this knowledge is competent to human reason, as identical with the Absolute itself. In this act of knowledge, (which, after Fichte, he calls the Intellectual Intuition*), there exists no distinction of subject and object,-no contrast of knowledge and existence; all difference is lost in mere indifference,-all plurality in simple unity. The Intuition itself,-Reason,-and the Absolute are identified. The Absolute exists only as known by Reason; and Reason knows only as being itself the Absolute. This act (act!) is necessarily ineffable:

"The vision and the faculty divine,"

to be known, must be experienced. It cannot be conceived by the understanding, because beyond its sphere; it cannot be described, because its essence is identity, and all description supposes discrimination. To those who are unable to rise beyond a philosophy of reflection, Schelling candidly allows that the doctrine of the Absolute can appear only a series of contradictions; and he has at least the negative merit of having clearly exposed the impossibility of a philosophy of the Unconditioned, as founded on a knowledge by difference, if he utterly fails in positively proving the possibility of such a philosophy, as founded on a knowledge in identity, through an absorption into, and vision of, the Absolute.

Out of Laputa or the Empire it would be idle to enter into an articulate refutation of a theory, which founds philosophy on the annihilation of consciousness, and on the identification of the un

the idea of a virtuous; from the enjoyment of freedom, the idea of a free; from the enjoyment of life, the idea of a living; from the enjoyment of the divine, the idea of a godlike—and of a God."—So Goethe:

"Waer nicht das Auge sonnenhaft,

Wie koennten wir das Licht erblicken?
Lebt' nicht in uns des Gottes eigne Kraft,

Wie koennte uns das Goettliche entzuecken?"

So Kant and many others. (Thus morality and religion, necessity and atheism, rationally go together.) The Platonists and Fathers have indeed finely and frequently said, that "God is the life of the soul, as the soul is the life of the body."

"Vita Animæ Deus est; hæc Corporis. Hac fugiente,
Solvitur hoc; perit hæc, destituente Deo."

These verses, which embody, almost in the same words, the sentiment of St
Austin, are preserved to us from an ancient poet by John of Salisbury, and they
denote the comparison of which Buchanan has made so admirable a use in his
Calvini Epicedium.]

[This expression remounts however to Cusa. See what is said of him in Appendix I. (B).]

conscious philosopher with God. The Intuition of the Absolute is manifestly the work of an arbitrary abstraction, and of a selfdelusive imagination. To reach the point of indifference,―by abstraction we annihilate the object, and by abstraction we annihilate the subject, of consciousness. But what remains?—Nothing. "Nil conscimus nobis." We then hypostatise the zero; we baptize it with the name of Absolute; and conceit ourselves that we contemplate absolute existence, when we only speculate absolute privation.* This truth has been indeed virtually confessed by the two most distinguished followers of Schelling. Hegel at last abandons the Intuition, and regards "pure or undetermined existence" as convertible with "pure nothing;" whilst Oken, if he adhere to the Intuition, intrepidly identifies the Deity or Absolute with zero. God, he makes the Nothing, the Nothing, he makes God; "And Naught is ev'rything, and ev'rything is Naught."+ Nor does the negative chimæra prove less fruitful than the positive; for Schelling has found it as difficult to evolve the one into

* [The Infinite and Absolute are only the names of two counter imbecilities of the human mind, transmuted into properties of the nature of things,-of two subjective negations, converted into objective affirmations. We tire ourselves, either in adding to, or in taking from. Some, more reasonably, call the thing unfinishable-infinite; others, less rationally, call it finished-absolute. But in both cases, the metastasis is in itself irrational. Not, however, in the highest degree: for the subjective contradictories were not at first objectified by the same philosophers; and it is the crowning irrationality of the Infinito-absolutists, that they have not merely accepted as objective what is only subjective, but quietly assumed as the same, what are not only different but conflictive, not only conflictive, but repugnant. Seneca (Ep. 118) has given the true genealogy of the original fictions, but at his time the consummative union of the two had not been attempted. "Ubi animus aliquid diu protulit, et magnitudinem ejus sequendo lassatus est, infinitum coepit vocari. Eodem modo, aliquid difficulter secari cogitavimus, novissime, crescente difficultate, insecabile inventum est."]

