long satisfy such a mind as Cousin's and in the second year of his instruction, as professor of philosophy in the Normal School, he passed to the German school of Kant. Shall we blame him for pausing a while on the rigid old German : nay, for being for a while subjugated by the master mind that had held all Germany under the iron rule of the invincible categories? And yet, his Course of Philosophy for 1818, made when he was only twenty-six years of age. shows that he, if still in some degree a disciple of Kant, is by no means his slave, but a free disciple; nay, that he has detected and exposed the fundamental vice of the Kantian categories; and we doubt, if in the whole range of philosophical literature, a more remarkable work for depth, clearness, and truth, prepared by so young a man, can be found, than this Course for 1818. Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, each in turn, as well as Proclus and Descartes, have had their influence, which has been more or less unhappy; but none of them, nor all of them together, have been able to retain him; and as he gradually recovers his independence, we see him approaching nearer and nearer to a system which shall be free from all the objections which have been urged against his past labors. He is now in the very prime of life, being only in the fifty-first year of his age, younger, we believe, than was Kant when he published his Critik der reinen Vernunft, and therefore altogether too young to be judged as a man who has finished his labors.

Cousin as a writer is confessedly one of the ablest masters of his language; as a scholar, nobody questions his eminent ability and attainments. Even Lerminier and Leroux, his two bitterest and most formidable eneinies, concede him erudition of the highest order, as his comments on Plato, Aristotle, his edition of Proclus, his history of ancient philosophy, and his more recent work on Abelard and the middle ages, abundantly evince. His translation of Plato is a monument to his learning and ability, of which his countrymen may well be proud. We have nothing to begin to compare with it in English. As for understanding Plato, the mere English reader might as well study him in the original Greek as in Mr. Taylor's un-English translation. The only portion of Plato tolerably Englished, that we have seen, is Shelley's translation of the Banquet, but which after all by no means compares with Cousin's. As to Cousin's metaphysical ability, we point to his reduction of the categories of Kant to the two categories of substance and cause,

demonstrating that it is only in the category of cause that we seize the category of substance; and to his analysis of the fact of consciousness, showing that thought is an intellectual phenomenon, with three inseparable and imperishable elements; namely, subject, object, and form; two great facts which contain in themselves all the positive progress, even according to the admission of Leroux, a competent judge, that philosophy has made since the time of Descartes, and which we have adopted, in our chapters on Synthetic Philosophy, as the basis of our own system. As yet, so far as at present informed, we do not think Cousin has derived from these original discoveries of his all the advantages they really contain. We have found them, since we arrived at the same results by an independent process of our own—for till we had so done we had no conception of their profound significance fruitful in the greatest and richest results. But it is not too late for him to make his own original discoveries-not the labors of others-the basis of his own system; and when he does so, he will give us a philosophy to rank with the philosophies of the greatest masters of this or any other age.

We have felt, in criticising as we have done some portions of Cousin's past labors, that these statements were due to him; nay, they were due to us, that we might not seem to deny the merits of the master without whose labors we should never have presumed to aspire to a place, however humble, among the cultivators of philosophy. The fundamental errors of Cousin's teachings thus far, belong not to him, but to modern philosophy itself. These errors are two; one lying at the bottom of the empirical school, and the other at the bettom of the rationalistic school;-the first of the Baconian, the second of the Cartesian. Cartesianism starts with a fundamental error, namely, the sufficiency of pure reason as manifested in the individual consciousness. We will not

say

that the Cartesians never borrow any thing from empiricisin; that is, make no use of facts learned only from experience; but the sufficiency of the individual reason is the principle of the school. Thought is regarded as a purely intellectual act; and hence the formula of the school, cogito, ergo sum, I think, therefore I am. All, according to this principle, is found in reason, and is capable of being demonstrated a priori. This is the fatal vice of the whole continental philosophy, as represented by Cartesianism in France, Wolfism and Hegelism in Germany, against which

the Critique of pure Reason may be considered a virtual but indistinct protest.

The Baconian school proceeds on an error of an opposite kind. It assumes, very properly, that all knowledge begins with experience, but recognizes in the fact of knowledge no a priori element. Hence, after passing through the sensism of Hobbes, pausing awhile with the good sense of Locke, it terminates in the materialism of the old French school. Against the dogmatism of the Baconian school, Hume may be considered as protesting in like manner as Kant has against that of pure reason; and it is worthy of note, that Kant and Hume, so far from being opposed one to the other, do virtually occupy the same ground. The practical reason of the one, is nothing but the common sense of the other. Both deny the impossibility of demonstrating external reality from the point of view of pure reason; the one resting it on the irresistibility of the "categories" of reason, which is purely subjective, and therefore no authority out of the subject itself; and the other, on a "belief" of which we can never get rid, but for which we have and can have no scientific basis.

