know, and to love? The author who leaves all the great moral, religious, social, and political questions by the way, and passes over untouched all that concerns us in the daily conduct of life, is infinitely removed, in our judgment, from producing a work of practical utility, and from the right to call himself a philosopher, or his speculations philosophy.

To have gone further, to have left the abstract regions to which he for the most part confines himself, and to have entered upon the great concrete questions of actual life, would, no doubt, have compelled Dr. Schmucker to touch upon debateable ground, perhaps to stir up long and bitter controversy. It would very likely have involved him in the party and sectarian conflicts of the day, and have effectually excluded his book from colleges and academies. But what then? What is the use of books or of essays that touch no practical question, that throw, or attempt to throw, light on no doubtful or still unsettled point of moral, religious, social, or political faith? No man who speaks freely, boldly, and honestly, on questions which really concern us in the conduct of life, in which men do really take an interest, questions on which it is worth one's while to speak at all, but must run athwart somebody's convictions or prejudices; but must stir up somebody's angry feeling; because there will always be somebody indicted by what he says. He must necessarily tread on somebody's corns. But what then? This is the risk every man who is really in earnest to spread truth, and ameliorate the moral, intellectual or physical condition of his race, must

run.

It is only at this price, that he purchases the opportunity to labor for human progress. Whoso counts this price too high, or feels unwilling or unable to pay it,-let him hold his peace. His silence will hardly prove to be a public calamity.

All faith, if genuine, if deep, if earnest, if living, is, say what we will to the contrary, exclusive and intolerant. Nothing is so exclusive and intolerant as truth, which has no patience with error, but excludes the semblance even of falsehood. This excessive liberality, about which some men take it into their heads to talk, which regards all opinions with equal respect, and

alike proper to be inculcated, is not liberality but indifferency, and more to be dreaded in Society, in Church or State, than the most narrow-minded bigotry, or the most ranting fanaticism. There is no sound morality nor practical wisdom in the remark, "I care not what a man's opinions are, if his conduct be good." Just as if a man's opinions were not a part of his conduct, and usually the most important part of it. The events of history are nothing but so many experiments, successful or unsuccessful, of the race to embody its opinions, to realize its faith. Men's beliefs are powers, and the only earthly powers of which the wise man stands in awe. A simple geographical opinion entering and germinating in the breast of a bold mariner, discovers a new continent, and changes the direction of the whole industrial activity of the race. A simple belief, that we should obey God, rather than kings, parliaments, and prelates, taking possession of a few honest, earnest-minded men in the western and midland counties of England, sends them on board the Mayflower, lands them one cold December's day on our bleak and rock-bound coast, and makes them the instruments of laying the foundation of a free republic, of opening a new school of social and political science for the world, and of demonstrating what man is and may be, when and where he has free scope to be what his Creator designed him to be. Faith is everything. There is not a single act of ordinary and every-day life, that could be done without faith on the part of the actor. Every honest man does and cannot but hold his own faith to be the true faith; and therefore does and cannot but hold every opposing faith to be false. To be as willing to see that opposing faith prevail, as to see his own prevail, would imply on his part, as much respect for falsehood as for truth; that in his estimation, falsehood is as good as truth, and worth as much to mankind. A man who is as willing to see falsehood as truth propagated, is no true man. He may be learned, polite, decorous, but God, truth, righteousness, have no greater enemy than he, on earth, or under the earth. Such are the men who are always in our way. They care for none of these things. They chill our hearts; they

damp our zeal; they weaken our hands. They belong to the race of Do-nothings. The advancement of mankind owes nothing to their exertions. Never out of their class does God raise up prophets, sages, heroes, and martyrs, by whose unwearied efforts, generous self-immolation, and unshrinking obedience to a high and living faith, the race is enabled to advance towards a higher and happier state. They are the lukewarm, the neither-cold-nor-hot, insipid and nauseating, whom God, in addressing the angel of the churches, declares he will "spew out of his mouth."

