the mind, operating altogether independently of any reflex notice we may take of them, and not depending for their authority on our induction of them, it is at the same time true that they can become known to us as general principles only by inward observation, and can be legitimately employed in philosophic speculation only on the condition of being rigidly inducted. By observation we may rise to the discovery of mental principles which do not in themselves depend on observation, but which have a place in our constitution anterior to our observation of them, and are there, as observation discovers, native, necessary, and universal.

In some respects, it is an unfortunate time for giving forth such a work to the world. Every age, like the seed, is at one and the same time the product of combined influences in the past, and the germ of life for the future. In this present age, two manner of principles, each of the character of a different parent, are struggling for the mastery: the one earth-born, sensational, empirical, utilitarian, deriving all ideas from the senses, and all knowable truth from man's limited experience, and holding that man can be swayed by no motives of a higher order than the desire to secure pleasure or avoid pain; the other, if not heaven-born, at least cloud-born, being ideal, transcendental, pantheistic, attributing man's loftiest ideas to inward light, appealing to principles which are discovered without the trouble of observation, and issuing in a belief in the good, instead of a belief in God. Each of these views has its keen partisans, either violently attacking one another, or regarding each other with silent contempt, while the great body of reading men are professedly indifferent,-those who claim to be neutral, however, being all the while unconsciously in the service either of the one or other, commonly of the lower or earthly, just as those who profess to belong neither to God or Mammon, do in fact belong to Mammon.

What then can be expected of the reception of such a work in such an age? A large body, even of the thinking portion of the community, are prejudiced against all such discussions, as fruitless of good in every circumstance, and in some forms productive of mischief. I suspect the great mass of those who call themselves

practical men, and the majority of those addicted to the study of the physical sciences, will be further prepossessed against this treatise as defending a doctrine which they thought had been long ago and for ever exploded by Locke. On the other hand, those most inclined to favour such pursuits are commonly committed and pledged to extreme views, and can scarcely be expected to look with a favourable eye on a work which, professedly built on pure observation, declines to follow any school; indeed, proclaims that as schools and sects, with their separate standpoints and watchwords, have long ago ceased in physical science, so it is time they should disappear in the field of mental science likewise, that those who prosecute the study, calling no man master, may look without prepossession into the volume spread out before them in their own soul, and read it with the eye of consciousness. Nearly all confessed metaphysicians will assert that I am degrading high philosophy in making it submit to the method of induction, and that the restrictions which I would impose upon speculation must deprive it of its most fascinating charms; while hundreds of eager youths, walking hopefully on the high a priori road, and expecting that the next turn—which they already see not far in front-must open on the great ocean of absolute truth, will feel as if they were unmercifully stopped and turned back at the very time when the long looked-for scene was about to burst gloriously on their view.

But regarded under some other aspects, this is an age in which such a work (I would on this account as well as many others it were only worthy of its subject) is especially needed. Every nation awakened to intelligence must have a philosophy of some description. Whatever men may profess or affect, they cannot do without it in fact; and if any age or country, arrived at civilization, will not form or adopt a high and elevating philosophy, it must fall under the power of a low and a debasing one. It frequently happens that a profession of contempt for all metaphysics as being barren and unintelligible, is an introduction to a discussion which is metaphysical without the parties knowing it (as the person in the French play had spoken prose all his life without being aware of it); and of such metaphysics it will commonly be found that they are futile and incomprehensible enough. Often is Aristotle de

