it from nothing; he draws it from himself. The creation of the universe is thus necessary; it is a manifestation of the Deity, but not the Deity absolutely in himself; it is God passing into activity, but not exhausted in the act.

The universe created, the principles which determined the creation are found still to govern the worlds of matter and mind. Two ideas and their connexion explain the intelligence of God; two laws in their counterpoise explain the material universe. The law of expansion is the movement of unity to variety; the law of attraction, the return of variety to unity.

In the world of mind the same analogy is apparent. The study of consciousness is psychology. Man is the microcosm of existence; consciousness, within a narrow focus, concentrates a knowledge of the universe and of God; psychology is thus the abstract of all science, human and divine. As in the external world the action and reaction of all phenomena may be reduced to two great laws; so, in the internal, all the facts of consciousness may be reduced to one fundamental fact, comprising in like manner two principles and their correlation; and these principles are again the one or the infinite, the many or the finite, and the connexion of the infinite and finite.

In every act of consciousness we distinguish a self or ego, and something different from self, a non-ego; each limited and modified by the other. These, together, constitute the finite element. But at the same instant that we are conscious of these existences, plural, relative, and contingent, we are conscious likewise of a superior unity in which they are contained, and by which they are explained ;-a unity absolute as they are conditioned, substantive as they are phenomenal, and an infinite cause as they are finite causes. This unity is God. The fact of consciousness is thus a complex phenomenon, comprehending three several terms: 1. The idea of the ego and non-ego as finite; 2. The idea of something else as infinite; and, 3. The idea of relation of the finite element to the infinite. These elements are revealed in themselves and in their relations, in every act of primitive or spontaneous consciousness. They can also be reviewed by reflection in a voluntary act; but here reflection distinguishes, it does not create. The three ideas, the three categories of intelligence, are given in the original act of instinctive apperception, obscurely, indeed, and without contrast. Reflection analyses and discriminates the elements of this primary synthesis; and as will is the condition of reflection, and will at the same time is personal, the categories, as obtained through reflection, have consequently the appearance of being also personal, and subjective. It was this personality of reflection that misled Kant; caused him to overlook or misinterpret the fact of spontaneous consciousness,-to individualise intelligence, and to refer to this personal reason all that is conceived by us as necessary and universal. But as, in the spontaneous intuition of reason, there is nothing voluntary, and consequently nothing personal; and as the truths which intelligence here discovers come not from ourselves; we have a right, up to a certain point, to impose these truths on others as revelations from on high; while, on the contrary, reflection being wholly personal, it would be absurd to impose on others what is the fruit of our individual operations. Spontaneity is the principle of religion; reflection of philosophy. Men agree in spontaneity; they differ in reflection. The former is necessarily veracious; the latter is naturally delusive.

The condition of reflection is separation; it illustrates by distinguishing; it considers the different elements apart; and while it contemplates one,

vice versa.

it necessarily throws the others out of view. Hence, not only the possibility, but the necessity, of error. The primitive unity, supposing no distinction, admits of no error; reflection in discriminating the elements of thought, and in considering one to the exclusion of others, occasions error, and a variety in error. He who exclusively contemplates the element of the infinite, despises him who is occupied with the idea of the finite; and It is the wayward development of the various elements of intelligence, that determines the imperfections and varieties of individual character. Men under this partial and exclusive development are but fragments of that humanity, which can only be fully realised in the harmonious evolution of all its principles. What reflection is to the individual, history is to the human race. The difference of an epoch consists exclusively in the partial development of some one element of intelligence in a prominent portion of mankind; and as there are only three such elements, so there are only three grand epochs in the history of man.