But happily for the cause of truth and righteousness, the bulk of mankind are sincere and earnest, and are strongly attached to their faith. Their opinions are to them serious matters, matters to be lived for, or if need be, died for. They do not and cannot hold it a matter of indifference to individual or social, to temporal or eternal wellbeing, what a man believes; and so long as this is the fact, no man will be able to put forth on practical questions, new, uncommon, or unpopular opinions, without stirring up controversy, without encountering serious opposition, and most likely not without calling down upon his head, many a shower of wrath and abuse. This result is inevitable, unless mankind be reduced to that state of perfect indifferency, in which the opinions one puts forth, whatever their character, can excite no interest, command no attention. But, once more, what then? If we are to refrain from discussing in our elementary works the great questions of practical life, which "come home to men's bosoms and business," through fear of this controversy, opposition, wrath, abuse, what will be the advantage of a free press? Nay, in such case, what will be the meaning of a free press? Public opinion would control it more effectually than the edicts of tyrants, backed by an armed police, fines, dungeons, and gibbets. A true man will never be rash; will never forget that his opinions are deeds, for which he is accountable to God and to society; but having done his best to ascertain the truth, fully assured of the purity and sincerity of his purpose, and having a word pressing upon his heart for utterance, he will go forth, modestly, reverently, and utter it,

fearlessly and honestly, without stopping for one moment to confer with flesh and blood. He knows that he speaks at his own peril; but he takes the responsibility, and asks not that it be less. He knows the penalty he must pay for daring to be true to his own convictions of duty; but he is willing and able to pay it. He who shrinks from it, has no reason to applaud himself for the manliness of his soul. He may be assured, that he is held in no high repute in the City of God, and is by no means chosen by Providence to be an instructor of his race. Were he to speak, it would be to tell us, that which can have no practical bearing on life, or the truth long since told and realized.

Admitting, then, that Dr. Schmucker could not have constructed a system of mental philosophy, in the full significance of the term, without touching on debateable ground, and giving rise to long and even bitter controversy, we are far from holding him excusable in sending us forth such a work as thisa work scrupulously avoiding the discussion of the only questions for the discussion of which philosophical works should be written or are needed.

Thus far we have objected to this work, on the ground that it is not a part of a general system of philosophy; that it is mere speculation on naked psychological abstractions, which have no real existence; that it leaves out of view all the great philosophical questions which relate to man's wants, rights, duties, and destiny; and, therefore, leaves out the only religious object for which a work on philosophy can be written. But we do not stop here. Passing over these grounds of objection, taking the work as psychclogy in the most restricted sense possible, we hold it defective and false, and were it likely to be introduced very extensively as a text-book in colleges and academies, we should hold it to be not only defective and false, but mischievous.

The very title-page creates a presumption against it. The author calls it "The Elements of a New System of Mental Philosophy." A new system of mental philosophy, if by system is meant anything more than the order and dress in which old doctrines are presented, can hardly be looked for.

Additions may be made to the old, but nothing radically new can be obtained. The human race is subjected to a law of continuity, which presides over all its development and growth, whether considered generically or individually. From this law human thought does not and cannot escape. The present was elaborated in, and evolved from the past. The future must be-so far as human effort is concerned-the elaboration and evolution of the present. The law of progress is that of continuous growth, which is in no case interrupted or disturbed, save as Providence aids it on, by granting, at such intervals as seems to it good, supernatural accessions of moral and intellectual strength. But these special grants, accessions, revelations, which God makes to us from time to time, as the conditions of our progress, do not break the law of continuity. They are all made in harmony with one and the same Divine Thought, of which human nature, as well as they, is an expression. They merely swell the tide of life; or as fine musical accompaniments blend in with the tones of the human voice, swell and enrich their melody, without being in ordinary cases distinguishable from them. Jesus does not build on the ruins of Moses: Christianity does not supplant Judaism; but generalizes and fulfils it. From the first to the last, the life of humanity is a continuous growth, not strictly speaking, by development, but by assimilation, accretion.

According to this law, all radicalism, that is to say, all destruction of what was fundamental in that which has preceded, or the creation of an order of life, religious, social, or philosophical, that is new in its fundamental elements, is necessarily condemned. What is, must be always our point of departure. This is the principle that must govern us in relation to the race at large, and also in relation to a particular nation or country. Each re former must connect his proposed reforms with the past of his own church, school, or nation; so that the continuity between its past and its future may be preserved. If he do not, he will labor to no end; he will fail in his projects, and deservedly fail. The American philosopher, then, must not attempt a new system of philosophy; but must seek to continue uninterruptedly, by

improving it, the philosophy the race has always embraced, and as modified by the faith and practice of his own nation. In other words, the American philosopher cannot transplant into his own country the philosophy of France or Germany, nor will it answer for him to seek to construct a philosophy for his countrymen from the French or German point of view. He must construct it from the English point of view, and continue English philosophy, as modified, as we may say, by Jonathan Edwards, our only American metaphysician, and by our peculiar civil, political, social, aud religious institutions. Our philosophy must be English philosophy Americanized, like the great mass of our population. We do not, then, want, as we cannot have, a new system of philosophy. Locke, Reid, and Jonathan Edwards, have laid the foundation for us, bave begun the work, which we are merely to continue.

