of physical research, more striking, if not more conclusive, than any other. The very defective nomenclature, and imperfect subdivision of the moral and political sciences, is attended with practical inconveniences, of which a better example cannot perhaps be given than the want of a line of demarcation between Politics and Political Economy, and the confusion of political with economical reasonings, in the most important legislative discussions. Of the more general classification, we cannot but say, as Lord Bacon says on a like occasion, "Remote and superficial generalities are no more aiding to practice, than an universal map is to direct the way between London and York." We have been somewhat surprised at the degree of praise bestowed on D'Alembert, in a place where his mathematical merits could not come into consideration. We are far from adopting the quaint description of one of his works in Gray's Letters, that "it is hard as a stone, as dry as a stick, and as cold as a cucumber." Though we are aware of the influence which the independence and simplicity of his character, and his union of exact science with general philosophy and polite literature, may perhaps unconsciously have exercised over the mind of his panegyrist, we cannot think it an act of judicious admiration, more than once to have placed his name in the immediate neighbourhood of the name of Bacon.

As some atonement for the length of our remarks, we subjoin a part of the conclusion of the preface, as a specimen of the manner of thinking and writing which prevails in this Discourse.

"I am not without hopes, that this disadvantage may be partly compensated by its closer connexion with (what ought to be the ultimate end of all our pursuits) the intellectual and moral improvement of the species.

"I am, at the same time, well aware, that in proportion as this last consideration increases the importance, it adds to the difficulty, of my undertaking. It is chiefly in judging of questions 'coming home to their business and bosoms,' that casual associations lead mankind astray; and of such associations, how incalculable is the number arising from false systems of religion, oppressive forms of government, and absurd plans of education! The consequence is, that while the physical and mathematical discoveries of former ages present themselves to the hand of the historian like masses of pure and native gold, the truths which we are here in quest of may be compared to iron, which, although at once the most necessary and the most widely diffused of all the metals, commonly requires a discriminating eye to detect its existence, and a tedious, as well as nice process, to extract it from the ore.

"To the same circumstance it is owing, that improvements in moral and in political science do not strike the imagination with nearly so great force as the discoveries of the mathematician or the chemist. When an inveterate prejudice is destroyed by extirpating the casual associations on which it was grafted, how powerful is the new impulse given to the intellectual faculties of man! Yet how slow and silent the process by which the effect is accomplished! Were it not, indeed, for a certain class of learned authors, who, from time to time, heave the log into the deep, we should hardly believe that the reason of the species is progressive. In this respect, the religious and academical establishments in some parts of Europe are not without their use to the historian of the human mind. Immovably moored to the same station by the strength of their cables, and the weight of their anchors, they enable him to measure the rapidity of the current by which the rest of the world are borne along.

"This, too, is remarkable in the history of our prejudices, that, as soon as the film falls from the intellectual eye, we are apt to lose all recollection of our former blindness. Like the fantastic and giant shapes which, in a thick fog, the imagination lends to a block of stone, or to the stump of a tree, they produce, while the illusion lasts, the same effect with truths and realities; but the moment the eye has caught the exact form and dimensions of its object, the spell is broken for ever; nor can any effort of thought again conjure up the spectres which have vanished."

The author was doubtless at liberty to fix the period at which he chose to commence his work. The revival of letters, or, to speak more strictly, the renewed study of the Greek and Roman writers, is one of the most conspicuous landmarks of literary history. But it is not equally clear that all the reasons assigned for the choice of this period are equally conclusive. The middle age is spoken of with a contempt too undistinguishing. The inactivity of the human mind was very far from being alike in all the portions

