not deceitful. The mind is not represented as conceiving two propositions subversive of each other, as equally possible; but only, as unable to understand as possible, either of two extremes; one of which, however, on the ground of their mutual repugnance, it is compelled to recognise as true. We are thus taught the salutary lesson, that the capacity of thought is not to be constituted into the measure of existence; and are warned from recognising the domain of our knowledge as necessarily co-extensive with the horizon of our faith. And by a wonderful revelation, we are thus, in the very consciousness of our inability to conceive aught above the relative and finite, inspired with a belief in the existence of something unconditioned beyond the sphere of all comprehensible reality.*

2.The second opinion, that of KANT, is fundamentally the same as the preceding. Metaphysic, strictly so denominated, the philosophy of Existence, is virtually the doctrine of the Unconditioned. From Xenophanes to Leibnitz, the Infinite, the Absolute, the Unconditioned, formed the highest principle of speculation; but from the dawn of philosophy in the school of Elea until the rise of the Kantian philosophy, no serious attempt was made to investigate the nature and origin of this notion (or notions) as a psychological phænomenon. Before Kant, philosophy was rather a deduction from principles, than an inquiry concerning principles themselves. At the head of every system a cognition figured, which the philosopher assumed in conformity to his views; but it was rarely considered necessary, and more rarely attempted, to ascertain the genesis, and determine the domain, of this notion or judgment, previous to application. In his first Critique, Kant undertakes a regular survey of consciousness. He professes to analyse the conditions of human knowledge, to mete out its limits,—to indicate its point of departure, -and to determine its possibility. That Kant accomplished much, it would be prejudice to deny; nor is his service to philo

[True, therefore, are the declarations of a pious philosophy :-"A God understood would be no God at all;"-"To think that God is, as we can think him to be, is blasphemy."-The Divinity, in a certain sense, is revealed; in a certain sense is concealed: He is at once known and unknown. But the last and highest consecration of all true religion, must be an altar-’Ayvwoty Oeû—“To_the_unknown and unknowable God." In this consummation, nature and revelation, paganism and Christianity, are at one: and from either source the testimonies are so numerous that I must refrain from quoting any.-Am I wrong in thinking, that M. Cousin would not repudiate this doctrine ?]

sophy the less, that his success has been more decided in the subversion of error than in the establishment of truth. The result of his examination was the abolition of the metaphysical sciences, of Rational Psychology, Ontology, Speculative Theology, &c., as founded on mere petitiones principiorum. Existence is revealed to us only under specific modifications; and these are known only under the conditions of our faculties of knowledge. "Things in themselves," Matter, Mind, God,―all, in short, that is not finite, relative, and phænomenal, as bearing no analogy to our faculties, is beyond the verge of our knowledge. Philosophy was thus restricted to the observation and analysis of the phænomena of consciousness; and what is not explicitly or implicitly given in a fact of consciousness, is condemned, as transcending the sphere of a legitimate speculation. A knowledge of the Unconditioned is declared impossible; either immediately, as an intuition, or mediately, as an inference. A demonstration of the Absolute from the Relative is logically absurd; as in such a syllogism we must collect in the conclusion what is not distributed in the premises: And an immediate knowledge of the Unconditioned is equally impossible.-But here we think Kant's reasoning complicated, and his reduction incomplete. We must explain ourselves.

While we regard as conclusive Kant's analysis of Time and Space into formal necessities of thought, (without_however admitting, that they have no external or objective reality;) we cannot help viewing his deduction of the "Categories of Understanding," and of the "Ideas of speculative Reason," as the work of a great but perverse ingenuity. The Categories of Understanding are merely subordinate forms of the Conditioned. Why not, therefore, generalise the Conditioned-Existence conditioned, as the supreme category, or categories, of thought ?-and if it were necessary to analyse this form into its subaltern applications, why not develop these immediately out of the generic principle, instead of preposterously, and by a forced and partial analogy, deducing the laws of the understanding from a questionable division of logical propositions? Why distinguish Reason (Vernunft) from Understanding (Verstand), simply on the ground that the former is conversant about, or rather tends towards, the Unconditioned; when it is sufficiently apparent, that the Unconditioned is conceived only as the negation of the Conditioned, and also that the conception of contradictories is one? In the

Kantian philosophy both faculties perform the same function, both seek the one in the many;-the Idea (Idee) is only the Concept (Begriff) sublimated into the inconceivable; Reason only the Understanding which has "overleaped itself." Kant has clearly shown, that the Idea of the Unconditioned can have no objective reality,-that it conveys no knowledge, and that it involves the most insoluble contradictions. But he ought tohave shown, that the Unconditioned had no objective application, because it had, in fact, no subjective affirmation; that it afforded no real knowledge, because it contained nothing even conceivable; and that it is self-contradictory, because it is not a notion, either simple or positive, but only a fasciculus of negationsnegations of the Conditioned in its opposite extremes, and bound together merely by the aid of language and their common character of incomprehensibility. (The Unconditioned is merely a common name for what transcends the laws of thought — for the formally illegitimate.) And while he appropriated Reason as a specific faculty to take cognisance of these negations, hypostatised as positive, under the Platonic name of Ideas; so also, as a pendant to his deduction of the Categories of Understanding from a logical division of propositions, he deduced the classification and number of these Ideas of Reason from a logical division of syllogisms.-Kant thus stands intermediate between those who view the notion of the Absolute as the instinctive affirmation of an encentric intuition, and those who regard it as the factitious negative of an eccentric gene-] ralisation.