But even if a new system of philosophy were needed, and could be looked for, we must assure Dr. Schmucker that he deceives himself if he thinks that he has furnished such a system. Saving his terminology, in some instances barbarous, and rarely felicitous, the distribution of the several parts, for the most part immethodical except in appearance, and now and then a statement no other philosopher would willingly hazard, we do not recollect a single portion of the work, either as to its thought, reasoning, or illustration, that can be called new. The author is rarely up with the Scottish school of Reid and Stewart, and is far below, as a mere psychologist, the Eclectic school of modern Germany and France. Even Upham's Philosophy, superficial and meagre as it unquestionably is, taken as a whole, is altogether superior to this, which throws no new light on a single metaphysical question, sets in a clearer point of view not a single fact of human nature, and adds nothing to our knowledge of the laws of the production or association of the psychological phenomena. If the author had spent less time in studying his own mind, and more in making himself acquainted with the views of such men as Plato, Aristotle, Bacon, Descartes, Locke, Leibnitz, Malebranche, Reid, and Kant, to say nothing of Schelling, Hegel, and Cousin, he would hardly

have ventured to call his crude notions a new system of mental philosophy. They can be new only to those who are not at all in the habit of reading on metaphysical subjects.

Dr. Schmucker not only tells us that his system is new, but that it is constructed on the basis of Consciousness and Common Sense. Has he any clear and definite notion of the sense in which he uses these terms, when he declares them the basis of his system? -or has he adopted them, without reflecting much on their import, from Dr. Reid, in whose philosophy they play so conspicuous a part? We have looked through his book without finding any clear or exact definition of them; and in any sense in which either is intelligible or acceptable to us, neither constitutes a basis of his sys

tem.

Common Sense, as the term is used by Dr. Reid, does not properly designate, as he supposed, a distinct and separate faculty of human nature, but a special degree of our general faculty of intelligence. Man by nature, in his very essence, is intelligent, capable of knowing, and intelligent to the requisite degree for seeing, perceiving, or knowing, in the three worlds of space, time, and eternity. The world which we call the world of eternity, is sometimes called the transcendental world, because its realities transcend those of time and space; and also, sometimes, the world of absolute, universal, immutable and necessary truth. The contents of this world, after Plato and the Platonists, we call IDEAS; Reid called them constituent elements of human nature, first principles of human belief; Aristotle and Kant term them categories of the reason, and in their view categories of the reason as a faculty of human nature. They are the first principles of all science, and of each of the sciences. They, however, do not, as some moderns seem to suppose, reside in the mind, but out of it, in what Plato and the Greeks call the Logos (Aoyos) and which we may call, with M. Cousin, "the world of Reason," of absolute, universal, and necessary Truth. But, though these ideas or first principles, do not subsist in the human mind, the human mind is constructed in accordance, and placed in intimate relation

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with them; so as to be always capable of perceiving them, not detached, not as mere abstractions, but so far as they enter into, and constitute the basis of the finite, particular, contingent, concrete objects of time and space, save in connexion with which we never recognize them. The power to perceive these ideas, or first principles of belief, is what Dr. Reid really understood by Common Sense; that is, not merely a sense common to all men, but a power in each man to perceive, to entertain, or to assume certain first principles, common and indispensable to every act of intellectual life.

