was nothing in the world but a creator and created | possessed whilst in the womb, though to no purmind. According to Dr. Beattie, he taught "that pose, knowledge which I lost the moment I had external objects (that is, the things which we take occasion for it, and which I have never since been for external objects) are nothing but ideas in the able perfectly to recover." Rationalism, or idealmind; and that independent of us and of our facul- ism, which has excited so much attention in Gerties, the earth, the sun and the starry heavens have many, is the offspring of this school. Leibnitz is no existence at all; that a lighted candle has not regarded as its founder. From him the Germans one of those qualities it appears to have; that it is have derived one of their most distinguishing chanot white nor round, nor luminous, nor divisible, racteristics-their propensity to the idealistic menor extended; but that, from any thing we know or thod of reasoning, and generations yet unborn can ever know to the contrary, it may be an Egyp- are destined to breathe in Germany the atmosphere tian pyramid, the king of Prussia, a mad-dog, the created by this great man. Among the vagaries island of Madagascar, Saturn's rings, one of the of this philosopher and profound thinker, was a Pleiades, or nothing at all." Hume went even far- doctrine, which originated solely with himself, and ther than his tutor in this doctrine. Berkley ad- for which he claims the sole honor. It was the mitted that there was mind; Hume declared that pre-established harmony; or that the human soul there was neither mind nor matter; there was only contained within itself the energy of a continued a series of concatenated ideas and impressions, "a series of actions and operations, which were carried bundle of perceptions that succeed each other with on without any reference to the body; every thing inconceivable rapidity, and are in perpetual flux." going on in the body as if it had no soul, and in Hence, Dr. Good draws the legitimate conclusion, the soul as if it had no body, and that the concurI myself, of to-day, am no more I myself of to-rence observable between the actions of soul and morrow, than I am Nebuchadnezzar or Cleopatra. body was casual! The learned but superstitious I am but a bundle of changing perceptions. Malbranche embraced this theory, but asserted that Des Cartes, and with him Malbranche, Leibnitz, the agreement of the actions of the soul with the Spinoza and Bayle maintained the doctrine, op-actions of the body, so as to preserve this unbroken posed triumphantly by the immortal Locke, that harmony, was a direct operation of the infinite there is no intellectual world, that our ideas are mind, and that it should be regarded as a continupurely and altogether innate, and that to obtain ous miracle. Leibnitz also maintained the existknowledge we must search for it only in our own ence of what was called the law of continuity, minds, and not from without. That there, that is, or that the harmonious action of the soul was not in our minds, it reposes, and is not necessarily ob- lost, even for a moment, but was perpetual and servable, unless by careful observation-" the mind was never lost for a moment, not ceasing even in is a store-house of ideas;" they are there implanted sound sleep, lethargy or continued trance; and he by nature; hence they are strictly innate. The hence, from these two doctrines, draws a third, first lesson taught by these philosophers is, that which is called opticism, the foundation of which we must doubt concerning the reality of all things: is, that this is the best of all possible worlds. He hence, Des Cartes doubted first whether he him- comes to this conclusion by asserting, that, as the self existed-he resolves this gravely by the irre- preëstablished harmony is the result of the divine Bistible syllogism, "Cogito, ergo sum." Having energy, it must be that of the wisest and best of ascertained satisfactorily that he himself exists, he beings, and therefore perfect. Every individual begins immediately to act in conformity to his must see that this at once saps the foundation of grand doctrine-that the mind is crowded with all human responsibility, and removes all stimuli to possible ideas. He begins to draw them up from human exertion-it bears its folly in its front. their deep recesses, and among the first that he According to this theory Leibnitz himself, with all brings up is the knowledge that he himself has a his deep-toned benevolence as a philanthropist, and body, that he is surrounded by like beings with him- all his far-reaching intellect as a thinking being, self, that there is a God, all mathematical and deserves no more credit nor no more honor than moral truths, &c. Voltaire has facetiously ridi- the sensualist, or the but half-humanized inhabitculed this notion of the French philosopher. "Des ant of New-Holland. Cartes," says he, "asserted that the soul at its Leibnitz is regarded as the founder of German coming into the body, is informed with the whole rationalism, but