Such is the story as traced even by her own votaries. Yet it is this constantly-failing, constantlydissatisfied science which has given their chief title to immortality to some of the names most known and famous in the ordinary world.

Let it be understood, to begin with, that the present writer has no

pretensions to touch the history of philosophy as a philosopher should. It is with the eyes of the outside spectator, or, as the subject of this sketch expresses it, the vulgar, that we regard its strange, long-continued, unproductive toil. We do not attempt to take up its phraseology, or to explain its changes, so far as they come under our notice, from within, but from without. Without overstepping that barrier which separates the external sphere, in which everything is real to our rational faculties, from the interior, in which all is image and idea-some notion, we think, may be given of what was going on at a certain period in the inner circle, and how its movements affected, and were affected by, the outer shell of practical existence. The eighteenth century was full of philosophers and philosophisings, and yet it cannot in any way be described as a philosophical age. It is an age of rude contact, wild prejudices, petty motives, everything that is most foreign to the principles of pure thought. If there had been any practical tendency in the science to elevate men's minds, and bring them to a better atmosphere, a more fit opportunity for the exercise of its influence could not have been. But this is an agency y which no philosopher claims. In utter disinterestedness, without hope of gain or reward, the thinker goes on in his sphere within a sphere. The world and its doings are nothing to him-men and their ways are beneath his notice. While the world beats the air in its fierce fever, while it fights and struggles with all the perversities of life, he stands, in the dim Camera Obscura of his own consciousness, gazing at the reflections of things turned topsy-turvy by the laws of nature. Is it a real world that is outside? No. It is but some phantasm, probably quite unlike the moving current of images that come and go. There are no things in his universe-there are but thoughts;

or if anything exists besides thought, it is that Something-be it God, be it devil, be it matter or substance, or howsoever the word may change-a vast darkness, which no man can fathom or define. The great sea raging outside has little influence on the calm flux and reflux of his tidal river: now it ebbs to some bare unity, called, it may be, Idealism, it may be Sensationalism; now it rises in a tide infinitesimally greater, to acknowledge a duality of mental power. In endless succession come those fallings and flowings. The spiritual conception rises with Descartes, rises with Spinoza, ebbs with Hobbes, begins to mount with Locke, swells to a spring-tide in Berkeley, falls back to the lowest water-mark in Hume and the philosophers of the Revolution. Yet how small a space is represented in this coming and going! From Descartes, who was sure of himself, to Hume, who was sure of nothing, the distance is scarce so much as might be represented by the line of glistening pebbles or muddy bank between high and low watermark. And so far as the big universe was concerned, these great thinkers might have been but so many children weaving their endless bootless games upon the margin of the stream. Man knew as much and as little of himself at the end as at the beginning. He knew as little of the speechless forces round him; he was as ignorant of whence he came and whither he was going. It may be said that true philosophy proposes no end to itself, and is beyond all vulgar longings after a result; but we reply, that our estimate of its extraordinary, brilliant, and bootless labour -a labour which has confessedly occupied some of the finest intellects in the world-is made from without, and not from within. No one questions the strange interest of these inquiries to all who get within the magic circle. But to what purpose is this waste? asks

the bewildered spectator; and neither from within nor from without is there any reply.

The reigning philosophy of the time was that of Locke, when George Berkeley came into the world; one of those serious moderate compromises between two systems of which the English mind seems peculiarly capable. Reject ing as untenable the philosophy which deduced everything from individual consciousness, and yet not material enough to deny some power to the mind itself in conjunction with the senses, Locke formed the conception of a double action always going on in those dark recesses of the human intellect which have never yet given forth their secret to any inquirer. His decision was, that though sense supplied the mind with all its materials, yet there was in the mind a certain power of reflection and rumination over the material supplied which made every final conclusion a joint process effected by two powers acting together experience bringing in the corn, but reflection grinding it in the mill. According to this theory, no innate principle, no intuitive certainty, belonged to man. True, he might move about among the phantasms of earth with a certain vulgar external sense of their reality, but to know any one thing exactly as it is, was for ever denied to him by laws immutable. His own ideas of things were all his possession; they might not even resemble the things themselves, and probably did not but they were all to which he could attain. The ground on which he walked presented to him certain appearances of verdure, beauty, solidity, various and extended surface; but these were but impressions made on his senses, combined and accumulated by his intellect, and not, so far as he knew, affording even a fair representation of the earth in its own individuality. And yet the earth possessed an individuality, and the something, the

substance, whatever it was, really existed. With these impressions, Locke insisted, it was meet that man should be satisfied. Satisfied or not, he had reached the end of his tether. To go farther was impossible-to gain anything like absolute knowledge was impossible: the contentment thus enjoined might be to an eager spirit only the forlorn and pathetic resignation of a being blindly stumbling among the ghosts of things; but to Locke's calm and unexaggerated intelligence it was the reasonable contentment of a creature born to no better enlightenment, able to derive pleasure and pain, though not knowledge and certainty, from the shows of nature, and bound to make a virtue of necessity and put up with its inevitable deprivations. Most men do so without finding any difficulty in the matter; and it was fit and right that they should do so, concluded the philosopher, with a calmness and moderation which were indeed the characteristic sentiments in his case of philosophical despair. He was resigning his own science when he said it. "Locke gave up philosophy as hopeless," says Mr Lewes. To this point had the silent tide crept up when Berkeley came into the world.

And here the spectator who knows the age will brighten with a thrill of warmer interest. The philosopher who was about to awaken the discussions, the laughter, the ridicule of the eighteenth century, is no abstract being shut up in a fictitious world. In him life gives no contradiction to fame. There is not a spot in his existence for which his warmest admirer need fear the light of day. Bishop Berkeley was not only a philosopher, he was a man. His being was not starved upon the meagre fare of speculation, but nourished by all the generous currents of existence. A life full of active service to his kind, full of the warm impulses of a spontaneous, frank, open-hearted Irish naturea sensibility so keen as to lead him