have no longer an argument for their defence. "Man is the dream of a shadow;" God is the dream of that dream.

Brown, after the best philosophers, rests the proof of our personal identity, and of our mental individuality, on the ground of beliefs, which, as "intuitive, universal, immediate, and irresistible," he not unjustly regards as "the internal and neverceasing voice of our Creator,-revelations from on high, omnipotent [and veracious] as their author." To him this argument is however incompetent, as contradictory.

What we know of self or person, we know only as given in consciousness. In our perceptive consciousness there is revealed as an ultimate fact a self and a not-self; each given as independent, each known only in antithesis to the other. No belief is more "intuitive, universal, immediate, or irresistible," than that this antithesis is real and known to be real; no belief therefore is more true. If the antithesis be illusive, self and not-self, subject and object, I and Thou are distinctions without a difference; and consciousness, so far from being "the internal voice of our Creator," is shown to be, like Satan, "a liar from the beginning." The reality of this antithesis in different parts of his philosophy Dr Brown affirms and denies.-In establishing his theory of perception, he articulately denies, that mind is conscious of aught beyond itself; virtually asserts, that what is there given in consciousness as not-self, is only a phænomenal illusion,-a modification of self, which our consciousness determines us to believe the quality of something numerically and substantially different. Like Narcissus again, he must lament,

"Ille ego sum sensi, sed me mea fallit imago."

After this implication in one part of his system, that our belief in the distinction of self and not-self is nothing more than the deception of a lying consciousness; it is startling to find him, in others, appealing to the beliefs of this same consciousness as to "revelations from on high ;"-nay, in an especial manner alleging "as the voice of our Creator," this very faith in the distinction of self and not-self, through the fallacy of which, and of which alone, he had elsewhere argued consciousness of falsehood.

On the veracity of this mendacious belief, Brown establishes his proof of our PERSONAL IDENTITY. (Lect. xii.-xv.) Touching the object of perception, when its evidence is inconvenient, this

belief is quietly passed over as incompetent to distinguish notself from self; in the question regarding our personal identity, where its testimony is convenient, it is clamorously cited as an inspired witness, exclusively competent to distinguish self from not-self. Yet, why, if, in the one case, it mistook self for not-self, it may not, in the other, mistake not-self for self, would appear a problem not of the easiest solution.

=

The same belief, with the same inconsistency, is again called in to prove the INDIVIDUALITY OF MIND. (Lect. xcvi.) But if we are fallaciously determined, in perception, to believe what is supposed indivisible, identical, and one, to be plural and different and incompatible, (self self + not-self); how, on the authority of the same treacherous conviction, dare we maintain, that the phænomenal unity of consciousness affords a guarantee of the real simplicity of the thinking principle? The materialist may now contend, without fear of contradiction, that self is only an illusive phænomenon; that our consecutive identity is that of the Delphic ship, and our present unity merely that of a system of co-ordinate activities. To explain the phænomenon, he has only to suppose, as certain theorists have lately done, an organ to tell the lie of our personality; and to quote as authority for the lie itself, the perfidy of consciousness on which the theory of a representative perception is founded.

On the hypothesis of a representative perception, there is, in fact, no salvation from materialism, on the one side, short of idealism-scepticism-nihilism, on the other. Our knowledge of mind and matter, as substances, is merely relative; they are known to us only in their qualities; and we can justify the postulation of two different substances, exclusively on the supposition of the incompatibility of the double series of phænomena to coinhere in one. Is this supposition disproved?-the pre-. sumption against dualism is again decisive. "Entities are not to be multiplied without necessity;”—“A plurality of principles is not to be assumed where the phænomena can be explained by one." In Brown's theory of perception, he abolishes the incompatibility of the two series; and yet his argument, as a dualist, for an immaterial principle of thought, proceeds on the ground, that this incompatibility subsists. (Lect. xcvi. pp. 646, 647.) This philosopher denies us an immediate knowledge of aught beyond the accidents of mind. The accidents which we refer to body, as known to us, are only states or modifications of the

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percipient subject itself; in other words, the qualities we call material, are known by us to exist, only as they are known by us to inhere in the same substance as the qualities we denominate mental. There is an apparent antithesis, but a real identity. On this doctrine, the hypothesis of a double principle losing its necessity, becomes philosophically absurd; and on the law of parcimony, a psychological unitarianism, at best, is established. To the argument, that the qualities of the object are so repugnant to the qualities of the subject of perception, that they cannot be supposed the accidents of the same substance; the unitarian -whether materialist, idealist, or absolutist-has only to reply: that so far from the attributes of the object being exclusive of the attributes of the subject, in this act; the hypothetical dualist himself establishes, as the fundamental axiom of his philosophy of mind, that the object known is universally identical with the subject knowing. The materialist may now derive the subject from the object; the idealist derive the object from the subject; the absolutist sublimate both into indifference; nay, the nihilist subvert the substantial reality of either:-the hypothetical realist, so far from being able to resist the conclusion of any, in fact accords their assumptive premises to all.