Were we to adopt from the Critical Philosophy the purpose of analysing thought into its fundamental conditions, and were we to carry the reduction of Kant to what we think its ultimate simplicity; we would discriminate thought into positive and negative, according as it is conversant about the Conditioned or the Unconditioned. This, however, would constitute a logical, not a psychological, distinction; as positive and negative in thought are known at once, and by the same intellectual act. Kant's twelve Categories of the Understanding would be thus included under the former; his three Ideas of Reason under the latter; and thus the contrast between Understanding and Reason would disappear. Finally, rejecting the arbitrary limitation of Time and Space to the sphere of sense, we would express under the formula of The CONDITIONED in TIME and SPACE a definition

B

Crit. N
Kaut

of the conceivable, and an enumeration of the three Categories of thought.*

The imperfection and partiality of Kant's analysis are betrayed in its consequences. His doctrine leads to absolute scepticism. Speculative reason, on Kant's own admission, is an organ of mere delusion. The Idea of the Unconditioned, about which it is conversant, is shown to involve insoluble contradictions, and yet to be the legitimate product of intelligence. Hume has well observed, “that it matters not whether we possess a false reason, or no reason at all." If "the light that leads astray, be light from heaven," what are we to believe? If our intellectual nature be perfidious in one revelation, it cannot be presumed truthful in any; nor is it possible for Kant to establish the existence of God, Free-will, and Immortality, on the supposed veracity of reason, in a practical relation, after having himself demonstrated its mendacity in a speculative.

Kant had annihilated the older metaphysic, but the germ of a more visionary doctrine of the Absolute (Infinito-absolute,) than any of those refuted, was contained in the bosom of his own philosophy. He had slain the body, but had not exorcised the spectre, of the Absolute; and this spectre has continued to haunt the schools of Germany even to the present day. The philosophers were not content to abandon their metaphysic; to limit philosophy to an observation of phænomena, and to the generalisation of these phænomena into laws. The theories of Bouterweck, (in his earlier works,) of Bardili, of Reinhold, of Fichte, of Schelling, of Hegel, and of sundry others, are just so many endeavours, of greater or of less ability, to fix the Absolute as a positive in knowledge; but the Absolute, like the water in the sieves of the Danaides, has always hitherto run through as a negative into the abyss of nothing.

3. Of these theories, that of SCHELLING is the only one in regard to which it is now necessary to say anything. His opinion constitutes the third of those enumerated; and the following is a brief statement of its principal positions :

While the lower sciences are of the relative and conditioned, Philosophy, as the science of sciences, must be of the Absolutethe Unconditioned. Is the Absolute then beyond our knowledge? -philosophy is itself impossible.

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[See Appendix I. (A), for a more matured view of these Categories or conditions of thought.]

But how, it is objected, can the Absolute be known ?-As unconditioned, identical, and one, it cannot be cognised under conditions, by difference and plurality; not therefore, if the subject of knowledge be distinguished from the object of knowledge. In a knowledge of the Absolute, existence and knowledge must be identical: the Absolute can only be known, if adequately known; and it can only be adequately known, by the Absolute itself. But is this possible? We are wholly ignorant of existence in itself:-the mind knows nothing, except in parts, by quality, and difference, and relation; consciousness supposes the subject contradistinguished from the object of thought; the abstraction of this contrast is a negation of consciousness; and the negation of consciousness is the annihilation of thought itself. The alternative is therefore unavoidable:-either finding the Absolute, we lose ourselves; or retaining self, and individual consciousness, we do not reach the Absolute.

All this Schelling frankly admits. He (and Fichte also) explicitly admits that a knowledge of the Absolute is impossible, in personality and consciousness: he admits that, as the understanding knows, and can know, only by consciousness, and consciousness only by difference, we, as conscious and understanding, can apprehend, can conceive only the Conditioned; and he admits that, only if man be himself the Infinite, can the Infinite be known by him.

"Nec sentire Deum, nisi qui pars ipse Deorum est;

("None can feel God, who shares not in the Godhead.”)

But Schelling contends that there is a capacity of knowledge above consciousness, and higher than the understanding, and that

[This line is from Manilius. But as a statement of Schelling's doctrine it is inadequate; for on his doctrine the deity can be known only if fully known, and a full knowledge of deity is possible only to the absolute deity—that is, not to a sharer in the Godhead. Manilius has likewise another (poetically) laudable line, of a similar, though less exceptionable, purport :

Exemplumque Dei quisque est in imagine parva ;"
("Each is himself a miniature of God.")

For we should not recoil to the opposite extreme; and, though man be not identical with the Deity, still is he "created in the image of God." It is, indeed, only through an analogy of the human with the Divine nature, that we are percipient and recipient of Divinity. As St Prosper has it :-" Nemo possidet Deum, nisi qui possidetur a Deo."-So Seneca :-" In unoquoque virorum bonorum habitat Deus."-So Plotinus:--" Virtue tending to consummation, and irradicated in the soul by moral wisdom, reveals a God; but a God destitute of true virtue is an empty name."-So Jacobi :-" From the enjoyment of virtue springs