The reality of this power cannot be questioned. Without it, as Dr. Reid has shown over and over again, man could have not only no firm basis for metaphysical science, no recognition of objects transcending time and space, but in point of fact no science at all; but would be incapable of a single act of cognition whatever. But this power, the reason (Vernunft) of Coleridge and the Germans, which they seek to distinguish from the understanding (Verstand), is not a distinct and separate faculty of human nature, but, as we have said, merely a special degree of the general faculty of intelligence. To know may indeed have various conditions and degrees, but, as M. Cousin has well remarked, it is always one and the same phenomenon, whatever its sphere or degree. I know always by virtue of one and the same faculty of intelligence, whether the objects of my knowledge be the contents of space, of time, or of eternity; that is, whether these objects be bodies, events, or ideas; or whether I know mediately through external bodily organs, or immediately by intuítion. Had Dr. Reid carried his analysis a little farther, he would have perceived that his "first principles " are objects of the mind, not laws of human belief; and he might then have escaped the error of calling Common Sense a distinct and separate faculty of human nature.

Does Dr. Schmucker understand by Common Sense this power of human nature to perceive ideas or objects which transcend the worlds of space and time? In this sense, it is the power to perceive substance in the cause, being in the phenomenon, the infinite in the finite, the universal in the par

ticular, the absolute in the relative, the necessary in the contingent, the permanent in the transient. But this power he denies from the beginning of his book to the end, and admits as objects of knowledge, of cognition, only the objects of space. His pretension then to have based his philosophy on Common Sense, according to Dr. Reid's use, or virtual use, of the term, is wholly unfounded. He goes right in the face and eyes of Common Sense.

The only other intelligible sense of the term, is the common or universal assent of mankind. We have no objections to using the term in this sense, and none to making it in this sense authoritative. We know in matters pertaining to politics, and morals, matters pertaining to the race, no high er authority, under divine revelation, than the common assent of mankind. But what is the exponent of this common assent? Whence shall we collect this universal assent of the race? Unquestionably from tradition. The universal assent of the race, is the universal tradition of the race, and the authority of the race is nothing else than the authority of tradition. Tradition taken in the true and large sense of the term, and so as to include not only what may be termed natural, but supernatural, or Providential tradition, in all that relates to politics, morals, and society generally, we recognize and hold to be authoritative. But we do not find Dr. Schmucker appealing to tradition; nay, he rejects it, in calling his system new, and in seeking, as he tells us was the case with him, to construct his system, not by consulting the philosophical monuments of the race, but by refusing for ten years to read any work on the subject, and by devoting himself solely to the study of his own mind. We must needs believe, then, that he deceives himself, when he thinks that he has made Common Sense a basis of his system.

The author's claims to having made Consciousness another of the bases of his system, we apprehend, in any sense acceptable even to himself, are no better founded. Consciousness is not, as Dr. Reid seems to have taught, a distinct and separate faculty of the human mind; nor is it a peculiar act of the mind, by which it not only knows, but takes note of the fact that it knows, as seems to be Dr. Schmucker's own

opinion. The precise fact of consciousness is not the mind taking cognizance of its own operations, but of itself, in its operations, as their subject, as the operator. We perceive always; for we are by nature and essence active and percipient; and nature, sensible and transcendental, is at all times around us, and streaming into us with its influences: but we are not always conscious; we are conscious only in those more vivid, more distinct perceptions, in which we comprehend in one view, by one simple act of the percipient agent, both the object perceived, and the ME as subject perceiving it. Consciousness is therefore simply the recognition by the ME of itself, in the fact of perception, as the agent perceiving; in thought as the subject thinking; in love as the subject loving; in contradistinction from the object perceived, thought, or loved.

A system of philosophy based on Consciousness, must be based on the agent revealed by Consciousness, that is to say, the ME, or subject. A system of philosophy based on the ME must be purely subjective, and incapable of attaining to existence exterior to the ME. It would be then the reduction of all our knowledge to the sentimental affections of the sentient subject, the last word of the Sensual school; or the irresistible categories of the reason, or forms of the understanding, the last result of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason--a rationalistic idealism; or to mere volitions or voluntary creations of the ME itself, with Fichte, or an Egoistic Idealism, if the expression will be permitted us. Is it in either of these results that Dr. Schmucker would end? Is his philosophy purely subjective? So far as it is systematic, it is so, in our view of it; but he has not intended it to be so, for he asserts objective reality, the independent existence of entities out of the ME, though by what authority he does not inform us.

But in saying that his philosophy is based on Consciousness, we suppose the author intends that we should understand, that in constructing it he has had direct recourse to the facts of human nature, the phenomena of his own mind, as revealed to him by immediate consciousness. On this point he is nowhere very explicit; but we presume that we do him no injustice, when we say that he probably adopts what is