of this long period. During the darkest part of it, which extends from the fall of the Western empire to the beginning of the thirteenth century, the numerals called Arabic were introduced. Paper was fabricated from linen. Gunpowder and the compass were discovered. Before its termination, oil painting, printing, and engraving closed this series of improvements, unequalled in use and brilliancy, since those first inventions which attended the rise of civilisation, and which therefore preceded history. These inventions were proofs of mental activity as well as incitements to it; and it may even be doubted, whether the human mind could have rendered a greater service to the science of the succeeding age, than in thus preparing the soil which it was to cultivate, and constructing new instruments for its use. In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, however, it cannot be doubted that the faculties of men throughout Europe were generally and very signally turned towards various studies. About the same period we find the cultivation of the Roman Law, the rise of the School Philosophy, and the commencement of Poetry in modern language, in Sicily, in Tuscany, in Provence, in Catalonia, in Normandy, in England, in Scotland and in Suabia. These dissimilar studies, appearing to us, at this distance to arise suddenly in countries remote from each other, and at a period of small intercourse between nations, mark a general revolution in the mind of Europe. The government, laws, and manners of the middle age have been studied with a diligence due to the investigation of the source of the diversity of institutions and national character which still prevails in Europe. The literature of the same period has of late almost everywhere inspired a general curiosity and interest. Most nations have returned with renewed affection to the earliest monuments of the genius of their forefathers; and, amidst circumstances which abundantly counteract the extravagant whimsies of a few writers, there is no danger of permanent excess in that disposition. It is an useful fashion which makes a refined age familiar with those powers and graces which are familiar to each language, and with those original qualities which distinguished the first literary efforts of each, when they must have arisen spontaneously out of the national character ;which turns each nation from the imitation of foreign models to the improvement of their own native and characteristic excellences; which contributes somewhat to strengthen national spirit, and in any degree, however small, to confirm the love of every people for their own country.

It would be folly to compare the importance of the study of the ancient laws and literature of Europe with that of the history of the metaphysical speculations of any period, and especially where those speculations, with whatever power of mind they were conducted, must be owned to have been peculiarly unsuccessful.-But the philosophy of the middle age may deserve some notice. As long as the scholastic systems continued to be formidable enemies to free enquiry and sound philosophy, it might be an excusable policy to display only their vices, which were sufficiently enormous. But since they have ceased to be dangerous, we may safely be just to them. They are in truth the source from which most of the metaphysical discussions of modern times have sprung. Under the scholastic discipline the understanding of Europe was educated; and, from its first operation, probably acquired much of its peculiar character. A system in which every European of liberal education during three centuries was trained, cannot have been without a powerful influence on the reasonings and opinions of succeeding times. Whatever occupies so long the force of the general under

standing, however unprofitably as far as regards positive results, cannot be uninstructive in its course, and by its example. The widest deviations from our modes of thought and expression, and even from the course of right reason, are the subject of the more curious problems in the theory of intellect. Even in a practical view, the contemplation of them weans the mind from the narrowness incident to those who think constantly in the forms and words of their own time and country, turns reflection into unaccustomed channels, dispels the illusion of combinations of language to which we have been long habituated, and may present a new side of a principle or an opinion which a better mode of philosophising kept out of view. For these reasons, we are interested by an account of the most extravagant speculations of China and Japan;* and the less they resemble our own, the more they excite our curiosity.

A contempt for the exertions of intellect under forms different from ours, is as sure a mark of a narrow mind as that hostility, almost to be called hatred, which is sometimes betrayed by men of talent against those sciences which they are incapable of learning. Neither disposition could find any place in a mind like that of Mr. Stewart, formed in the school of Bacon, of which it is the peculiar character to estimate the relative value of all sciences with an equal eye, and to explain the causes of philosophical failures in a manner which avoids all injustice to the talents of the philosophers whose speculations have been unsuccessful. Yet he has spoken of the schoolmen with a nearer approach to acrimony than has been justifiable, since their remaining authority at Salamanca or Louvain has ceased to be dangerous to the free exercise of reason.