he did not carry it to a height suffinotion of metaphysical notions; knowing God, in-ciently sublime to satisfy his countrymen. Kant finite space, possessing all abstract ideas; in a engendered a still wilder vagary. He pursued word, completely endued with the most sublime rationalism to its utmost limits, and then appeared light, which it unhappily forgets as soon as it is before the world as the founder of a philosophy, born." "With regard to myself I am little in- which he named, for preeminence, the transcenclined to fancy, that some weeks after I was con- dental. And truly has he transcended the most ceived, I was a very learned soul; knowing at that sublimated and ethereal systems of all his predecestime a thousand things which I forgot at birth; and sors in the regions of philosophy. He avowedly 66 them. ascends to a place where experience is to be laid | mathematical affections of matter are not derived aside to a height where he may breathe an at- directly through the medium of sensation and remosphere of unmixed intellectuality. To him flection, they are so dependent on them, that, with'spontaneous conceptions" and "the necessary out their aid, it would be impossible to conceive of conditions of thought," laid open worlds which were before unknown. Mounting to this supreme height, this dwelling place of Reason in her virgin purity, unallied to experience or facts, he was able, together with some of his disciples, to bring down to human intellect a correct analysis of the attributes of Deity—to fill up the immense void between the finite and the infinite-to look back upon all that is past in the invisible world, and to look forward into futurity and all possible occurrences. The literature of Germany is an evidence of the influence of the opinions of Kant and his predecessor. Kant also taught, that time and space contain the substance of all our knowledge-that as knowledge exists in the mind, and cannot exist without comprehending time and space, therefore the mind contains them, and it cannot exist without them, as if the mind of an infant unborn contained either the one or the other. We must likewise be amused with the different theories which have been concocted, with regard to the manner in which ideas are presented to the mind. Malbranche, as we have before hinted, maintained that the human soul was united to a being of infinite perfection, who in himself has the ideas of all created things, and who, being always present with his creatures, reveals to us, as far as he thinks proper, his ideas of objects, and thus as in a mirror we see all things in God. Hartley taught that ideas were communicated to the mind by vibrations communicated to the nerves, which were saturated with an imponderable, elastic fluid. His words are, "External objects, impressed on the senses, occasioned, first in the nerves on which they are impressed, and then on the brain, vibrations of the small, and, as one may say, infinitesimal medullary particles. And these Gassendi and Hobbes were violent opponents of vibrations are excited, propagated and kept up the Cartesian school. They revived the ancient partly by the ether, partly by the uniformity, conatomic theory of Epicurus, and run into the other tinuity, softness and active powers of the medulextreme in opposition to Des Cartes. In their lary substance of the brain, spinal marrow and view, the soul was material, composed of the for- nerves." Now all this is mere assumption; for tuitous concurrence of atoms, and thought was evolved by the vibrations or motions of these particles. They denied that there were any innate ideas; they were all sensible images, conveyed to the mind from without, and thus every idea which could not thus be traced to an external sensation was chimerical. Hence our ideas of God, Justice, Truth, unless they can be resolved into some simpler form, by which they can be made objects of sensation, cannot exist. Indeed, Hobbes went so far as to say that there were no immaterial existences. According to his system, mind is material, and the Deity is material, the uncreated as well as the created; and mind, thought, is nought but the mobility of this materiality. experience and observation give us no evidence of either the existence of such an ether or a vibratory motion in the nerves. Unworthy, however, as these notions seem of the approbation of philosophic minds, Hartley was not the first nor the only one to adopt it. Even Newton seems to have cherished something of the same kind; and the secretion of animal spirits in the brain was long cherished by many of the most profound thinkers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Is not this, likewise, something like the doctrine advanced by Plato, that external objects are continually throwing off light films, which, coming in contact with the nerves, are communicated to the sensorium of the brain-"all external objects are perpetually throwing off fine alternate waves of different flavors, odors, colors, shapes and other qualities, which, by striking against