nounced in language borrowed from himself, and the Schoolmen are disparaged by those who are all the while using distinctions which they have cut with sharp chisel in the rock, never to be effaced. There are persons speaking with contempt of Plato, Descartes, Locke, and all the metaphysicians, who are taking advantage of the great truths which they have discovered. It could easily be shown that in sermons from the pulpit, and orations in the senate, and pleadings at the bar, and even in common conversation, principles are over and anon appealed to which have come in ages long gone by from the heads of our deepest thinkers, who may now be forgotten by all but a few antiquarians in philosophy. Natural science itself, in the hands of its most advanced votaries, is ever touching on the borders of metaphysics, and compelling physicists to rest on certain fundamental convictions as to extension and force. The truth is, in very proportion as material science makes progress, do thinking minds feel the need of something to go down deeper and mount up higher than the senses can do; of some means of settling those anxious questions which the mind is ever putting in regard to the soul, and the relation of the universe to God, and of finding a foundation on which the understanding can ultimately and confidently repose. Whatever the superficial may think, philosphy is an underlying power of vast importance, and of mighty influence. It is because it is fundamental and radical, that it is unseen by the vulgar, who notice only what is upon the surface. Let us see that the foundation be well laid, that the root be properly placed. That foundation must be secure which is laid in our mental constitution; that is the proper root which is planted by our Maker.

In determining the precise nature of the mental intuitions, we may hope to be able to settle what they can do, and, as no less important, what they can not do. Thus do I hope to contribute my little aid in elevating the low, and in bringing down the presumptuous tendencies of the age; thus would I raise the downward, and at the same time lower the proud look; thus would I keep men on the one hand from poring for ever on the dust of the earth, and on the other hand from attempting, Icarus-like, to mount in a flight which must issue in a lamentable fall. Thus would I seek to raise the view-position of some reckoned by themselves and others the

wiser and more sober, who are digging for ever in the mere clay of material existence, and who believe in nothing but what can be seen and touched, never rise to the contemplation of moral and spiritual, of immutable and eternal truth; and thus too would I save the more promising of our intellectual youths from falling under the power of boasting a priori intuitionalism, which is alluring them on by gilded clouds, which will turn out to be damp and chill after they have taken infinite pains to climb to them and to enter them.

In Europe and the United States of America, thought is in a restless and transition state. In Germany, the high transcendental or dialectic method has wrought itself out—has cropped to the surface in thinness and brittleness. In the reaction, eminent professors of the Hegelian school are lecturing to half-empty benches; and books, which, had they been published a quarter of a century ago, would have moved thought to its greatest depths, can now find little sale, few readers, and no believers; while, in the absence of a judicious philosophy, accepted and influential, a plausible materialism, acknowledging no existence but matter and force, has made considerable progress, on the pretence of furnishing what the old metaphysics never yielded, something tangible and therefore solid. In the English-speaking nations, there has been for a considerable time, especially among certain meditative and impulsive youths, a recoil against Lockism, and the bony and haggard forms of physicism, which have become denuded of all truth, intellectual, moral, and religious, which transcends sense and experience, and a tendency towards an idealism which, all decked and radiant, is seeking to win them to its embrace; but of late this spirit seems to be giving way to a revived sensationalism, which would explain all thought by experience, and reduce all virtue to utility. And, turning away from all these old speculative questions, there are eminent men in Germany, in France, and England who would explain mental phenomena by physiological processes. If premature theories are not constructed, and inferences are kept from outrunning facts, the researches prosecuted are worthy of all encouragement, and we may expect to find them rewarded sooner or later by a less or larger measure of success. But it is never to be forgotten

that whatever explanation the brain, nerves, and physical forces may furnish of the rise of certain states of mind, they can render no account of peculiarly mental facts, such as consciousness, intelligence, emotion, the appreciation of beauty, and the sense of moral obligation. These must ever be studied by self-consciousness, and not by any method of sensible observation, or of weighing and measuring; and the results reached by careful self-inspection can never be set aside or superseded by any inquiry into unconscious aud unthinking forces. In particular, physiology can never settle for us the nature of intuition as an exercise of mind, nor determine the ultimate laws of thought and belief. It is surely possible and conceivable in these circumstances that there may be some, wearied of the din of the old metaphysical disputes, and feeling that the highest physics cannot yield a philosophy of the mind, who may be prepared to welcome an earnest but unpretending attempt to discover, not certainly all truth (which is precluded to the human mind), but by a sure method, that of internal observation and experience, a sure foundation of primary truth laid by God in our mental constitution, on which other truths may be placed, and on which they may rest so as never to be dislodged.