SOME will have it, that all philosophy is vain; and that the time bestowed upon it, in our colleges and elsewhere, is only wasted, or worse than wasted, in the pursuit of a phantom that can never be reached, while it leads us away continually from the proper use of life. What men need in this world, we are told, is not speculation, but an active apprehension of the living realities with which they are immediately surrounded, and the proper practical use of these for the ends of their own existence. The world is a fact, broadly and palpably spread out before our senses; and our life is a fact, which we are required to turn to right account, by making the best of it for ourselves and others, in the circumstances in which we may happen to be placed. Why, then, should we occupy ourselves with things that lie wholly beyond the sphere of our actual existence, and that can only serve to disqualify us for understanding and using the world as it is? The sense of the world is sufficiently clear of itself for such as are disposed to take things just as they are, without troubling their heads about what they are pleased to call its inward spiritual constitution and design. We have had ample experiment besides of the vanity of philosophy, in the past history of its own achievements. The world has been philosophizing since the days of Pythagoras at least, and from a still earlier date, and yet to what has it come in the end? Has its philosophy made it any wiser or better? Has it accomplished any solid gain whatever for the human race? Is the world improved in any respect by the long exploded systems of Greece, by the profound lucubrations of the schoolmen in the middle ages, or by the vast upheavings of thought which have had place since the days of Immanuel Kant, in the modern metaphysics of Germany? Is it not, in fact, a history of contradictions and confusions, from beginning to end-one

system continually surmounting another, only to be as certainly overwhelmed after the same fashion, in its turn? It will be time enough to challenge our respect for philosophy, when philosophy shall have come to some proper understanding, in the first place, of her own mind and meaning. When she shall have become once mistress of herself--a house no longer divided against itself, the very cavern of Eolus where all pent-up minds are struggling perpetually in fierce conflict-it will be time enough to think of proclaiming her mistress of the world. Till then, let her be remanded to her proper dwelling place in the clouds, the land of far-off shadows and dreams. The world has too much serious business on hand, to be interrupted by her pretensions, and may reasonably say, in the language of Nehemiah to Sanballat and Geshem the Arabian of old: "I am doing a great work, so that I cannot come down; why should the work cease, whilst I leave it and come down to you?"

All this is very comfortable doctrine, of course, for those who have no disposition and not much power, possibly, to think for themselves, while they have just as little wish or will to be bound by the thinking of others. Agrarianism, indeed, we may call it, of the most truly democratic order; for is it not something more to level thus the aristocracy of mind, than it is to bring down simply the aristocracy of birth or fortune? Is it not a species of self-exaltation, particularly soothing to the sense we commonly have of our own importance, to be able in this way to compare ourselves so favorably with what has generally been counted the highest order of the world's intellect, and the true nobility of its life? The man who can say of all philosophy, It is mere wind, must needs. feel himself in this respect somewhat superior to the great minds which, in different ages, have counted it worthy of their attention and study. It is much, surely,

for any one to have the thought clearly present in his own consciousness: "Pythagoras was a fool, Plato was a fool, Aristotle was a fool; all the old Greek philosophers were fools; the seraphic, irrefragable doctors of the school divinity, Thomas Aquinas, Bonaventura, Duns Scotus, the whole of them together, were fools; and the same character belongs most eminently to the modern German thinkers, Kant, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, and all who think it worth while to waste any time upon their speculations: but I am wise; for I have sense enough to know that all philosophy is nonsense, and that the less the world is troubled with it the better. My life is more rational, and likely to be of far more account at last, than theirs." This, we say, is comfortable; and it is not much wonder, perhaps, that philosophy should be in bad credit with so many persons, when so fair a premium in this way is made to rest on unthinking ignorance and sloth.