The character of the scholastic system, in general, is that of a collection of dialectical subtleties, contrived for the support of the doctrines of the corrupted Christianity of that age by a body of Divines-some of extraordinary powers of discrimination and argument, strengthened in the long meditation of their cloister by the extinction of every other talent and the exclusion of every other pursuit-to whom their age and their condition denied the means of studying polite letters, of observing nature, or knowing mankind. Thus driven back as it were upon themselves-cut off from all the materials

Two literary phenomena of a singular nature have very recently been exhibited in India. The first is a Hindu Deist. Rammohun Roy, a Bramin, has published a small work, in the present year, at Calcutta, entitled "An Abridgment of the Vedant, or Resolution of all the Veds; the most celebrated work of Braminical theology; establishing the unity of the Supreme Being, and that he alone is the object of worship." It contains a collection of very remarkable texts from the Vedas in which the principles of Natural Religion are delivered, not without diguity; and which treat all worship to inferior beings, together with the observance of rites and seasons, and the distinctions of food, as the aids of an imperfect religion, which may be altogether disregarded by those who have attained to the knowledge and love of the true God. His contempo raries and his ancestors he considers as idolaters, notwithstanding the excuse of an allegorical theology which some Europeans have made for them. This Socinian Bramin is made to con plain, with feeling, in the English version, of the obloquy which he has incurred among his countrymen by the purity of his faith. He alludes nowhere to any other system of religion; and passes over, in absolute silence, the labours, and indeed the existence, of the Missionaries. The second is a work about to be published at Bombay by MULLA FEROUZ, a Parsee priest, and probably the first of that sect, for many ages, who has made any proficiency in the general literature of the East. He proposes to publish the "Dusateer," with an English translation and notes,- a singular and somewhat mysterious book, of which he tells us that no copy is known to exist but that in his possession." It is said to be the source from whence the Dabistan (Edin. Rev. vol. xxvi. p. 288.) is borrowed. The original is said to be in a language or dialect of which there is no other specimen; and so ancient, that an old Persian version which accompanies it, professes to have been made before the conquest of Persia by the Mahometans. It is quoted by several writers in comparatively modern times; and the Persian version is often cited as an authority by Persian dictionaries of the seventeenth century. Its pretensions, therefore, as a mere monument of language, are very high, and cannot fail to attract the curiosity of all Orientalists to this re-appearance of the followers of Zoroaster in the literary world.

on which the mind can operate-and doomed to employ all their powers in the defence of what they must never presume to examine, the condition of these men seemed without one advantage; unless it should be thought such, that it cultivated to the highest degree of subtlety the logical talents of acute disputants, and rendered them on their own ground invincible Polemics. Till the thirteenth century, their logic was the mere slave of their theology. The labour of the schools was employed only to rivet the fetters of reason. But the effect of the wretched and prohibited versions of Arabic translations of Aristotle, then for the first time introduced into the West, soon proved that it is impossible in any way to excite the activity of the human faculties without ultimately promoting the independence of reason. This pretended Aristotelianism was as much resisted at that period by persecution, as it was supported by the same means about three centuries later. The schoolmen were the innovators and reformers of the thirteenth century. As soon as they conquered the prohibitions, and quoted liberally the real or supposed opinions of Aristotle, Philosophy began to assert her independence, to blend her authorities with those of Theology, and insensibly to claim a sphere of her own, within which her jurisdiction was exclusive. A division of the authority to which they were subject, was the first step towards emancipation. The most conspicuous schoolman of this second period was Aquinas,* whose Secunda Secundæ continued for three hundred years to be the ethical code of Christendom. No work of a private man, probably, ever had so many commentators as this once famous treatise. Suarez, the last celebrated person among them, was a contemporary of Lord Bacon. The first reformers of learning distinguish it by honourable commendations from the other productions of the schools. Erasmus considered Aquinas as superior in genius to any man since his time; and Vives owns him to be the soundest writer among the schoolmen. However the Secunda might be disgraced by being the manual of Henry VIII., it is a matter of some interest to see the book which was the first moral instructor of Sir Thomas More. Fontenelle, a Cartesian, exempt from any prejudice in favour of a schoolman or a saint, says, that"in another age, Aquinas might have become a Descartes." To his moral treatise Leibnitz chiefly alludes, in the just observation frequently repeated by him, that "there was gold in the impure mass of Scholastic philosophy, and that Grotius had discovered it." The same great philosopher, indeed, often confessed his own obligations to the schoolmen, and the value of some part of their works, at the moment when such an avowal required most courage-when their authority had been just entirely abolished, and before the dread of its restoration was extinguished. Under the shelter of his authority, we may venture to own, that we have read this work in the nineteenth century with pleasure and advantage. Whatever may be the thought of his theological morals, it is certain, that no moralist has stated the nature and grounds of all the common duties of mankind with more fulness and perspicuity. The number and refinement