A knowledge of the elements of reason, of their relations and of their laws, constitutes not merely philosophy, but the conditions of a history of philosophy. The history of human reason, or the history of philosophy, must be rational and philosophic. It must be philosophy itself, with all its elements, with all their relations, and with all their laws, represented in striking characters by the hands of time and of history, in the visible progress of the human mind. The discovery and enumeration of all the elements of intelligence enables us to survey the progress of speculation from the loftiest vantage ground; it discovers to us the laws by which the development of reflection or philosophy is determined; and it supplies us with a canon by which the approximation of the different systems to the truth may be finally ascertained. And what are the results? Sensualism, idealism, scepticism, mysticism, are all partial and exclusive views of the elements of intelligence. But each is false only as it is incomplete. They are all true in what they affirm-all erroneous in what they deny. Though hitherto opposed, they are consequently not incapable of coalition; and, in fact, can only obtain their consummation in a powerful eclecticism, which shall comprehend them all. This eclecticism is contained in the system previously developed; and the possibility of such a universal philosophy was first afforded by the discovery of M. Cousin, in the year 1817, “that consciousness contained many more phenomena than had previously been suspected."

The present work is at once an exposition of these principles, as a true theory of philosophy, and an illustration of the mode in which this theory is to be applied, as a rule of criticism in the history of philosophical opinion. As the justice of the application must be always subordinate to the truth of the principle, we shall confine ourselves exclusively to a consideration of M. Cousin's system, viewed absolutely in itself. This, indeed, we are afraid will prove comparatively irksome; and we must solicit indulgence not only for the unpopular nature of the discussion, but for the employment of language which, from the total neglect of these speculations in Britain, will necessarily appear abstruse to the general reader.

Now it is manifest that the whole doctrine of M. Cousin is involved in the proposition, that the unconditioned, the absolute, the infinite, is immediately known in consciousness by difference, plurality, and relation. The unconditioned, as an original element of knowledge, is the generative principle of his system; the mode in which the possibility of this knowledge

is explained, affords its discriminating peculiarity. The other positions of his theory, as deduced from this assumption, may indeed be disputed, even if the antecedent be allowed; but this assumption disproved, every consequent in his theory is at once annihilated. The recognition of the absolute as a constitutive principle of intelligence, our author regards as at once the condition and the end of philosophy; and it is on the discovery of this principle in the fact of consciousness, that he vindicates to himself the glory of being the founder of the eclectic, or one catholic philosophy. The determination of this cardinal point will thus satisfy us at once touching the pretensions of the system. To explain the nature of the problem itself, and the character of the solution propounded by M. Cousin, it is necessary to premise a statement of the opinions that may be entertained regarding the unconditioned, as an immediate object of knowledge and of thought.

These opinions may be reduced to four-1. The unconditioned is incognisable and inconceivable; its notion being only negative of the conditioned, which last can alone be positively known or conceived. 2. It is not an object of knowledge; but its notion, as a regulative principle of the mind itself, is more than a mere negation of the conditioned. 3. It is cognisable, but not conceivable; it can be known by a sinking back into identity with the absolute, but is incomprehensible by consciousness and reflection, which are only of the relative and the different. 4. It is cognisable and conceivable by consciousness and reflection, under relation, difference, and plurality.

The first of these opinions we regard as true; the second is held by Kant; the third by Schelling; and the last by our author.

1. In our opinion the mind can conceive, and consequently can know, only the limited, and the conditionally limited. The unconditionally unlimited, or the infinite, the unconditionally limited, or the absolute, cannot positively be construed to the mind; they can be conceived at all only by a thinking away, or abstraction of those very conditions under which thought itself is realised; consequently, the notion of the unconditioned is only negative,-negative of the conceivable itself. For example, on the one hand we can positively conceive neither an absolute whole, that is, a whole so great, that we cannot also conceive it as a relative part of a still greater whole; nor an absolute part, that is, a part so small, that we cannot also conceive it as a relative whole, divisible into smaller parts. On the other hand, we cannot positively represent to the mind an infinite whole, for this could only be done by the infinite synthesis in thought of finite wholes, which would itself require an infinite time for its accomplishment; nor, for the same reason, can we follow out in thought an infinite divisibility of parts. The result is the same, whether we apply the process to limitation in space, in time, or in degree. The unconditional negation, and the unconditional affirmation of limitation; in other words, the infinite and the absolute, properly so called,* are thus equally inconceivable to us.

