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 coëxist 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, have 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 na

ture of perception through the eye will not settle for us what is the nature of perception through the touch, so neither can an investigation of any one intuition settle for us the nature of the apprehension which the others, or any of the others, are fitted to furnish. The metaphysician, in conducting his delicate inquiries, must go over the intuitions one by one, asking of each what it has to say of itself, and what is the vision which it has to disclose; in this respect acting like the divine who has the proper respect for revelation, and who does not determine beforehand what the inspired record should say, but reverently asks, What saith the Scripture ? A thousand errors have arisen in philosophy from omitting to look at our intuitions individually, and from affirming of all what may be true only of some.

It is the special office of the metaphysician to go to our intuitions one by one, and ask, What does it say of itself? what does it, profess to look at and discover? This latter is the inquiry which we should make when our aim is to discover whether the conviction testifies to the existence of an object or truth external to, or independent of, the mind perceiving it. To give some examples. What, we may ask, is the object attested by the mind when it is perceiving through the senses? The answer seems to be, an object external to self, extended and moveable. In this exercise, and in every other intelligent exercise, consciousness testifies to the existence of a self in intelligent exercise. There are other operations in which the mind is simply imagining: even in such cases it has a knowledge; but it has no knowledge of, or belief in, an object external to the mind. If I am picturing a griffin, I am conscious of self thus engaged, but I have no intuitive conviction of the existence of a griffin, independent of my thinking of it, as I have of the existence of this pen or that table when I press my hand upon it. In the interpretation of the intuition it is essential to inquire what, if any, is the sort of object to the existence of which it testifies.

These two are different from yet another and a third inquiry : Does, or does not, the intuition speak the truth? Is it not possible that it may deceive us? I am anxious to avoid this question for the present, and defer it till we have got an answer to the two

prior ones,-What is the nature of the intuitions? and what the precise object looked at?—questions which will be settled as we examine the intuitions in order. The question as to what saith the intuition is not the same as the question as to whether the intuition should be trusted. It is expedient to determine precisely what the witness says, before we inquire whether he does or does not speak the truth; and so we adjourn this last question to the close of our survey.

In questioning the witness it will be necessary, when a testimony is given in favour of a reality independent of the contemplative mind, to determine very precisely what is the sort of reality. In particular the question should be put, Is the attestation in behalf of an independent thing, or merely of the quality of a thing, or of the relation between one thing and another, or what else? For example, self-consciousness seems to testify in behalf of self as an individual existence, and sense-perception seems to assert of bodily objects that they have a separate being; but when the mind contemplates thinking, or solidity, or potency, though it undoubtedly affirms of them that they are real, it does not look on them as separate entities, as this paper or as this book is. The mind declares that moral excellence is a reality, and not a figment, but it does not attribute the same sort of reality to it as it does to the man who possesses moral excellence. The mind seems to me to declare that there is a reality in space and time, but we may land ourselves in innumerable difficulties if we make rash assertions as to the kind of reality we give them. Unless we draw such distinctions we may altogether misunderstand the testimony given, and then be tempted to charge the blunders which our own hastiness has committed on our mental constitution. And yet these are distinctions which are altogether lost sight of by those who juggle with the phrases "objective" and "subjective." Even in our most subjective exercises, as when the mind is thinking of one of its own states, there is always an object known, namely, self; and when we say that such a thing has an objective existence, we may mean a great many different things which should be carefully distinguished.'

1 On Subjective and Objective, see Part II. Book 1. Chap. ii. sect. vi. Supplementary.