And then, the case becomes still worse, of course, when the prejudice of religion comes in, as it is always ready to do, in favor of the same conclusion. It is bad enough, we are told, that philosophy should pretend to interfere with the actual world, in its common life, abstracting men's minds from its practical realities, and amusing them with its own theoretic dreams; but when the evil is made to reach over, in the same form, to the sphere of religion and faith, it is something still more difficult to be endured. And is there not in fact an original, necessary opposition between revelation and philosophy? Is not faith the simple contrary of speculation? Is it not written, "Let no man spoil you through philosophy;" plainly implying that we should have nothing to do with it, in the business of Christianity? And is not the history of the church from the beginning full of instruction and warning, in the same direction? Have not all corruptions and heresies sprung from philosophy, undertaking to rule and set aside the simple doctrine of God's word? Witness the flood of Gnostic speculations in the second century; the subsequent errors of Origen and his school; the scholastic subtleties of the Aristotelian theology, at a still later period; and above all, the rapantheistic systems, to which the

modern German philosophy has given birth. Philosophy and infidelity are found to have, in all ages, a close inward affinity for each other. The first may be considered the elder sister, if not in fact the proper natural mother of the second. That state of the church accordingly is to be accounted the most prosperous, in which religion is as little as possible the subject of speculation; and the man who meddles least with the contents of his faith, in the way of inward thought and reflection, is likely to show himself the best Christian, and make his way most successfully to heaven.

But now, in opposition to all such popular cant,—that can hardly be said for the most part to understand its own meaning,it is at once an ample reply to say, that philosophy belongs to the very constitution of our life, and cannot be expelled from it therefore without the greatest violence and wrong. For what is it at last, more or less than the endeavor to know ourselves and the world, and, the form in which, at any given time, this knowledge reflects itself in our consciousness? And can it be a question at all, whether it be proper and right for us to seek the knowledge of ourselves in this way? It lies in the idea of humanity itself, that it should comprehend within itself such a mode of existence, just as it necessarily includes also the life of art or the law of social, or political organization. The question whether philosophy is to be tolerated and approved, is precisely like the question whether we should approve and tolerate government or art. These are all so many several spheres only of our human existence itself, which are necessary to make it true and complete, and which cannot be sundered from it, without overthrowing, at the same time, its essential constitution. It is not by any arbitrary option or will of ours, that they come to have the right of being comprehended in the organic structure of the world; their right is as old as the world itself, and must stand as long as man and nature shall be found to endure. If any number of men, for instance, in vast world-convention assembled, should pretend to sit in judgment on the right and title of the fine arts, music, sculpture, poetry and the rest, to retain their place in the world, and at last

proceed in form to legislate them out of it, as useless, fantastic, and injurious to religion; to what would such legislation amount in the end, more than to expose the impotence and folly of the congress from which it might spring? The fine arts might say to such a convention: "What have we to do with thee, vain, wretched apparition of an hour! Is the nature of man to be thus made or unmade, at thy puny pleasure? Our authority is broader, and deeper, and far more ancient than thine." And can it be any more reasonable, I would ask, to think of legislating philosophy out of the world or out of the church, in any similar way? Philosophy is no subject for human arbitrament and legislation, in such magisterial form. The question of its being tolerated and allowed, is not just like the question whether we shall have, or not, a tariff or a national bank. It asks no permission of ours, to exercise its appointed functions in the vast world-process of man's history; it has exercised them through all ages thus far, and it will continue to exercise them, no doubt, to the end of time, in virtue of its own indefeasible right to be comprehended in this process, as an original necessary part of its constitution.

Philosophy is the form, simply, in which all Science is required at last to become complete. It is not, as sometimes supposed, one among the sciences only, in the way in which this may be said of geography for instance, or chemistry, or mathematics; it is emphatically the science of science itself the form in which science comes to master its own nature, in the way of conscious self-apprehension and self-possession. It belongs to the very conception of knowledge, that however distributed into manifold departments and spheres, it should nevertheless be at the last the power of a single universal life. All science is organic, and falls back finally upon the unity of self-consciousness as its centre and ground. This is, however, only to say that it comes to its true general end in the form of philosophy, which is for this very reason the mistress and mother of all sound knowledge in every other view. What can be more rrational, then, and absurd, than to cry out gainst philosophy as something unproitable and vain? It were just as reason

