the principles or original sources of all teaching, whether scientific or practical. It seems, then, sufficiently clear that Aristotle allotted to man a faculty which intuitively perceived the principles of science and of action, and that although he did not think man became conscious of these without those phantasmata which are derived from the senses, he did not therefore make the latter the creative source of human knowledge: the light of the intellect must shine on them before they had any distinguishable colour.

§. 44. We may imagine Aristotle, apiso-réλns, as a little boy amusing himself with pulling his own name to pieces, and contemplating its component parts. When we have done so, we shall have got before us a summary view of his whole philosophy, which was occupied, as we see from one of the most magnificent productions of his or any classical author, the first Book of the de Part. Anim., in investigating the end for which things were made. Peace to him is the end of war, and quiet contemplation of laborious energy. Death, as we have seen, in his view, divests a mortal of those pavτáoμara, which enable it to busy itself with human sensations and human affairs; the higher faculty, the intellect, he thought enduring and divine. Hence he believed a contemplative life of some sort, including, probably, strong emotions of the will," to be man's prime happiness. But "such a life", he says, p. 1177, b. 26, "is more excellent than accords with man; it is not so far as he is man that he will thus live, but so far as something divine is in him; and the more excellent this part is of the composite being man, the more excellent is its energy, as compared with that of any other virtue. If then, as compared with man, intellect be something divine, then is life, according to this intellect, a divine, compared with human, life. Not, therefore, according to the advice of those who would have a human being entertain human thoughts, and a mortal mortal ones, should we act; but as far as possible we should make him immortal, and do all things with a view to living up to that which in him is most excellent".

§. 45. The puzzle which the view of man we have been discussing suggests is, how, on Aristotle's principles, a composite being can have the same end as a vous or non-composite being;

33 This was Scotus's view of the matter (see in Sent. L., p. 137; Tataret., iii., p. 23; Krisper, ii, p. 366), and he is justified in it by the way in which Aristotle considers ὀρεκτικός νους and ὄρεξις διανοητικὴ to be synonyms (V. Eth. N., vi. 2, de Ar., iii., fin., p. 433, a. 25, with the notes of Zell and Trendelenburg. And contemplation is to choose its own kind of life (see presently), and so involves an act of the will. Cf. 406, b. 24, φαίνεται κινεῖν ἡ ψυχή τὸ ζῷον διά προαιρέσεως

τινός.

for if the end of man ought to be human happiness, it is plain that the least addition will make a more eligible happiness (E. N., p. 1097, b. 16, p. 1172, b. 27). Now if to think without dependence on phantasmata be happiness, then to be able to think so, and also with dependence, would be greater happiness. And it would be manifest unfairness to say that phantasmata essentially, and in their own nature, hinder rather than further thought; it is not they, but our present imperfect command over them, which make them a hindrance to human thought. If a human agent, without phantasia, could elicit an intensity of thought equal to a hundred, then the chances are, that with it the intensity would become (say) a hundred and one; because the whole make of his nature is framed with a view to his so thinking. Aristotle, however, with characteristic cautiousness, does not lay down in a positive and dogmatic tone, that the end of a composite being is the same as that of a non-composite being, if the words marked in italics in the following quotation from the same chapter, are any guide to his feeling on the subject. "Each one would seem to be this (i.e. the most excellent part of him), if that which determines his nature be also his better part. However, it would be absurd if any one chose not his own kind of life, but that of some other being; and what we have said before will be suitable to say on this occasion too, that that which is proper to each being by nature is to each the best and the most enjoyable. Hence, life according to the intellect is so to man, if this be what man mostly is". There are other passages where the same cautions step and uáλisa make their appearance on the same subject (as, e.g., p. 407, b. 4, 1166, a. 22), but it is sufficiently clear from this, that man, as a ov pavraσTikóv ought to have an end proper to him, if nature makes nothing in vain. Although, therefore, he adopted the beautifully poetical Greek name for the butterfly, ux, it does not at all serve as a symbol to show that he had no misgivings about man's final destiny, or was absolutely certain that it consisted solely in a contemplation merely intellectual, though involving choice and acts of the will.

§. 46. A consciousness more or less vague, then, that man, who thinks by the aid of phantasmata, is a radically and essentially different being from a vous or angel, will be found to haunt our great philosopher, whether he contemplates the soul as entering upon its race, or as struggling with life, or as a separate soul with its own reminiscences of friends and relatives left behind. And now we have gone as far as we are entitled to do either by Aristotle's statements or by the objects of the ATLANTIS. Philosophy may lead us to the ocean edge of eternity; but, to sink in

that ocean the chain which is to bring us messages from the other world, is a task which we must hand over to the hardy and enterprising grasp of scientific theology."

ART. III. Dr. Seyffarth and the Atlantis on Egyptology. By P. LE PAGE RENOUF.

Eines Mannes Rede

Ist keines Mannes Rede;

Man soll sie billig hören Beide.

HE first volume of the Transactions of the Academy of Science of St. Louis, contains a paper by Dr. Seyffarth, in which that learned writer reflects so severely on the manner in which his system of hieroglyphic decipherment and interpretation was treated in the third number of the ATLANTIS, that I feel bound, in justice both to the conductors of that journal and to myself, to say, at least, a few words in vindication of the article, for which I am responsible.

That the arguments advanced in my article against Dr. Seyffarth's system are, at least, extremely plausible, seems to be admitted by himself.

"In general", he says, "I must acknowledge that the said article is written so ingeniously, skilfully, and winningly, that scarcely any one reader, except the author and myself, would suspect its deceptiveness, and that, had I not a conscience, I should wish to be able to write such articles. As, however", he continues, “my motto is suum cuique-or truth for friends and enemies-I can but admire the eminent superiority of the Rev.