The same contradiction would, in like manner, invalidate every presumption in favour of our LIBERTY OF WILL. But as Brown throughout his scheme of Ethics advances no argument in support of this condition of our moral being, which his philosophy otherwise tends to render impossible, we shall say nothing of this consequence of hypothetical realism.

So much for the system, which its author fondly imagines, "allows to the sceptic no resting-place for his foot,—no fulcrum for the instrument he uses:" so much for the doctrine which Brown would substitute for Reid's ;-nay, which he even supposes Reid himself to have maintained.

66 'SCILICET, HOC TOTUM FALSA RATIONE RECEPTUM EST!"*

[In this criticism I have spoken only of Dr Brown's mistakes, and of these, only with reference to his attack on Reid. On his appropriating to himself the observations of others, and in particular those of Destutt Tracy, I have said nothing, though an enumeration of these would be necessary to place Brown upon his proper level. That, however, would require a separate discussion.]

III-JOHNSON'S TRANSLATION OF TENNEMANN'S MANUAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY.

(OCTOBER, 1832.)

A Manual of the History of Philosophy; translated from the German of TENNEMANN. By the Rev. ARTHUR JOHNSON, M.A., late Fellow of Wadham College. 8vo. Oxford: 1832.

WE took up this translation with a certain favourable prepossession, and felt inclined to have said all we conscientiously could in its behalf: but alas! never were expectations more completely disappointed; and we find ourselves constrained exclusively to condemn, where we should gladly have been permitted only to applaud.

We were disposed to regard an English version of Tennemann's minor History of Philosophy-his "Grundriss," as a work of no inconsiderable utility-if competently executed; but in the present state of philosophical learning in this country we were well aware, that few were adequate to the task, and of those few we hardly expected that any one would be found so disinterested, as to devote himself to a labour, of which the credit stood almost in an inverse proportion to the trouble. Few works, indeed, would prove more difficult to a translator. A complete mastery of the two languages, in a philological sense, was not enough. There was required a comprehensive acquaintance with philosophy in general, and, in particular, an intimate knowledge of the philosophy of Kant. Tennemann was a Kantian; he estimates all opinions by a Kantian standard; and the language which he employs is significant only as

available the presumption in favour of the original facts of consciousness, that what is by nature necessarily BELIEVED to be, truly IS. Aristotle, in whose philosophy this presumption obtained the authority of a principle, thus enounces the argument: -"What appears to all, that we affirm to be; and he who rejects this belief, will, assuredly, advance nothing better worthy of credit." (Eth. Nic. L. x. c. 2.) As this argument rests entirely on a presumption; the fundamental condition of its validity is, that this presumption be not disproved. The presumption in favour of the veracity of consciousness, as we have already shown, is redargued by the repugnance of the facts themselves, of which consciousness is the complement; as the truth of all can only be vindicated on the truth of each. The argument from common sense, therefore postulates, and founds on the assumption-THAT

OUR ORIGINAL BELIEFS BE NOT PROVED SELF-CONTRADICTORY.

The harmony of our primary convictions being supposed, and not redargued, the argument from common sense is decisive against every deductive inference not in unison with them. For as every conclusion is involved in its premises, and as these again must ultimately be resolved into some original belief; the conclusion, if inconsistent with the primary phænomena of consciousness, must, ex hypothesi, be inconsistent with its premises, i.e. be logically false. On this ground, our convictions at first hand peremptorily derogate from our convictions at second. "If we know and believe," says Aristotle, "through certain original principles, we must know and believe these with paramount certainty, for the very reason that we know and believe all else through them;" and he elsewhere observes, that our approbation is often rather to be accorded to what is revealed by nature as actual, than to what can be demonstrated by philosophy as possible: Προσέχειν οὐ δεῖ πάντα τοῖς διὰ τῶν λόγων, ἀλλὰ πολλάκις μᾶλλον τοῖς φαινομένοις.

*

"Novimus certissima scientia, et clamante conscientia," (to apply the language of St Augustin, in our acceptation,) is thus a proposition either absolutely true or absolutely false. The argument from common sense, if not omnipotent, is powerless: and in the hands of a philosopher by whom its postulate cannot be allowed,

* Jacobi (Werke, II. Vorr. p. 11, sq.) following Fries, places Aristotle at the head of that absurd majority of philosophers, who attempt to demonstrate every thing. This would not have been more sublimely false, had it been said of the German Plato himself. [Dissertations on Reid, p. 771.]