their appropriate senses, excite in the senses themselves a perception of the qualities and presence of the parent objects, and are immediately conveyed, by the sentient channel, to the chamber of the mind, or sensory, without any injury to their texture, in the same manner that heat, light and electricity pervade solid substances, and still maintain their integrity." The ideas of many other philosophers are equally curious. Some made the mind a looking-glass, reflecting the pictures or images of external things. Some made The quibbling controvesy which for a time was carried on by the school of Scotch philosophers, against the metaphysical system advanced by Locke, must also be regarded as another instance of the folly of philosophers. Locke advocated the doctrine that all our ideas may be reduced to the results of sensation and reflection, and that every idea in the mind may be traced back to these. The Scotch philosophers pretended to have found a third medium, which they call intellectual instinct, or common sense. They assert that it is by this only that we are able to acquire the notions of extension, motion, duration, and other like abstract ideas. It is employed in what is termed by the mind wander out of the body to communicate Stewart the mathematical affections of matter; and thus they have been combating a bugbear which does not in reality exist, for, if our ideas of the with and obtain information from the objects with which it was conversant. Others again, that the mind perceived sensible objeets by sensible images, and that these images were as strictly material as the objects themselves; but on this subject we forbear to go further. figure. firmly persuaded that God must have made the world in six days and rested on the seventh, because there were but seven notes in music. Reid Learned Geologists have also furnished their mentions another, who knew that there could not quota of subjects for the entertainment of the cu- be more than three parts in music: to wit, Bass, rious. Until within a very few years their notions Tenor and Treble, because there were only three with respect to the nature of the material world, persons in the Trinity. Another was convinced and the changes which have evidently taken place that the doctrine of the trinity was true, and that upon its surface, are extremely chimerical. Buffon mathematically, because it took three sides and supposed that the earth was a fragment of the sun, three angles to compose the simplest mathematical struck off by the contact of a comet. This fragment being at the time fused, and having a whirl- We will now bring our rummaging among the ing motion communicated to it, in the concussion absurdities of great minds to a conclusion, having attained a globular form; and in its revolutions brought, as we proposed, before the reader, some round its centre, in the course of some fourteen of their notions, and we think in a sufficient numthousand years, became so cool at the poles as to ber to serve as a monument of the folly of human be habitable, and by degrees the portion also round reason, and also as a proof that the most towerthe equator. Darwin supposed that the earth was ing minds have cherished opinions which must ever formed by a volcano in the sun, which belched out, remain as blurs upon their great names. There at a single moment, this monstrous mouthful. seems in this also to be a check upon the proud and Jameison thought it a huge crystal, the earthy daring flight of the immortal mind in its present parts on the surface being its external coating. sphere of action; and Providence has, as it were, Leibnitz, that it was a comet, vitrified by its own to prevent all idolatry which might arise among fires, and covered over with the ashes and lava. men on beholding the transcending brightness of La Place accounted for the chains of mountains, some of the luminaries of intellect which have by supposing that the earth was formerly orna- careered in time through the heavens, permitted mented with rings similar to those of Saturn; and some dark spots-macula upon the sun's disc-to that these, falling upon its surface, became the ridges appear, to prove that they were still mortal and of mountains. Kepler, the immortal, made the finite, and that man in the highest reaches of his earth a mighty Mastodon; water being its blood, powers is but "darkly wise," and that in the utthe earth its flesh, the rocks its bones, and the me- most splendor of his moral and mental nature he is tallic ores the results of disease and rottenness in but "rudely great." We cannot, however, close the bones of the monster, as the fœtid odors of without reverting to one of the last systems of these substances plainly indicate. Whitehurst, philosophy, which has been presented to the public, aware of the purposes to which steam might be and which, we think, contains its full complement applied, accounted for the derangement of the of follies. Its parent is, the French philosopher, earth's surface, by supposing it to contain a vast the celebrated