+ [From the Rejected Addresses. Their ingenious authors have embodied a jest in the very words by which Oken, in sober seriousness, propounds the first and greatest of philosophical truths. Jacobi (or Neeb?) might well say, that, in reading this last consummation of German speculation, he did not know whether he was standing on his head or his feet. The book in which Oken so ingeniously deduces the All from the Nothing, has, I see, been lately translated into English, and published by the Ray Society (I think). The statement of the paradox is, indeed, somewhat softened in the second edition, from which, I presume, the version is made. Not that Oken and Hegel are original even in the absurdity. For as Varro right truly said :-"Nihil tam absurde dici potest, quod non dicatur ab aliquo philosophorum;" so the Intuition of God the Absolute, the Nothing, we find asserted by the lower Platonists, by the Budhists, and by Jacob Boehme. -And yet there is a sense in which these paradoxical dicta admit of a favourable interpretation.]

the many, as his disciples to deduce the universe and its contents from the first self-affirmation of the "primordial Nothing."

"Miri homines! Nihil esse aliquid statuantve negentve;

Quodque negant statuunt, quod statuuntque negant.”

To Schelling, indeed, it has been impossible, without gratuitous and even contradictory assumptions, to explain the deduction of the finite from the infinite. By no salto mortale has he been able to clear the magic circle in which he had enclosed himself. Unable to connect the unconditioned and the conditioned by any natural correlation, he has variously attempted to account for the phænomenon of the universe, either by imposing a necessity of self-manifestation on the absolute, i. e. by conditioning the unconditioned; or by postulating a fall of the finite from the infinite, i.e. by begging the very fact which his hypothesis professed its exclusive ability to explain.-The veil of Isis is thus still unwithdrawn ; and the question proposed by Orpheus at the dawn of speculation will probably remain unanswered at its setting,

Πῶς δέ μοι ἔν τι τὰ πάντ ̓ ἔσται, καὶ χωρὶς ἕκαστον ;
("How shall I think-each, separate and all, one?")

In like manner, annihilating consciousness in order to reconstruct it, Schelling has never yet been able to connect the faculties conversant about the conditioned, with the faculty of absolute knowledge. One simple objection strikes us as decisive, although we do not remember to have seen it alleged. "We awaken," says Schelling, "from the Intellectual Intuition as from a state of death; we awaken by Reflection, that is, through a compulsory return to ourselves." + We cannot, at the same moment, be in the intellectual intuition and in common consciousness; we must therefore be able to connect them by an act of memory-of recollection. But how can there be a remembrance of the Absolute and its Intuition? As out of time, and space, and relation, and difference, it is admitted that the Absolute cannot be construed

* [Isis appears as the Ægypto-Grecian symbol of the Unconditioned. ("IoisἸσία- Οὐσία : Ἴσειον,—γνῶσις τοῦ ὄντος. Plutarch, Isis et Osiris. In the temple of Athene-Isis, at Sais, on the fane there stood this sublime inscription :

"I AM ALL THAT WAS, AND IS, AND SHALL BE ;

NOR MY VEIL, HAS IT BEEN WITHDRAWN BY MORTAL."

('Εγώ εἰμι πᾶν τὸ γεγονὸς, καὶ ὄν, καί ἐσόμενον, καὶ τὸν ἐμὸν πέπλον οὐδείς πω θνητὸς ἀπεκάλυψε.)]

+ In Fichte's u. Niethhammer's Philos. Journ. vol. iii. p. 214.

to the understanding? But as remembrance is only possible under the conditions of the understanding, it is consequently impossible to remember anything anterior to the moment when we awaken into consciousness; and the clairvoyance of the Absolute, even granting its reality, is thus, after the crisis, as if it had never been. We defy all solution of this objection.-But it may be put in another form: To know the Absolute and to be the Absolute, are, ex hypothesi, one and the same. Therefore, in the Intellectual Intuition, the individual speculator, the conscious Schelling, Steffens, Oken, is annihilated; and, e contra, the Intellectual Intuition is impossible for the philosopher in a state of personal individuality and consciousness. But it is in this state of personality, and non-intuition of the Absolute, that the philosopher writes; in writing therefore about the Absolute, he writes of what is to him as zero. His system is thus a mere scheme of words.

