sense, which subdues the very force of our instincts, which leads us perpetually to oppose and thwart our mere animal nature, and which, so far from being synonymous with instinct, is possessed in an infinite variety of intensity by men of the same bodily temperament and the same natural propensities.

If, again, we regard man as an intelligent being, here, also, we find the will operating in every faculty we exercise. The power of attention is nothing more nor less than the will exerting itself in modifying or prolonging the trains of thought— trains which are, in fact, never left to themselves uncontrolled, except in the hours of sleep, of reverie, or of mental disease. The same voluntary energy explains the rise of many of our fundamental ideas; it gives us all the notion we have of power, and consequently of causality; it lies at the foundation of human liberty, and is therefore the corner-stone of all moral responsibility. Of this great agent in our conscious existence, sensationalism, as held by the philosophers now under our consideration, can render no account. M. Destout de Tracy, indeed, affirms a liberty in man, which he terms the power to act, that is, the power of performing mechanical actions in obedience to the investigation of our nervous system; but this is by no means an adequate explanation of the facts of the case. Whence comes the determination to act upon certain fixed principles; whence the design that points

at the accomplishment of great objects; whence the energy which, in the pursuit of its purposes, overcomes the allurements of sense, breaks down all the barriers of our propensities, and despises weariness, suffering, and death itself, in comparison with the fulfilment of the moral laws, to which it owes eternal allegiance? Here are questions on which our author is silent, here facts of daily life, to which his whole system affords no solution.

3. We urge still further, that the French ideology does not account for the emotions of our nature. It commits an error in the outset by confounding our emotional feelings with those which are purely sensational. In sensation there is no intellectual action whatever; the mind is then existing merely in a receptive state; that is, it is simply feeling the impressions which, according to its constitution, things from without are capable of making upon it. Emotions, on the contrary, arise from some actual notion or conception, which has been formed by the exercise of the intellect, and which produces, according to its nature, corresponding feelings or impulses in the mind. Every one can easily distinguish the generic difference between the pleasurable feeling we derive from the taste of an apple, and that which we derive from the occurrence of some auspicious event; or between the painful feeling arising from a grating sound, and that arising from any circumstance, which inspires us with fear or dread. The

former class of feelings come from a material cause, and cease the instant their cause is removed; the latter arise from our inward perception of something relating to our own interests, from a purely intellectual idea, involving good or evil to ourselves. These fundamental distinctions are in the philosophy now before our attention altogether confounded, and the nervous system is made so excessively and incredibly sensitive, that it can shrink at an evil, or thrill at a prospect that may be realised a year, or perchance ten years hence.

Of all the emotions, however, those which come under the province of æsthetics are the least satisfactorily explained. On the ideological principles the emotion of beauty can be nothing more than a peculiar kind of sensation, produced by a peculiar kind of outward object. Now we do not at all deny, that the emotion in question does really arise with the presence of certain objects, termed beautiful; but if we analyze this emotion, we see that it contains an element in it quite different from that, which is here supposed. We judge of beauty, whether it be in poetry, or painting, or nature, according to some internal model of perfection-some beau-ideal which exists only in our own minds; and we term a thing beautiful or not, according to its greater or less resemblance to this standard. We never see a perfect model of beauty, either in art or nature, and never, therefore, perceive our beau-ideal embodied

in the beau-real; on the contrary, however lovely any actual form may be, there is ever "Aliquid immensum infinitumque," some pure abstraction of perfection immeasurable and infinite in its nature, that still transcends it, and lies at the foundation of all the higher exercise of taste and fancy. Again, we say, then, that the ideological school altogether fails of a theory, upon which it is possible to explain all that is peculiar to the emotions of the sublime and the beautiful.

4. We urge, lastly, that the system we are opposing does not account for the facts of our moral and religious nature. The foundation of all morality, according to these philosophers, is utility in the very lowest sense of the term; and the aim of all duty is the preservation of our physical enjoyment. These, we affirm, are the morals that are exactly fitted for an animal, which derives all its happiness from sense, and has no wish beyond the satisfaction of its bodily instincts. Viewing man in this light, the catechism of Volney is a very excellent summary of duty; and, perhaps, might lead on his theory of man to as great an amount of mere animal pleasure, as could be expected in the present constitution of things. In opposition to this, however, we contend, that, to view human nature in this light, is to strip it of everything that is great or good; to banish every true virtue from the world, as far as it is bound to spring from a virtuous source; and to hasten on a result, which

would end in the breaking up of every tie that holds human society together.

There are in the human mind universally two great fundamental notions of right and wrong, which are as absolute in their nature, and as impossible of being obliterated, as any fundamental axioms of man's universal belief. The fact, that men of different nations, in different ages, and in different states of mental development, have held the most conflicting notions, as to what belongs to the category of right and what belongs to that of wrong, is no evidence whatever against the universality of those fundamental notions themselves; nay, it rather proves that they always exist, although the moral judgment may not be enlightened enough to apply them to all the practice of life. These notions, moreover, are accompanied with a moral emotion, which, while it gives us a profound admiration for what is purely disinterested, acts as an imperative, that becomes more and more powerful, in proportion to the greater development of the moral faculty; ever inciting us to the avoidance of evil, and the constant pursuit of good. The whole phenomena of our disinterested feelings; the admiration and enthusiasm we necessarily feel in the contemplation of any lofty examples of them, an enthusiasm which rises higher just in proportion, not to the utility, but to the sacrifice which accompanies their exercise; the entire absorption which such instances manifest in the rectitude of