As the conditionally limited (which we may briefly call the conditioned is thus the only object of knowledge and of positive thought-thought necessarily supposes conditions; to think is therefore to condition, and conditional limitation is the fundamental law of the possibility of thought. How,

It is proper to observe, that though we are of opinion that the terms Infinite and Absolute, and Unconditioned, ought not to be confounded, and accurately distinguish them in the statement of our own view; yet, in speaking of the doctrines of those by whom they are indifferently employed, we have not thought it necessary, or rather we have found it impossible, to adhere to the distinction.

indeed, it could ever be doubted that thought is only of the conditioned, may well be deemed a matter of the profoundest admiration. Thought cannot transcend consciousness; consciousness is only possible under the antithesis of a subject and object of thought, known only in correlation and mutually limiting each other; while, independently of this, all we know either of subject or object, either of mind or matter, is only a knowledge in each of the particular, of the different, of the modified, of the phenomenal. We admit that the consequence of this doctrine is, that philosophy, if viewed as more than a science of the conditioned, is impossible. Departing from the particular, we admit that we can never, in our highest generalisations, rise above the finite; that our knowledge, whether of mind or matter, can be nothing more than a knowledge of the relative manifestations of an existence which, in itself, it is our highest wisdom to recognise as beyond the reach of philosophy :-Cognoscendo ignorari, et ignorando cognosci.

The conditioned is the mean between two extremes, exclusive of each other, neither of which can be conceived as possible, but of which, on the principle of contradiction, one must be admitted as necessary. On this opinion, therefore, reason is shown to be weak, but 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 contradiction, 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 beyond the relative and finite, inspired with a belief in the existence of something unconditioned beyond the sphere of all comprehensive reality.

2. The second opinion, that of Kant, is fundamentally the same as the preceding. Metaphysic, strictly so denominated, is the doctrine of the unconditioned. From Xenophanes to Leibnitz, the infinite, the absolute, formed the highest principle of speculation; but from the dawn of philosophy in the school of Elis till the rise of the Kantian philosophy, no serious attempt was made to investigate the nature and origin of this notion as a psychological phenomenon. Before Kant, philosophy was rather a deduction from principles than an enquiry concerning principles themselves. At the head of every system a notion figured, which the philosopher assumed in conformity to his views; but it was rarely considered necessary, and still more rarely attempted, to ascertain the genesis, or to determine the domain, of the notion, previous to its application. In his 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 philosophy 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, etc., as founded on mere petitiones principiorum. Existence was revealed to us only under specific modifications, and these were known only under the conditions of our faculties of knowledge. "Things in them

selves," mind, matter, God,-all, in short, that was not particular, relative, and phenomenal, as bearing no analogy to our faculties, was beyond the verge of our knowledge. Philosophy was thus restricted to the observation and analysis of the phenomena of consciousness, and what was not explicitly or implicitly given in a fact of consciousness, transcended the sphere of a legitimate speculation. A knowledge of the unconditioned was impossible, either immediately as a notion, or mediately as an inference. A demonstration of the absolute from the relative was logically absurd; as in such a syllogism we must collect in the conclusion what is not distributed in the premises. An immediate knowledge of the unconditioned was equally impossible: but here we think his reasoning complicated, and his reduction incomplete. We must explain ourselves.

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While we regard as conclusive Kant's analysis of time and space into mere conditions of thought, we cannot help viewing his deduction of the categories of understanding, and the ideas of speculative reason, as the work of a great but perverse ingenuity. The categories of the understanding are merely subordinate forms of the conditioned. Why not, therefore, generalise the conditioned as the one category 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 contraries 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 conception (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 to have 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 negations;-negations of the conditioned in its opposite extremes, and bound together merely by their common character of incomprehensibility. 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 the logical division of propositions, he deduced the classification and number of these ideas of reason from the logical division of syllogisms. Kant thus stands intermediate between those who view the notion of the absolute as the instinctive affirmation of an eccentric consciousness, and those who regard it as the factitious negative of an eccentric generalisation. Were we to adopt from the critical philosophy the idea 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 unconditioned. This, however, would constitute a logical, not a psychological distinction; as positive and negative in thought are known