that thus the functions of strategy and politics became very naturally and almost inevitably united to the functions of religious instruction. If these facts and principles had been properly dealt with by the author, he would have written about the Scotch clergy in an entirely different spirit. When the civil department of the state became partisan, by assailing another large and essential interest of the people, or one which they felt to be essential, then a collision became inevitable, and under such circumstances even the church naturally becomes military and imperious, and of course falls into many acts of severity and oppression.

Our readers perceive, that according to the author, the great enemies of mankind are loyalty, superstition, protection, religion, and reverence, and their great supporters are the powerful classes, and particularly the clergy. These are the maladies or rather reverence, which underlies them all, or ignorance, which underlies it, is the great social malady which he proposes to cure. And, strange as it may appear, scepticism, "the great principle of scepticism," "the necessary precursor of all inquiry," is the remedy which he proposes. "Till doubt begins, progress is impossible." "No other single fact has so extensively affected the different nations." "To it we owe the spirit of inquiry."

Strange that our natural spirit of inquiry should depend for its existence upon the doubts which its own errors suggest; that our natural faith in our intellectual power should be of less use to us than disbelief has been, and that we must begin to doubt before we have made any such progress as to have anything to doubt about! What vicious extremes a spirit of spite is sure to lead men into! With what contemptuous boastings it proclaims the victories it is about to achieve! With what blind and indiscriminating confidence and recklessness it attacks equally the strong and the weak points of its enemies! To have respect enough for enemies to make sure of understanding them, is as valuable in polemics as in war.

We have noticed that authors of much more caution and reflection than Mr. Buckle have spoken favourably of the scientific value of scepticism; but we cannot see that it can possibly be of any value. In its nature, it is a mere withhold

ing of belief in any given opinion or system. It contributes not even hay or stubble to any of our scientific structures; and when it is studied and perverse, it treats with equal contempt the frail wigwams or clay huts of our savage life, and the more artistic and substantial mansions of the highest civilization; its delight is in weakening and destroying all human systems, and it has no constructive power. In one form it is a pitiable timidity and pusillanimity, that is ever hesitating to act, because it can come to no decided opinions; in another, it is an impudent effrontery, that rails continually at all the common opinions of society, and especially at all those which society regards as sacred, and has no opinions of its own, except that whatever others admit, it must doubt or deny. It is not philosophical or scientific caution, but the two vicious extremes of this; one fearful and the other reckless, both rejecting sufficient evidence, but one timidly rejecting it as insufficient for its own mind, and the other boldly rejecting it as insufficient for any mind; the former cowardly, hesitating, and unconstructive, and the latter impudent, dogmatizing, and destructive.

A watchful experience very early teaches us that our judgments are very liable to be erroneous, and that we ought to be cautious in investigating the evidence from which they arise; but this is rather faith than scepticism, for it admits we must form opinions. No one ever thinks of doubting until after his faith has given him a large stock of opinions, and he has discovered that some of them are erroneous, or in conflict with

the opinions of other persons. But suppose that one should adopt scepticism as a principle of thought; how will he apply it? He cannot possibly reject all the opinions he has heretofore acquired or accepted, for they have become a part of the mind itself, and it must be rejected with them. He cannot arbitrarily choose to reject any one of the classes or systems that constitute his stock of knowledge or belief, for they, too, are parts of the mind. He may profess a rejection of them, but nature will assert their power when any necessity seems to call for them. He must discriminate before he can reject, and this requires evidence, and faith in evidence, before it can act, and is therefore not scepticism.

All natural doubting results simply from faith producing a

higher knowledge; we doubt, because evidence has produced another and incompatible belief; and therefore natural doubt is a mere accident of a growing faith, and is not itself a principle of the mind, though it may be cherished and cultivated until it becomes a chronic and diseased habit of mental action. We may suppose that our system of opinions on any given subject is complete, and yet a further advance in knowledge may reveal to us some hiatus in the system, or some incompatibility between it and our new acquisitions, and then it is faith that urges us to a higher knowledge, by which this incompatibility can be removed or corrected. The doubts thus raised are not scepticism, but the perception of logical contradictions, which the very nature of the mind cannot allow to stand together. Scepticism is naturally blind and indiscriminating, not knowing truth or error, and is a mere negation of knowledge; it is not it therefore that raises doubts or corrects errors. Faith alone is adequate to receive evidence, and present it to the understanding for its judgment, and the truth thus obtained is the sole power by which erroneous opinions and systems are to be expelled or modified.