The historians of Italian literature have latterly thought that Aquinas, of a noble family in that part of Lower Italy which had never utterly relinquished its ancient connexion with Greece, and educated at the famous monastery of Monte Cassine, where some sparks of ancient literature were kept alive in the darkest times, was not without some tincture of Grecian learning. Whether there be any grounds for a like opinion concerning Roger Bacon, we shall be unable to determine, ull the Oxford press shall present us with a complete edition of the works of that great ornament of the University; who ought not to be mentioned, in any sketch of the scholastic age in which he appeared, as a stranger; being, in truth, a philosopher of the seventeenth century, formed, by some unaccountable combination of causes, in the schools of the thirteenth.

of the practical observations in this work, which have been repeated by modern philosophers, have sometimes given rise to suspicion of plagiarism against these last, instead of the much more reasonable inference, that the superior understanding of this ingenious recluse had anticipated remarks, which, without any knowledge of his writings, were naturally presented to succeeding writers by their observation of human life in a more civilised age. To find the exact agreement of such a work as that of Aquinas with the moral precepts of our own age, has some tendency to heighten our reverence for the rule of life which thus preserves its unchangeable simplicity, amidst the fluctuations of opinion, under the most unlike and repugnant modes of thinking, and in periods of the most singular, or, if it so pleases the reader, of the most perverted speculation,

Those who are accustomed to remark the faint and distant indications of the progress of the human mind, will observe that, in the twelfth century, the first revolt against the tyranny of Rome broke out in France; that Aquinas and Dante flourished at the same time in the same country; that when in the next age, polite literature had begun to drive the School Philosophy over the Alps, and when it seemed to have established its chief seat in England, the ferment excited by the subtleties of Scotus, and by the bold novelties of Occam, were almost contemporary with Chaucer, and seemed to have called forth Wickliffe.

Scotus is probably the extreme point which verbal subtlety can reach. The genius of the scholastic system could advance no farther. William of Ockham (in Surrey), born about the beginning of the fourteenth century, the circumstances of whose life are obscure, and whose writings it is extremely difficult to procure, is generally known as the reviver of the Nominalists, justly distinguished above other schoolmen by Mr. Stewart and by Leibnitz; but he was, in truth, also the restorer of an independent philosophy in the middle age. He defended the rights of the Civil Magistrate against the usurpations of the Church, and gave an example of free inquiry, in speculations which had become inaccessible to Reason by their alliance with the Papal Theology. The century which passed between his death and the revival of letters was a period of active progress towards mental independence. His works against the Papal authority are preserved in collections which are to be found in all great libraries. They are represented by Selden as " the best that had been written in former ages on the Ecclesiastical Power;" and the testimony of Seldon has peculiar weight on behalf of a Popish schoolman. But those writings on which his great reputation in his own age was founded, are now very rare. Brucker, who appears to have seen none of them, contents himself with a few passages of modern writers, in commendation or censure of Occam: but a very clear and satisfactory account of them, supported by numerous extracts, is contained in Tenneman's History of Philosophy, Vol. viii. part 2., published at Leipsic in 1811.

This memorable English philosopher retained many opinions which he had imbibed from Scotus, and, among others, that justly obnoxious position which makes the distinction of Right from Wrong depend on the Will of God. But he is the first, from the downfal of ancient philosophy, who had the boldness, in express words, to reject human authority, even that of his master:-" I do not support this opinion because he lays it down, but because I think it true; and therefore, if he has elsewhere maintained the