able surely to cry out against science in any of its subordinate departments; as some, indeed, most consistent in their fanaticism, have at times pretended to do, in blind homage to a life of sense, or in the service, possibly, of a blind religion. All science has its chaotic disorders and revolutions, its sources of danger and its liabilities to corruption and abuse. But what then? Must we cease to think and inquire, in order that we may become truly wise? Shall we extinguish the torch of knowledge, that we may have power in the dark to fancy ourselves secure from harm? To do so were only to commit violent wrong upon our human nature itself. Man was made for science; he needs it, not as a means simply to something else, but as a constituent, we may say, in the substance of his own being. But his relation to science, in this view, is his relation at the same time to philosophy; for, as we have just seen, science can have no reality, except as it includes in itself a reference at least to philosophy, as that in which alone it can become complete. Man then is formed for philosophy, as truly as he is formed for science; and if we did but consider it properly, we should see and feel that to undervalue and despise the first, is as little rational as it is to undervalue and despise the second. Philosophy is not a factitious interest, artificially and arbitrarily associated with our life, which we may retain or put away from us altogether at our own pleasure; it is the perfection of our intelligence itself, the necessary summit of self-consciousness, towards which all the lines of knowledge struggle from the start, and in which only they are made to reach at last their ultimate and full sense.

What has now been said, does not imply of course that all men are called to be philosophers, and to exercise the functions of philosophy on their own account. When we say of art, that it forms an original constituent sphere of our general human life, we do not mean certainly that every individual is required to be a painter, or musician, or poet, or all of these together, in order that he may fulfil his proper destiny in the world. Non omnia possumus omnes ; the life of the world is something far more comprehensive and profound than the life of any one man, or any ten thousand men

in spite of all discouragement and seem

arate parts of which the whole is composed. The perfection of the individual does not consist in his being all that the general idea of human life requires, but in this, that he shall truly fill his own place in an organism, which is complete for the purposes that belong to it as a whole. In this sense we say, that art is a necessary constituent of humanity, though few comparatively may be fitted as organs to exercise the functions for which it calls: these functions belong to the organic constitution of our life, as a whole, and for the use of the whole; and where they are not acknowledged or fulfilled, the life itself must be regarded as, to the same extent, mutilated and shorn of its true sense. So in the case before us. Science and philosophy are not necessary for all men, individually and separately taken; but they are necessary at all times to Man as an organic whole. The great fact of humanity, the process of the world's life, cannot go forward at all without their presence. It may be enough for the mass of men perhaps to be borne along by the spirit of the age to which they belong, without any clear insight into its constitution and course; but this is not enough for the age itself. Through organs proper for the purpose, it ought to come if possible to a clear understanding of its own spirit and will, so as to be self-conscious and not blind. As we have already said, however, this self-consciousness is philosophy; and towards it at least all human life must continually struggle, so far as it is vigorous and sound. Nay, a bad life must rest in some consciousness too, often, to be sure, very dark, of its own meaning and tendency; and so far this also will have its philosophy. Philosophy and life, in fact, whether men consider it or not, go ever hand in hand together.

It is perfectly ridiculous, therefore, to think or speak of the world as having power to accomplish its history without philosophy; as much so, as though we should dream that society might exist without government. It would be indeed something most strange and unaccountable, that the human mind should have shown such an inveterate propensity through all ages to speculate in this way,

reason for it other than its own vagrant curiosity or lawless self-will. The world has never been without its philosophy, as far back as we find it exhibiting any signs whatever of a moral or intellectual life. Christianity wrought no change in it, with regard to this point. Many in modern times have charged the early Church with unfaithfulness to her Master, in permitting the great truths of the Gospel to become a subject of school speculation; as though it might have been possible to have handed them down as mere traditional articles of faith, without their being made to enter thus, with new informing power, into the actual thinking of the world as well as into its actual life. And yet is not the thinking of the world, at all times, inseparably identified with its life; or rather, is it not the very soul through which this itself lives, the central stream that carries all forward in its own direction? If Christianity were to be something more than a religion of blind mechanical tradition; if it should at all make good its claim to be the absolute truth of the world, the eternal consummation of humanity itself; it must introduce itself into the actual process of the world's history as it stood, so as to fulfil and not destroy the original sense of it, in all its complicated parts. We might as well ask, that it should not meddle with the sphere of politics, as that it should abjure all interest in philosophy. The early Church soon found herself compelled to speculate. It was part of her mission in the world, to regenerate its intelligence and reason. And so in all periods since, we find philosophy closely interwoven with the activity' of the church under other forms, and refusing to part with its authority for the human mind, so far as this can be said to have made any historical progress at all. The Reformers, in the sixteenth century, imagined at first, indeed, that their cause required its entire banishment from the territory of religion; but they were soon 1 compelled themselves to have recourse again to its aid; and in the end, the old order of things in this direction was fully established throughout the Protestant world.

