and confusing controversies which abound to such an extent in philosophy, in theology, and in other departments of investigation as well. It is always to be allowed, indeed, that our inquiries on most subjects may be conducted and terminated satisfactorily without our being required to go down to netaphysical principles. The farmer, the merchant, the politician, and even the physical investigator in most of his walks, may come to the right conclusion in regard to the topics which they wish to settle, without its being necessary for them to determine the nature of mathematical axioms or the law of cause and effect; on which, notwithstanding, some of these calculations regarding the seasons or the tides or the movements of the heavenly bodies, or the probable actings of men, may after all depend-only, however, in the sense of a deep foundation which it is not necessary for these parties to examine. But if any one will enter on speculations involving radical truth, he must be prepared to submit to the conditions on which they can be properly conducted. No man is bound to be a metaphysician unless he chooses; but if he insist on becoming one, he must attend to the regulations of the office which he takes on himself. Every man is not under a moral obligation to throw aside other useful pursuits, and devote himself to answering such speculations as those of Spinoza, Berkeley, Hume, Fichte, or Hegel; but if he ventures into the arena, he must conform to its rules. Every friend of religion is not obliged to write a philosophic defence of it, and some who have ventured upon such a work might have been more profitably employed in a less ambitious undertaking, as in defending some of the outworks of religion, or illustrating its power by their lives; but those who claim to be philosophers must comport themselves as philosophers. It is to be regretted that multitudes dabble in metaphysics who have no capacity for grappling with its subtle truths; and the only effective mode of curbing this incompetency and quackery, is by insisting on all those who would enter the trade undergoing some sort of scientific apprenticeship. Nor are these restrictions the less necessary from the circumstance that not a few of those who profess the greatest aversion to metaphysics are all the while deep in metaphysics without knowing it, and certainly without being prepared to avow it, and it is needful to

lay an arrest on such by showing what the science is, and compelling them if they enter the country to conform to its laws.

There are persons who are constrained by the circumstances in which they are placed, or by what they believe to be the voice of duty, to discuss fundamental questions. There are persons, even in the lowest walks of life, troubled, owing to a peculiar intellectual temperament (commonly not of a very healthy character), with speculative doubts, which are only to be removed by speculative arguments; but, if convinced, it must surely be by arguments built on a sure foundation. Some are placed in a position in which they are assailed by the infidel, and feel that they must meet him in the cause of truth and religion. Some, as knowing that they possess peculiar gifts, feel themselves called on to defend the very citadel of morals or of religion, or to rear a fabric of truth compacted from the very base. But if these men are not to waste their strength in a war of subtleties, they must be careful how they begin to build, lest what they rear turn out to be a crazy and unstable fabric, and a source of weakness rather than of strength. Paying attention to certain restrictions and precautions themselves, they will be in a position to insist on wild speculators, or the sceptics whom they oppose, conforming themselves to the canons of the logic of metaphysical speculation.

These then I reckon as the conditions of all argument which appeals formally to primary truth, to necessary conviction, or common sense. Persons not pretending to be philosophers, and discussing none of those topics which philosophers alone can discuss, may claim the privilege, when a sceptical objection comes in their way, or an altogether unbelievable dogma is asserted, of rejecting it at once, on the ground of spontaneous conviction, and troubling themselves no more about it. They must take care, however, in all such cases, that what they suppose to be a native conviction be not a mere prepossession of education, or prejudice of temper; and if there be ground for doubt, there is no help for it but in an appeal to the tests of intuitions, and the canons of their legitimate use. And as to those who profess to proceed philosophically, it is incumbent on them that they prove that what they assume is an original conviction, and that they generalize the

spontaneous exercises, and express them in rigid formulæ. But when it is thus conducted, the argument from intuition or common sense is not an argumentum ad populum, and least of all an argument addressed to vulgar prejudice. It presupposes a rigid scientific process, and should not be attempted by any except those who possess the requisite retrospective powers of observation, and have disciplined themselves to the rules of the logic of first principles. When conformed to the right conditions, it is an argument strictly scientific, eminently satisfactory within its proper domain, and is in an especial sense the philosophical argument.

Such restrictions as these would, I know full well, lay an arrest at once on more than one-half of the metaphysics of this age, and of every age. This would be felt to be a discouragement by certain eager youths, full of expectations of the results to be reached by philosophic speculation, and by certain older, but not wiser men, who have mapped out the whole intellectual globe, and would feel troubled at the idea of their distribution being disturbed; but in the end there would be no loss, for the part remaining after the refining process would be of vastly more worth, and would soon be acknowledged to be so.