What has now been stated may in some degree enable the reader to apprehend the relations in which our author stands, both to those who deny and to those who admit a knowledge of the Absolute. If we compare the philosophy of COUSIN with the philosophy of Schelling, we at once perceive that the former is a disciple, though by no means a servile disciple of the latter. The scholar, though enamoured with his master's system as a whole, is sufficiently aware of the two insuperable difficulties of that theory. He saw that if he pitched the Absolute so high, it was impossible to deduce from it the relative; and he felt, probably, that the Intellectual Intuition-a stumbling-block to himselfwould be arrant foolishness in the eyes of his countrymen.Cousin and Schelling agree, that as philosophy is the science of the Unconditioned, the Unconditioned must be within the compass of science. They agree that the Unconditioned is known, and immediately known: and they agree that intelligence, as competent to the Unconditioned, is impersonal, infinite, divine.But while they coincide in the fact of the Absolute, as known, they are diametrically opposed as to the mode in which they attempt to realise this knowledge; each regarding, as the climax of contradiction, the manner in which the other endeavours to bring human reason and the Absolute into proportion. According to Schelling, Cousin's Absolute is only a relative; according to Cousin, Schelling's knowledge of the Absolute is a negation of thought itself. Cousin declares the condition of all knowledge to be plurality and difference; and Schelling, that the condition

under which alone a knowledge of the Absolute becomes possible, is indifference and unity. The one thus denies a notion of the Absolute to consciousness; whilst the other affirms that consciousness is implied in every act of intelligence. Truly, we must view each as triumphant over the other; and the result of this mutual neutralisation is,-that the Absolute, the Infinite, the Unconditioned, of which both assert a knowledge, is for us incognisable.*

In these circumstances, we might expect our author to have stated the difficulties to which his theory was exposed on the one side and on the other; and to have endeavoured to obviate the objections, both of his brother Absolutists, and of those who altogether deny a philosophy of the Unconditioned. This he has not done. The possibility of reducing the notion of the Absolute to a negative conception is never once contemplated; and if one or two allusions (not always, perhaps, correct) are made to his doctrine, the name of Schelling does not occur, as we recollect, in the whole compass of these lectures. Difficulties, by which either the doctrine of the Absolute in general, or his own parti

*["Quod genus hoc pugnæ, qua victor victus uterque !"

is still further exhibited in the mutual refutation of the two great apostles of the Absolute, in Germany, Schelling and Hegel. They were early friends,-contemporaries at the same university, occupiers of the same bursal room (college chums), -Hegel, somewhat the elder man, was somewhat the younger philosopher, and they were joint editors of the journal in which their then common doctrine was at first promulgated. So far all was in unison; but now they separated, locally and in opinion. Both, indeed, stuck to the Absolute, but each regarded the way in which the other professed to reach it, as absurd. Hegel derided the Intellectual Intuition of Schelling as a poetical play of fancy; Schelling derided the Dialectic of Hegel as a logical play with words. Both, I conceive, were right; but neither fully right. If Schelling's Intellectual Intuition were poetical, it was a poetry transcending, in fact abolishing, human imagination. If Hegel's Dialectic were logical, it was a logic outraging that science and the conditions of thought itself. Hegel's whole philosophy is indeed founded on two errors ;-on a mistake in logic, and on a violation of logic. In his dream of disproving the law of Excluded Middle (between two Contradictories), he inconceivably mistakes Contraries for Contradictories; and in positing pure or absolute existence as a mental datum, immediate, intuitive, and above proof, (though, in truth, this be palpably a mere relative gained by a process of abstraction,) he not only mistakes the fact, but violates the logical law which prohibits us to assume the principle which it behoves us to prove. On these two fundamental errors rests Hegel's Dialectic; and Hegel's Dialectic is the ladder by which he attempts to scale the Absolute.-The peculiar doctrine of these two illustrious thinkers is thus to me only another manifestation of an occur. rence of the commonest in human speculation; it is only a sophism of relative self-love, victorious over the absolute love of truth :-" Quod volunt sapiunt, et nolunt sapere quæ vera sunt."]