But the space which we have already occupied warns us that we must bring our remarks to a speedy close. We had intended to notice with some detail the author's numerous blunders in relation to the inductive and deductive methods of philosophizing; but we must be brief; he does not understand either of them. He did not need to tell us that he intended to follow the inductive method in writing a history of civilization; for in such an undertaking he could use no other. But he not only does tell his purpose, but boasts of it as something peculiar. He is continually making an ostentation of his method as if he had some peculiar skill in the management of it, though he often unconsciously turns it upside down. He brandishes his instrument with a display that must be truly imposing to inexperienced workmen, and yet with an awkwardness that is quite ludicrous to those who have read the Novum Organum, or the Novum Organum Renovatum. As he calls the methods of mental philosophy and of history "the direct opposite" of each other, because one studies one, and the other

many minds, it would seem very proper to call them by new names-singular and plural methods.

The obtrusive ostentation and confidence with which he pronounces Hutcheson, Adam Smith, Hume, Reid, Ferguson, Leslie, Hutton, and other Scottish authors, to be deductive in their method, when, so far as we recollect, not one of them is so, is really amusing. In treating the subjects which they had in hand, it was impossible for them to be so, and if our author had understood either method he would have known this to be so. He endeavours to prove that Hutcheson's method is deductive from his own language in his complaint against those who "would reduce all our perceptive powers to a very small number, by one artful refinement or another," though this proves nothing of the sort; and if he continued Hutcheson's sentence, which adds, that such persons "depart exceedingly from nature in their accounts of those determinations about honour and shame, which are acknowledged to appear universally among men;" others would have seen, if he could not, that Hutcheson was using no other than the inductive method. We quote from Moral Philosophy, vol. i. p. 79, 1st ed.

Though he acknowledges that Reid professed the inductive method, and thought he was following it in all his investigations; yet he pronounces Reid's method deductive throughout, and he attempts to prove it by several extracts, all of like tenor, one sample of which will suffice: "All knowledge got by reasoning must be built upon first principles." But the extracts themselves show that Reid is speaking of knowledge got by deductive or syllogistic reasoning, as distinguished from that got by observation and generalization according to the inductive method, and any person may see this more clearly by referring to his Essay vii., p. 671, 1st ed.

But with an apology to our readers for this long discussion we must stop. Can any one wonder at the abounding and gross errors of an author who so badly comprehends the very method which he professes to pursue, and which is the true method of historical philosophy, and especially of a young author who treats with a patronizing air nearly all his celebrated predecessors in the same fields of inquiry?

ART. IV.-The War and National Wealth.

THE opposite extremes of financial opinion in regard to the war, and the vast importance of the subject in every point of view, call for a discussion of it in the light of first principles. This will show whether the war is running us into the vortex of national bankruptcy, as some maintain, or whether it is productive of unequalled national prosperity, and warrants an unprecedented profusion of private expenditure, as others appear, both by words and actions, to believe. We think it easy to show the fallacy of both these extremes of opinion, and that the nation is able to furnish the means to carry on the war, and discharge all the obligations incurred by it, both interest and principal; while, at the same time, it cannot afford an unusual extravagance, or even its ordinary freedom of expenditure in living. Quite the contrary. The only condition on which the people can sustain themselves, or the government, together with the great institutions of religion, education, and charity, through the war, if long continued, is by a stringent and thorough economy, quite beyond any standard which has of late years been necessary. Thus they can, and, when they see its necessity, undoubtedly will do.

It is undeniable, that all war, in proportion to its magnitude and continuance, consumes the treasure and resources of the nation waging it. And, besides the cost of sustaining it, it works incalculable havoc and devastation on the territory occupied by the contending armies. From both these causes, the South has been utterly impoverished by the present war. It has given every sign of financial exhaustion. The country is stripped of all but the barest necessaries of life, and these in such stinted supply, that a large part of the people are on short allowance. The energy with which they protract the contest, is simply the energy of desperation, which, urging them to the sacrifice of the last man and the last dollar, cannot replenish their armies and military stores, after the complete exhaustion now apparently impending.