most useful, of his productions,) it is impossible not to recognise the logical Milo in every page. The unhappy Jonas • Proast,' who ventured to oppose him on the latter subject, is not so much vanquished as annihilated. Like some criminals who have been punished by being blown from a cannon's mouth, not a fragment of the unfortunate champion for persecution is to be found.

But not one of the traits of Locke indicated above-neither his logical acuteness, nor his thirst for truth, nor the sagacity with which he prosecuted his search for it,-is more marked than his habitual recognition of the narrow limits of the human faculties, and his conviction that the chief and most difficult function of a philosopher is to ascertain within what sphere men may legitimately philosophise. Profoundly feeling that there are impassable barriers which environ us on all sides, he is every where anxious to recognise the limits where philosophy must pause, the brink of those abysses and precipices on which there is no access to human hand or foot. Acknowledging without shame --rather with manly modesty-this fact of the true position of man, he never hesitates to confess his ignorance where he is ignorant, nor even in many cases his despair of ever attaining knowledge. His great work originated, as he himself tells us, in a discussion, in which he suspected that the baffling difficulties arose from not having ascertained the limits of the human faculties; and that therefore the first thing is to discover the 'powers thereof, how far they reach, to what things they are in any degree proportioned, and where they fail us.'" In the wellknown metaphor, he reminds us that it is of great use to the 'sailor to know the length of his line, though he cannot with it fathom all the depths of the ocean;' he tells us that if the 'capacities of our understanding be well considered, the extent of our knowledge once discovered, and the horizon which sets the bounds between the enlightened and dark parts of things, -between what is and what is not comprehensible by us,-men would, perhaps, with less scruple acquiesce in the avowed ignorance of the one, and employ their thoughts with more advantage and satisfaction in the other.' Happy had all philosophers acted on such maxims! But it requires a great deal of courage (especially in a philosopher) frankly to say 'I do not know,' and perhaps still more to say, I doubt if I ever shall.' Acting on such maxims, it is refreshing to see with how firm a hand Locke at once applies the knife to those huge wens of ontology,' as it was called, which had so long impoverished and almost destroyed all healthy intellectual philosophy. It is thus he proceeds to indicate the principles on which he proposes to

construct his great work, and, in doing so, shows how well he had pondered the limits of a just psychology. This, therefore, being my purpose, to enquire into the original, certainty, and 'extent of human knowledge, together with the grounds and 'degrees of belief, opinion, and assent; I shall not at present 'meddle with the physical consideration of the mind, or trouble 'myself to examine wherein its essence consists, or by what 'motions of our spirits, or alterations of our bodies, we come to 'have any sensation by our organs, or any ideas in our under'standings; and whether those ideas do in their formation, any ' or all of them, depend on matter or no.'

To restrict speculation to the limits within which alone philosophy is possible, is, of course, the principal point in relation to what is the great object of all philosophy-the discovery of TRUTH; but to transcend those limits in intellectual philosophy is to violate this caution in the most flagrant, though, lamentable to say the most common form. The very object of this science is to teach us the extent of our faculties, and to develop and invigorate them by the robust discipline it imposes. To involve it in impossible speculation is to lose both benefits at once; to impair and fuddle the intellect at the same time.

The feelings with which one has been sometimes tempted to accompany adventurous speculators beyond the limits of a legitimate intellectual philosophy, and to penetrate the regions of the unconditioned,'-the clouds which lie beyond and above the elevations given to man to scale,-may be compared to those with which the lover of the picturesque, in mountain regions, is sometimes lured into a similar delusion. He is tempted, it may be, to ascend some unknown peak on which the clouds still rest, assured that they will clear off before the summit is reached. As the traveller ascends through the lower region, in the clear atmosphere, and with the ample landscape of valley, wood, and water clearly outspread before him, all is pleasant enough. As he approaches the belt of clouds, and begins to have misgivings, some of the party assure him that if he will but go on, the whole will be presently clear. He complies; and first, all the discoveries of a lower elevation begin to be seen through a curtain of mist, their magnitudes are altered, their forms distorted, and ultimately their distinctive features lost. At last, he reaches a point where he can see nothing but a rolling cloud of vapour, which hides every object ten inches before his nose; and after standing wetted to the skin, and shivering in darkness visible' for a couple of hours or so, in which the envious clouds still envelope him,-now and then teased, perhaps, by a momentary rent in the veil, which seems to show

him something, but too transiently to let him know what, — he descends, and is glad to catch a glimpse of things in sunlight again. But for any purpose of pleasure or knowledge, in ascending those cloudy regions, he might as well have sat himself down at the base of the mountain and drawn a thick cotton nightcap over his head. Such seems to be the estimate pretty generally forming throughout not only England, but the Continent also, of the philosophical value of a vast deal of German speculation since Kant's time. He, however uncouth his nomenclature, or wearisome his style, did at all events treat of subjects which are the fair domain of speculation, and which it may be presumed the human intellect will be in a condition to settle some day or other, and in one way or another; but as for many of his more ambitious successors, we observe that even folks in England, who, a few short years ago, would have been indulgent towards them, or gratuitously admired without understanding them, are beginning to distrust their own amiable modesty, which always assumed the unfathomable profundity of the writers as the sole cause of their being unintelligible. We observe that even M. Cousin, despairing apparently of the success of his early projects of Eclecticism,' at least in this direction, speaks, in a recent and interesting work, of certain tendencies of the detestable 'German philosophy,' in terms he would hardly have employed some years ago. It reminds us of an expression in Sir James Mackintosh's Journal,' which, as extorted from one whose patient and persevering industry was not easily baffled, and whose calm and judicial mind was not soon ruffled, is not a little amusing. Even his equanimity was not proof against the irritating effect of being conscientiously bound to understand what was in fact not to be understood. When he took his departure for India, he was still meditating, it will be recollected, a history of philosophy, a favourite project, and one which, if he had had leisure and perseverance to complete it, would have been a noble monument of his genius. I am endeavouring,' he says, 'to understand this accursed German philosophy.' We