Victor Cousin, founder of the mosteam engine, used probably for propelling it in its dern school of Eclecticism; a system which he orbit round the sun, the bursting of which elevated has composed by an amalgamation of the German the mountains and volcanoes, and produced high and Scotch philosophy. The works of Cousin fissures in its rocky covering. The astronomer bear marks of being the handiwork of a transcenCopernicus explained the principle of gravitation, dent genius. He expresses himself in the gorby saying, it was "an appetite or appetence, which geous diction of Plato himself, and bears the reader the creator has impressed on all matter." Kepler, along with him with the resistless sweep of enthat it was a corporeal and mutual affection, tend-chantment. ing to union. Newton, that it was an original spell of his power, which restored lost motion ! We are hurried along under the magic words, and know not, until we lay aside his works, that we have awakened Every age has produced men of powerful minds, from a dream, and that many of his sublimest who have held opinions which appeared to the thoughts are truly but the fine-spun tenuities common sense of mankind the most whimsical and of which dreams are made. Cousin has fallen ridiculous, but which they themselves maintained into the error of other great men, the love of with a tenacity which the power of eloquence and originating, and like them, (every mother thinks argument could neither weaken nor destroy. To her own children the prettiest,) he has expendargue with them, in hope of turning their minds ed his greatest powers in adorning and fortifyfrom their peculiarities, was as hopeless a task as ing what is peculiarly his own. As he himself asto reason with a hypochondriac, in expectation of serts, he has plunged into a depth of Analysis, convincing him that he was not a tea-pot, an ele- which Aristotle nor Kant never dared to venture. phant, or a church-steeple, or that his head was Kant, and some of the German transcendentalists, not turned upon his shoulders. Locke informs us as we before remarked, had succeeded in handing that an eminent musician and good scholar was 'down to man a comprehensible analysis of the at VOL. VII-38 itself! tributes of the Deity. Cousin declares that this ritual, the world is spiritual; and we are thrown is the farthest boundary they have reached; but as back upon the doctrine of Hume and Berkley. Farhe asserts that humanity has not here reached the ther, if God thinks worlds, as men think thoughts, limits of her power, her crowning glory is what and, as thought is essential to mind, it is impossible he denominates reflection, not in the common ac- to check the perpetual emanation of worlds which ceptation of that word, but as designating a newly must spring from his Almighty being; and as thought discovered power, and what he considers the high-is imperishable, it is equally impossible for God to est operation of the human mind. He says, it is destroy or change any part of his creation-it is "the power which demands of our ideas their immutable and indestructible as the infinite mind pedigree, their origin; whether they are human or divine; whether they herald true knowledge from It would be curious to contemplate fully the a world of reality, or whether they merely fill the causes which have led great minds into absurdimind with notions and opinions of an unreal nature ties, of which the mass of men, endowed only with of things." He also makes Philosophy a neces-common sense, at a glance see the fallacy-but we sary demand of our natures. He reduces all pro- have wearied our own and our reader's patience. positions, the ten of Aristotle and those of Kant, Suffice it to say, the human mind loves the strange, to two, or rather to a single one. He says, as all the wonderful and the unrevealed, and men plunge ideas can be evolved by the formulas of unity and into the regions of ignorance and conjecture under multiplicity—the finite and the infinite-relative the influence of a fancy, which, restless and unand absolute, or of perfect and imperfect, and as controllable, longs to view new forms of things, and one of these cannot be conceived without its op-revel amid the incomprehensible and awful images posite, all propositions may be reduced to one; of its own creation. It loves to fill up the mighty hence, as he avows, that all things exist as corre-gap which Omnipotence has placed between the latives, "eternity and space and God are the known and unknown, the declared and the unresame; for eternity includes within it all time, as vealed. With a desperate energy it has plunged the whole includes the part; as expansion includes into the dark and cheerless abodes where spirits all places which are but parts of space, so abso-suffer, and into the unfathomed deeps where God lute being, or God, includes within himself all finite works his mysterious and terrible purposes and beings, which necessarily exist as parts of God." will; or again, with a wing which never tires, hoIn the same way by this