No man has seen more clearly than Cousin these two fundamental errors, and no man has sought more earnestly to escape them both: but in all his dogmatic teachings which we have seen, they both are reproduced. The first named we find everywhere in his theorizing on history; the second, in his separation of psychology from ontology; as if the human me, or soul, of which psychology investigates the phenomena, did not represent being, and as if we could assume the existence of the soul, study and classify its phenomena, without entering into the region of ontology, which is the science of being. This error led him to make psychology, in his method of philosophizing, the basis of ontology, when the very assumption of the possibility of psychology without ontology, that is, of a science of phenomena without any subject or being manifesting itself in them, is a plain and positive denial of the possibility of our ever going out of the phenomenon at all.

And yet Cousin has solved the problem, and as it seems. to us without knowing it. The solution, however, is not as Kant supposed in making all knowledge begin in sensible experience, and in contending that the subject, or mind, out of its own funds, on occasion of the sensible experience, furnishes an a priori element, which was not in the sensible

fact itself; nor in contending that we have two faculties of knowing, as does Jouffroy, one for knowing the external, and the other for knowing the internal; nor by distinguishing between the logical order and the chronological order, as Cousin himself does in his examination of Locke, although that distinction is very real; but all simply in what he himself has so often demonstrated, and so earnestly insists on, and which is really the basis of what he calls ontology, namely, the fact that we never seize the category of being, or substance, save in the category of cause; that is, the subject in the phenomenon, the actor in the act. The rationalist assumes that we can seize being in itself; the empiricist, that we seize in the phemenon only the phenomenal; the synthetist, which Cousin should be, and is when he is himself, asserts that in the act we seize the actor, and have the power to perceive the spiritual in the material, as we have stated in a foregoing part of the present essay.

We here leave the rationalistic theory of the history of humanity, to follow with an examination of the providential theory, or the view of history which explains its facts by the constant intervention of Providence, the religious theory properly so called,-under which head we propose to bring out what we hold to be the true view.

IV. THE PROVIDENTIAL THEORY.

The providential theory, which probably in some form is recognized or intended to be recognized by all, philosophers, may be contemplated under two different points of view: 1. The pantheistic view. 2. The religious view. In what we have to offer on each, we shall make Cousin our representative of the first, and Bossuet of the second.

1. Cousin is a professed eclectic, and it is the boast of his system of history, that it excludes no element from its appropriate share. Under a certain point of view, he assuredly does admit all the elements that can be conceived of as at work in human affairs. But granting that he admits all the elements, does he in his account of them, recognize and describe them all in their true character? In order to answer this question, we must return upon his system for a few moments, and contemplate it under a different point of view from that under which we have already contemplated it. He recognizes five elements in human history, five original ideas, whence have proceeded, and to which may be referred as their source, all the facts of the life of humanity

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considered collectively or individually. 1. The idea of the useful; 2. The idea of the just; 3. The idea of the beautiful; 4. The idea of the holy; 5. The idea of the true.

The first creates industry, and the mathematical and physical sciences; the second, the state, government, jurisprudence; the third, the fine arts; the fourth, religion (cultus); the fifth, philosophy, which clears up, accounts for, and verifies the other four. That these five elements exhaust human nature, there can be no doubt; that all the facts of human history in time and space, however various or complex, can be all included by the historian under the respective heads of industry, politics, art, religion, and philosophy, is unquestionably true; and so far Cousin's boast of having in his eclecticism overlooked no element of human life, is well founded. But in the creation of industry, politics, art, religion, philosophy, does humanity work alone and on her own funds; or does Providence come to her assistance? If Providence intervenes, is it in the form of a fixed, permanent and necessary law of humanity; or in the form of a free, sovereign power, distinct from humanity, graciously supplying her from time to time with new strength and materials to work with? Here lies the whole question between Providence in the pantheistic sense, and Providence in the religious sense.

Under the point of view we are now considering the subject, Cousin is to no small extent a disciple of John Baptist Vico, born at Naples, 1668, educated in the study of the ancient languages, the scholastic philosophy, theology, and jurisprudence, known as the author of the Scienza Nuova, or New Science, a work of vast compass, of immense power, and a mine of rich and profound thought, too little prized and studied by even our best scholars. Vico, though recognizing religion, and the action of Providence, yet starts from the principle that humanity is, so to speak, her own work. God acts upon the race, but only by it, in its instinctive operations. He explains nearly all the facts of human history from the political point of view; but he traces the various laws of nations, the manners and customs, and all the materials which enter into the history of humanity, to the "common sense of nations." Humanity is divine, but there is no divine man. The great men of ancient history, poets, prophets, sages, legislators, are not to be taken as individuals. They are mythical personages, creations of the national thought of their respective nations and epochs,