How vain, in view of all this, to quarrel

1

with philosophy, as though it were an interest false and pernicious in its own nature. We might, with as much reason, quarrel with the waters of the Susquehannah, for making their way towards the sea. The world must think; would not be true to itself, if it ceased to think; and it is not possible that it should be thus actively intelligent, without moving at the same time in the channel of some philosophical system, that may represent more or less clearly the unity of its general life. It will follow, moreover, from this view of the necessary relation in which philosophy stands to the life of the world, that it is not so entirely without rule and method in its course, as is taken for granted by the wholesale objection we are now considering. If it form an original and essential part of man's constitution, it must have a history, comprehended in the general flow of human history as a whole. But history implies organic unity and progress. It is just the opposite of chaos. Šuch onward movement, exhibiting the present always as at once the birth of the past and the womb of the future, belongs to the very conception of humanity; as much so as it does also, that it should exist by resolution into a vast system of nations, families and individuals. Distribution in time, and distribution in space, are alike necessary, to represent the one vast, magnificent fact, through which the idea of man is made real. To be human, then, is to be at the same time historical, in the sense here explained. If we should say that the world is not bound together by the force of a common life, at any given time, but is made up of nations and men confusedly thrown into one mass in an outward and mechanical way; it would not be a greater wrong to our nature than it is made to suffer, when this life is not apprehended as a continuous process also, always different and yet always the same, extending perpetually from one generation over to another. In fact, the two conceptions cannot be held asunder. There is no alternative here between cosmos and chaos. To be organic at all, the world must be historical; and its history must show itself especially in the progressive development of humanity, as a whole, towards its appointed end. This we might seem justified to assume, as a postulate of

religion as well as reason; since in no other view can we conceive of the world as carrying in itself a divine sense and meaning, so as to be the mirror truly of an idea in the mind of God. God is not the author of confusion, either in nature or history. He upholds and rules the world by plan; and this plan takes hold of the end from the beginning, bearing all life steadily forward as a process in its own service. In this way, every sphere of our general human existence comes to its proper evolution only in the form of history; and so we should expect to find it pre-eminently in the case of philosophy, representing, as this does, the inmost consciousness of the race itself from age to age. The idea of an absolutely stationary philosophy, mechanically at hand as something ripe and done, for the use of the world through all time, is an absurd contradiction. How could it then represent the world's life, in its ever-flowing actual form? Change and revolution here are not at once contradiction and confusion. May they not be but the necessary action of history itself, as it forces its way onward continually from one stage of thought and life to another? For this process, it should be remembered, is not by uniform movement, in the same direction and under the same character. goes by stadia or eras; not unlike those great world-cycles which geologists undertake to describe in the primitive formation of the earth, only compressed into much narrower dimensions. Each period has, of course, its own history, including the rise and decline again of its particular life, and the breaking up of its whole constitution finally, to make room for a new spiritual organization; and all this must necessarily be attended with some show of chaotic confusion, to the view, at least, of the superficial thinker; while it is still possible that the whole may be, notwithstanding, in obedience throughout to the same great law of development and progress.

It

Such an onward movement is found to characterize in fact the course of human thought, as it may be traced from its cradle in the ancient Oriental world, down to the present time. Philosophy has its own history, capable of being studied and understood, like the history of any other sphere of human life. This may be so dark still indeed as to leave room, at many points,