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as is the unorganized clod. These substances which our author dignifies with the name of causes, are just as powerless as their qualities which he calls effects. It is true that all these changes in nature point to power, and, guided by the laws of thought, they irresistibly carry us upward to that ultimate free force which presides over all. To substitute antecedence for efficient cause, would also preclude final cause, as each alike involves intelligence.

We cannot conclude our review of this able writer without at least uttering our protest against his use of cause in another connection; we allude to the control he gives it over the will. (Pp. 308-312.) After enumerating the difficulties involved in the doctrine of the will, he says: "To avoid these I am inclined to admit that antecedent circumstances do act causally on the will; but at the same time I maintain that cause operates in a very different way from that in which it acts in other departments of nature. . . . Consciousness cannot say what intermediate circumstances of an intermediate character have

swayed the will." "These causes certainly do not operate as causes do in physical nature, or as causes operate in our intellectual being." Indeed, it is in the peculiarity of the operation of these causes that our author finds "the subject cleared from all its difficulties."

Now this solution seems to us not to clear away difficulties, but to multiply and enhance them. He admits elsewhere that the freedom of the will is distinctly attested by consciousness, with such clearness that no kind or degree of evidence can set aside its testimony; that the knowledge of this fact is a simple intuition, so that it can be drawn from no deeper fact, and can be resolved into no anterior principle; that the will is the only sanctuary in which freedom can ever dwell. But how in the face of these explicit admissions can he expect that the will is under the sway of a foreign cause? He maintains the unlikeness of that cause to any other, and that it operates out of the sphere of consciousness. Do the facts then of its being view less and secret change its causal character?

It is surely incumbent on the theorist to inform us how its inscrutibility changes its causal nature. We have never before heard that the visibility or invisibility of an efficient cause changed its causal character. As the conflict between outward

cause of volition and the freedom of the will is what our author would reconcile, he cannot divest the cause of its efficiency, and still affirm that it produces volition; he cannot make the cause unlike any other cause in its nature, and yet like all other efficient causes in its operation. This verbal denial of efficiency and argumentative assertion of it, we must leave to be harmonized by our author. Could this concealment of the cause instigate the conflict between its control and the will's freedom, it would avail. But as this remains unaltered, the expedient simply cancels the testimony of consciousness. But in doing this what has our theorist achieved? He has laid deep the foundation of universal scepticism. He has not stopped at charging that faculty with imbecility, but has made it a false witness. That testifies the will itself to be causal. If it be false in this primary conviction, how can it be in anything else trusted?

We must then express with the deepest emphasis our astonishment that this writer, who has with such visionlike clearness vindicated the necessary veracity of our intuitive knowledge, should in this instance betray the cause into the hands of the enemy; that, after he had elsewhere argued with overwhelming evidence that the distrust of consciousness in a single instance would be unbarring the flood-gates of universal scepticism, he should proceed here on the same principle which he had shown to be the grave of all certitude, is indeed amazing.

Guided then by the light of our author's general argument in the former part of his work, we reach a conclusion in direct conflict with his on the will. We prove by his own argument that no efficient cause of volition can lie out of the soul's consciousness, as that consciousness testifies that the soul alone is causal.

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ART. VIII.-BARTH'S NORTHERN AND CENTRAL AFRICA.

Travels and Discoveries in North and Central Africa. Being a Journal of an Expedition undertaken under the Auspices of H. B. M.'s Government in the Years 1849-55. By HENRY BARTH, Ph.D., D.C.L., Fellow of the Royal Geographical and Asiatic Societies, etc., etc. In three volumes. 8vo. New York: Harper & Brothers. 1859.

AFRICA is the paradise of travelers, where, indeed, the tree of life is not found, but the tree of knowledge grows, bearing abundantly its tempting but dangerous fruit. A quarter of the world, second in historical antiquity to only one other, and containing within its limits the cradle of civilization in its three great elements, science, art, and letters, is still, as to most of its ample area, an unknown land; ever inviting the steps of the adventurous by the mystery that vails it, but repelling them by the mighty forces which nature there employs. The Africa of the Greeks and Romans was little more than the narrow belt of the valley of the Nile and the southern shore of the Mediterranean, including Egypt, Carthage, and Numidia. The fountains of the Nile were with them as with us, an unsolved geographical problem, which a more idealistic race than ourselves located in a land of light and beauty, of which the "Happy Valley" of Rasselas is but a faint copy, and the kingdom of Prester John a coarse caricature; while the "Pillars of Hercules," guarding the passage to the great unknown ocean, into which the evening sun retired from the world, and where was the famous island of Atlantis, marked the farthest goal of adventurous travel in that direction. Southward lay the regions of trackless sands, the inhospitable frontier of the terrible unknown, where were gorgons, and griffins, and pigmies; and over this the rim of the celestial vault rested steadily upon the shoulders of Atlas.

There is also in history a medieval Africa, quite distinct in its relations from either that of the classical ages or that of modern times. The early followers of Mohammed made the southern coasts of the Mediterranean an important field of

their heroic and zealous propagandism; and a great Saracenic empire was there established and maintained through many centuries, by which the native races were thoroughly established in Islamism, which continues to the present time; and their power and civilization carried beyond the Great Desert, and naturalized in the extensive and fertile regions of Sudan. The history of the Moors is among the most romantic in all the annals of our world, and the Berber race is, both in its history and present status, one of the most remarkable facts in the whole range of ethnography. That these people during the times of the califs penetrated far into the interior of the continent, and there established their power, and built cities, and cultivated the arts, and to some extent the sciences, are very well ascertained facts. The efforts made by travelers during the past hundred years in that region has only partially exhumed and brought to light the knowledge possessed by the Moslem Berbers a thousand years ago; and of the whole realm of Islam at this time, probably northern Africa, reckoning from the equator, is the strongest province.

Modern Africa is not simply an enlargement of that of the ancients, but another region. Egypt and the Barbary states are indeed portions of that continent, but they are not usually included in the notion of modern Africa. The discovery and partial exploration of tropical and southern Africa occurred about the same time with the discovery of our own continent, both events being portions of the common results of the impulse given to Europe just previously, which was especially directed to maritime explorations by the discovery of the compass and the revival of trade. While Spain, led by the genius of Columbus, directed her efforts to the New World, whither she was followed by England and France, Portugal, then a firstclass maritime power, was pushing her discoveries along the western coast of Africa, till, after passing the "Cape of Storms," her voyagers passed up the eastern coast to the Red Sea, and opened the passage to India. This preoccupation of the African coast by Portugal has no doubt largely affected the subsequent history of that continent, for in the cupidity and the non-progressive character of that nation have most of the evils which specially afflict Africa originated. By the rise and extension of the foreign slave-trade, in promoting which Portugal was

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