When speculative philosophy is pursued in the usual unrestrained manner, the results reached are of the most unsatisfactory character, and at times are felt to be so. How often do ardent youths rush into the country opened to them as keenly as the adventurers in the sixteenth century set out in search of El Dorado, and after spending years, and wasting the strength of manhood, they come back with a sense of emptiness and a feeling of disappointment! Even those who refuse to abandon the hope, and who cling most resolutely to the idea that they have discovered genuine gold, are now and again all but overwhelmed with a feeling of prostration and bitterness, and break out, as the Doctor in Faust,

"I feel it, I have heaped upon my brain

The gathered treasure of man's thought in vain."

In such there is a weariness, an aching, an ennui of the head, which is felt to be as deep, if not so keen, as the aching, the ennui of the heart ever is; and yet there may co-exist with this a

determination to continue the fruitless pursuit. Not a few have had a confession wrung from them like that of Jacobi :"In my younger years it stood thus with me in regard to philosophy: I seemed to myself to be heir to innumerable riches, and only some unimportant lawsuits and some unmeaning formalities seemed to hinder me from taking full possession of my inheritance. The suits, while pending, grew to be important. At last it appeared that I had inherited nothing but lawsuits, and that the whole bequest was in insolvent hands."

Happy are those who advance, or who can return, as fresh in spirit and as innocent as when they entered. Some, feeling as if no certainty could be reached, or, after unwinding the folds of the mystery, that nothing wonderful or worthy has been discovered, have come to the settled conclusion that it is vain for them ever after to expect to find certainty, to reach felt assurance, or even to look for anything worth seeing, and so give themselves up to listlessness and apathy. Wandering till they have become bewildered, as if in a deep and gloomy forest, they sit down with the intention of never rising; or like persons wearied and worn out in snowdrift, they lie down to become benumbed, and are ready to perish in cold. Still worse consequences have followed. How often does the eager youth rush on till he falls into the abyss!-

"He eagerly pursues,

Beyond the realms of dreams, that fleeting shade;

He overleaps the bounds!"

Entering into the labyrinth to survey its wonders, he is lost in its numberless passages and its endless windings without being able to find his way back to the open light and air; nay, how often has it happened that the builder of such intricacies has himself been imprisoned and entombed within them! Or, rushing eagerly to solve the sphinx riddles which Nature is propounding, and unable to find the solution, he must pay the awful penalty to that terrible power, which insists on a reply, and crushes those who try and do not succeed! Some have entered with lively anticipations this temple of mystery, only to come out oppressed with doubt or with the language of scorn and scepticism on their lips; they have seen all, they say, been in the very Holy of Holies, and found it

empty, with no God dwelling between the Cherubim or uttering his voice in the Shechinah.

"He dropped his plummet down the broad

Deep universe, and said, 'No God,'

Finding no bottom."

SECT. IV.--METHOD OF INVESTIGATING AND INTERPRETING OUR

INTUITIONS.

Two questions require to be answered in all metaphysical investigation. The one is, What is the nature of the intuition itself? and the other, What is the nature of the object at which it looks, and for which it is the guarantee? These two inquiries are to be prosecuted in one and the same way, that is, in the method of induction, not with sense, but consciousness, as our informant. There is really no other manner of determining the nature of the intuitional power, its law, rule, and manner of operation, nor any other mode of ascertaining what is the kind of object or truth revealed by that power. I know of no shorthand or summary way, by logic or cogitation, of settling these two essential questions in philosophy. It might have been different if man had been conscious of the intuition as an intuition. In this case it would only have been needful to look within by the internal sense in order to find its nature. But just as the law of gravitation is not written on the face of the sky so that the eye can see it, so neither is the law of causation printed on the soul so that consciousness can read off the inscription. The one law, like the other, is to be ascertained by an investigation of its individual acts, and this in a state of things in which the action of one property is closely interblended with that of other properties; necessitating not only an observation of facts, but a very patient and discerning induction, so that we may catch the rule of the different agencies.

The task, so far as the second question is concerned, might have been easier if all our intuitions had been constructed so as to discover one and the same kind of truth. But as each of the senses is organized to discover its own kind of material qualities, so each of the internal perceptions reveals its peculiar object or truth, and in its own peculiar manner. As inductive inquiry into the nature of