reasoning does the con-vers over the shadowy regions of the past and fuclusion arise, "that man and God are identified, for, ture, or mounts far above suns and systems, to the as the finite is part of the infinite; as man, for in-plains of immortality, and tells the joys and emstance, is a part of God, and as it will require all ployments of the beatified, and professedly brings the parts to compose the whole, so man and God down to humanity a transcript of the nature of are one. "Truly this draws near to the absurdi- Him, "who makes darkness his secret place, his ties of the apostate Spinoza, or the animal deity of pavilion round about dark waters and clouds of the Zeno. We cannot trace further the senseless re-sky," and who, as if to mock the vain efforts of sults and unwholesome tendencies of this doctrine, reason, made himself known to his servant in the but will mention what may be considered its princi-inexplicable words, " I AM THAT I AM." pal folly. It is the making God a necessary creator, and the manner in which he accounts for the divine creations. His words are-"if God is a cause, he can create; if he is an absolute cause, he cannot but create"-and further to surmount the even startling difficulties of the "a nihil, nihil fit,” he asserts that God does not draw the world from nothing, but from himself! "To create a thing is not so difficult to conceive; we do it every moment; I form a resolution, and another-what do I do? I produce an act which I refer to myself as its only cause-I seek no cause beyond or above myself. This is to create. The divine creation is the same in its nature; and all the difference between our creation and that of God, is the general difference between God and man." In plain English words, we think thoughts; God-worlds! He expressly asserts that God cannot create worlds out of nothing, but must do it out of himself; hence, as worlds, the parts, are material, God, the whole, must be material-or the converse, God being spi No shielding home of kindred sympathy- Not with the name of Peace- But with the name of Peace Thou'lt soon be blest, O solitary heart! With this poor world,-then yet bear on A little longer, and the Peace of Heaven, OLD ACQUAINTANCES. How some they have died, and some they have left me, gladly; but we do not yield them confidence as we There are not many pleasures superior to that one feels when looking on the face of an old acquaintance from whom one has been separated for some time. When you see one of these "old familiar faces," how the Past flares up before you! As you gaze admiringly at the honest frontispiece of your friend, event after event comes up, until much which is dear and imperishable on the records of Memory is present to you. Backwards flies your thought on swallow-wing to the scenes you loved "long time ago." Up rises star after star in your heart's firmament, which, in days Far foreign from my faith forever be that false a-gone, you worshipped with oriental devotion, philosophy which some of our seeming wise but antil it is thick studded with brilliants. The Pre-shallow writers teach now-a-days-according to sent glides imperceptibly from your view, and you which we become hardened at heart, sick of the are again with the Past, surrounded by a world of world, and full of wasting suspicion, as we bid interesting recollections. You forget what you adieu to the freshness and dewy influences of life's are, and become what you have been. Old loves morning. Such philosophy, however skilfully its and hopes and enterprizes, which have long lain texture may be woven, is but a cobweb which may sepulchred in your heart, start up in joyous resur- catch and hold silly flies, but does not win the berection from their tombs, and reënact their histories lief of those on whose minds is the light of a far before you. In one moment the mists in your eye heavenlier wisdom. The best philosophy in the condense, and in the next they are rainbowed by world is that which teaches a generous and expanthe smiles that flash from your lips. Delightful sive affection for all men, with a large allotment of reminiscences flit around you like night-birds and charity for their weaknesses, and an uncomproshy spirits among the rocks and caverns on a hill-mising hatred for their vices and meannesses. Such side by moonlight. You gather flower after flower philosophy has nothing to do with Dean Swift's from among the sweets of the Past, until quite black misanthropy, which taught him to love the overcome by the combined fragrance of the whole, you stand, not knowing whether you should weep that such pleasures are gone, or rejoice that such had been your delightful experience. masses of mankind, and to hate each of the individuals composing those masses. It reverses this system, and causes us to love every specimen of humanity on whom is not that most horrible of deMany of one's new acquaintances are most ex-formities, a deformity of the heart. It is not, cellent companions. We take them to our bosoms therefore, because we are believers of a rotten |