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The passage to which we refer occurs in the Avant-propos' to his recently published work, entitled 'Madame de Longueville; Nou'velles Etudes sur les Femmes Illustres et la Société du xvme Siècle,' -not the least interesting or valuable of M. Cousin's voluminous productions. Il nous reste à recueillir de tous nos écrits les éléments épars d'une Théodicée nouvelle, particulièrement fondée sur 'une Psychologie exacte fecondée par une induction légitime avec le 'double dessein de défendre la grande foi du genre humain contre la 'détestable philosophie que l'Allemagne, en ces derniers temps, a ' renvoyée a la France,' &c. &c. (P. viii.)

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cannot refrain here from recommending every reader to peruse Sir W. Hamilton's Essay,' first inserted in this Journal, ‘On "the Philosophy of the Unconditioned,' and to ponder especially its concluding sentences:- Conscious only of, conscious only in and through, limitation, we think to comprehend the infinite; and dream even of establishing the science, the nescience of Iman, on an identity with the omniscience of God. It is this 'powerful tendency of the most vigorous minds to transcend the sphere of our faculties, which makes a "learned ignorance' the most difficult acquirement, perhaps, indeed, the consummation of knowledge. In the words of a forgotten, but acute philosoper:-"Magna, immo maxima pars sapientiæ est"quædam æquo animo nescire velle."

Many a treatise of modern philosophy might, we think, be entitled Essays on the art of saying nothing in such a way that it cannot be known that nothing has been said.'

It must be granted, of course, that the very principle now inculcated requires, like any other, to be applied wisely, lest it should engender timidity where we may hope to succeed; but excess of caution is certainly an error on the right side.

It may be urged, perhaps, that Locke sometimes seems to depart from this wise caution, especially in his most gratuitous speculation as to whether it would not be possible for Omnipotence to endow matter' with 'thought.' We say gratuitous, for he himself did not believe that our minds are material, rather he imagined he had proof amounting to 'moral certainty' the other way; and assuredly he had no reason to infer that any other minds are, in some incomprehensible way, any such grafts upon matter. Still the very speculation, though in our view not merely presumptuous but irrational, is, in reality, a proof of the very characteristic we have here attributed to Locke, since he declares that he refrained from denying that matter might be susceptible of thought, only because he did not pretend to limit the power of God, who, he said, had given to matter properties to all appearance as inconsistent with its nature as thought itself, and he instances gravitation.' But we shall have a word or two to say of this by and by.

Locke's love of truth, though of course essentially a moral excellence, gives an indescribable charm to all the movements of his intellect; it animates, vivifies, transfigures the most tedious processes of logic. The evident desire and longing of his soul is to arrive at truth, and that only; he spares no toil, no patience, in hunting it, nor (when he deems he has found it) in setting it forth as plainly as possible to the apprehension of others.

It is obvious that nothing could, in his judgment, make amends for missing TRUTH; he has no preconceptions which he is determined shall stand; no shame in acknowledging an error; no sinister purposes to answer. As we read him, we feel sure that neither vanity nor interest could have induced him to disguise or mutilate a truth, nor to harbour a sophism, however brilliant and however applauded by others, for one moment in his bosom. They are his own glorious words - Whatever I 'write, as soon as I shall discover it not to be TRUTH, my 'hand shall be forwardest to throw it in the fire.'

The same reasons have made him one of the fairest of all controversial antagonists; disguising nothing, distorting nothing, garbling nothing, misquoting nothing; doing his devoir ever manfully, but knightly and honourably, and disdaining to use any weapons in the cause of truth which truth itself has not consecrated. These qualities, wherever they are found, must in the nature of things tend to give vastly augmented force to any man's logic. The intellect is more indebted to the love of truth than its worshippers generally suppose, and any aids which the understanding lends the conscience are ever faithfully repaid.

The fairness of Locke as a disputant, even in the excitement of oral controversy, (where it is so rarely exemplified), is noticed by Le Clerc. He accommodated himself to the level of the 'most moderate understanding, and in disputing with them, did "not diminish the force of their arguments against himself, although they were not well expressed by those who had used them;' a scrupulosity, which may remind one of Charles James Fox, who, it is said, sometimes stated an opponent's objections so strongly that his friends trembled lest he should not be able to answer them!

His ironical tone in controversy is often very amusing; but it is seldom accompanied with either bitterness or sarcasm. Perhaps one of the severest things he ever said was his quiet retort on Stillingfleet, who had charged him with some gross blunder: I acknowledge myself to be a mortal man, very liable to mistakes, and especially in your lordship's writings!'

As to the learning of Locke, it has, like that of Shakspeare, been most variously estimated. While some would make him almost ignorant of what his predecessors had written, and such a very Troglodyte in metaphysics that he was not properly acquainted even with such writers as Descartes or Hobbes,others are of opinion (with Stillingfleet) that he is under vast but unconscious obligations to them. The truth lies, as usual, between the extreme estimates. To suppose that a mind so inquisitive and powerful as Locke's should not have been tolerably conversant