34 The author must confess his sheer ignorance of the disputes on phantasma, which (a friend tells him) existed between the Jesuit and Carmelite schools of philosophy. He trusts, therefore, that no more learned reader will think him a partizan. A moderate knowledge of Aristotle in the Greek may have made him seem so unwittingly, as the Greek does not always present the same text as the Latin of St. Thomas and others, who were, he believes, the main authorities for school philosophers.

1 P. 527–569. A remarkable Papyrus scroll, written in the Hieratic character, about 1050 B.C., illustrated by G. Seyfarth, A.M., Ph.D., D.D., Prof. in the Concordia College, St. Louis, Mo. The first twelve pages are illustrative of Egyptian texts, the rest of the paper is headed "Champollion and Renouf”.

2 This title is a gratuitous gift of Dr. Seyffarth, to whose imagination I am indebted for the only ordination I ever received. I beg to call his attention to this undeniable instance of the rashness of his conclusions. He really knows nothing about me except through one or two articles, which furnish no data from which he could know for certain even to what sex I belong. Miss Fanny Corbaux is a well known Egyptologist, and anything she pleased to write upon hieroglyphics would, I am sure, be thankfully received by the ATLANTIS. And even if it were true (as it is not) that articles in this journal

P. Renouf of Dublin. On the other hand, I cannot conceal that his treatise is so full of contradictions, misrepresentations, insinuations, and calumnies, on every page, that a small volume would not suffice to refute them all".

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I will not return Dr. Seyffarth's compliment. I am convinced that he is utterly incapable of anything like wilful misrepresentation or deliberate calumny, though, if his language were measured by the rule which he applies to those who differ from him, nothing would be easier than to turn against him such passages as the following, of the like of which his writings are full. Wresting another's words from their true sense is equivalent to lying". I wonder that the reverend gentleman did not blush to write down such palpable calumnies". For almost all his passionate assertions relative to those whom he considers his adversaries are utterly at variance with strict truth; they attack not only the intellectual but the moral character of men quite as honourable as himself; they are in fact calumnies of the most odious kind, and often expressed in language which in certain parts of the civilized world would undoubtedly bring down corporal chastisement upon its author. But it is not to any moral perversity that we must attribute the incredible misrepresentations of fact so common in Dr. Seyffarth's attacks upon all Egyptologists since the time of Champollion, but to a peculiar inaccuracy of mind, in consequence of which he misses the exact meaning of an author, and hits upon something essentially different, though more or less resembling it in sound or sense. Even when he quotes the very words of an author, we cannot be sure that we have the author's meaning, as the words quoted may have been written in a totally different context from that put before us, and may refer to persons or things utterly different from those imagined by Dr. Seyffarth.

I am represented, for instance, to my great astonishment and disgust, as describing Mr. George Long, late Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, as "a person ignorant of mathematics". The passage in which this impertinent assertion is supposed to be made is as follows:

"A most learned and accomplished scholar, Mr. George Long, has declared that if the hieroglyphic mode of writing be a complex system, the same text, the same phrase, and, perhaps, the same word, containing phonetic, symbolical, and figurative

were written solely by professors of the Catholic University, why should those professors necessarily be clerical? Are they at Louvain, Munich, Vienna, or Rome? And has Dr. Seyffarth never heard of the illustrious names of Novella d'Andrea and Laura Bassi, both of whom taught at Bologna, the latter within the memory of persons still living?

elements, no man in his senses will ever trouble himself with deciphering an hieroglyphic text. A person ignorant of mathematics might with equal plausibility speak of the absurdity of trying to solve an equation involving three unknown quantities. Hieroglyphic writings are deciphered, as equations are solved, by the observation of fixed rules".

According to the exegetical principle by which Dr. Seyffarth appears to have interpreted these words, it would seem that when a parity or analogy of reasoning is asserted as existing between two arguments or objections, an identity is also asserted with reference to the persons using them; so that if, in arguing with a person holding absolutist views in politics, I were to say, “A democrat might with equal plausibility maintain so and so", this would imply that the absolutist is a democrat.

One or two more comparisons between Dr. Seyffarth's quotations from my articles and the original text, will show how strangely he misinterprets what he reads:

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6

Look", says he, "what did . . . Mr. Renouf do? He assures his readers I had attributed to each character the principal consonants-that is only half a dozen sounds', and that with my 'key' it would be possible to read Irish melodies' in any hierogly phic text whatever, although he knew my key perfectly well. And why did he so? Probably he acted in accordance with the maxim, the end justifies the means".

6

Any unprejudiced person who will refer to that part of my article which Dr. Seyffarth quotes in this passage, will see at once that Dr. Seyffarth is not at all mentioned in it, and I have, in fact, never asserted that he attributed the principal consonants' to each hieroglyph'. My argument in the place referred to, as far at least as I understand it myself, is as follows:-Dr. Seyffarth's test of a true key of hieroglyphic decipherment (namely, the possibility by means of it of reading and grammatically translating entire texts), is an unsafe and fallacious test, because it would be satisfied by a "key", which everybody (Dr. Seyffarth included) would allow to be a false and absurd one. "It is easy enough", I said, "to invent a key which will enable us to explain not only hieroglyphic, but cuneiform, and every other kind of writing. We have only to attribute to each character the values of the principal consonants, that is, only about half a dozen sounds; and with this key it is not difficult to make out the Ten Commandments, the Psalms of David, or the Irish

3 ATLANTIS, NO. IV., p. 342. Dr. Seyffarth (p. 542) copies my quotation from Mr. Long, and adds: "It is true ...[Mr.] Renouf cites this very same sentence, but adds that the sober Mr. Long is a person ignorant of mathematics'". • Trans. of Acad. of St. Louis, Vol. I., p. 551.