son, is willing to believe it possible that there are many things true which now sound like contradictions; and instead of being 'wise above what is written,' whether in the volume of Revelation or of Nature, (which, as Bishop Butler has shown, is inscribed with hieroglyphics equally dark,) commits himself to probabilities where demonstration deserts him, and, in the mean time, awaits that glorious dawn which shall let in, on the child of dust, the light of eternity; and either clear up the mysteries which baffle him, or leave him contented with his ignorance. Ignorant, indeed-infinitely ignorant-with all his knowledge, he will ever be; for it is the necessary condition of a finite intellect, that it will never comprehend those problems which demand an infinite intellect to solve; and it is possible that the full comprehension of the origin of evil' may be of the number.

In the present scene of things, at all events, we must acquiesce in something less than demonstration; and most cordially do we concur with Leibnitz, when he says, 'The harmony which is found in all the rest of the universe, forms a strong presumption that we should also find it in the government of man, and 'generally in that of the entire spiritual world, if all were but 'known to us. It becomes us to judge of the works of God not 'less wisely than Socrates judged of those of Heraclitus, when " he said, "What I understand pleases me well; and I believe 'that the rest would please me no less, if I understood it." Nor are even the hypotheses men may frame on this without their use, if, without pretending to remove every difficulty, they but assist us in conceiving that there may be methods of explaining this terrible mystery though we cannot perfectly comprehend them. We fully appreciate, for this reason, the sublime passage with which Leibnitz thus closes the first part of his Theodicée: Those attempts of our reason, in which there is no necessity of absolutely confining ourselves to certain hypotheses, only serve to make us conceive that there may be a thousand ways of justifying the conduct of God; and that all the evils we see, and all the difficulties we suggest to ourselves, ought 'not to prevent our believing (when we cannot know by demonstration,) that there is nothing so exalted as the wisdom of "God, nothing so just as his judgments, nothing so pure as his holiness, and nothing more immense than his goodness.'

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With such lofty feelings as these, few can sympathize with the ridicule which is poured on the Theodicée, by the author of Le Candide; even if its mocking author (Voltaire) had confined himself to what was really sophistical in that celebrated work, and had not extended his satire to the whole, order of the Universe. If we are reduced to the melancholy alternative

VOL. LXXXIV. NO. CLXIX.

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of choosing between an ennobling but illogical faith, and a logical but debasing reason, nowhere better than here could we say-It is wiser to be wrong with Leibnitz than right with Voltaire.

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Fond as philosophers in general are of their favourite theories, perhaps there never was an instance of this paternal instinct more striking than Leibnitz's affection for his Preestablished Harmony. Of the many theories which have been invented to account for the phenomena of perception, and to get rid of the supposed connexion of mind and matter, none was ever more groundless than this; and yet to none of them have their authors attached the hundredth part of the importance which Leibnitz attached to it. The supposition that the movements of body and of mind are as totally distinct (to use his own favourite and oft-repeated illustration) as those of two timepieces exquisitely correct, and that the former, like the latter, agree only in the perfect simultaneity with which they are performed, is really one of the most monstrous and even self-destroying hypotheses ever framed. According to that theory, to adopt the illustration of Bayle, the body of Cæsar 'must have performed all its acts, though it had pleased God to 'have annihilated Cæsar's soul the day after it was created;' or 'as Dr Thomas Brown puts it, the soul of Leibnitz would, though his body had been annihilated at birth, have felt and acted as if with its bodily appendage-studying the same works, 'inventing the same systems, and carrying on with the same warfare of books and epistles the same long course of indefatigable controversy; and the body of this great philosopher, though his soul had been annihilated at birth, would not merely have 'gone through the same process of growth, eating and digesting, and performing all its other ordinary functions, but would have achieved for itself the same intellectual glory, without any con'sciousness of the works which it was writing and correcting'would have argued with equal strenuousness for the principle of the Sufficient Reason, claimed the honours of the Differential 'Calculus, and laboured to prove this very system of the Pre-esta⚫blished Harmony, of which it would certainly, in that case, have 'been one of the most illustrious examples.'

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Now, what proof can we ever have of the existence of a material world, if we accept a theory, the precise object of which is to sever all connexion between it and the percipient mind? The very machinery of that material world, and its whole series of

* Lectures on the Philosophy of the Human Mind, Vol. ii. p. 116.

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movements, are supposed to be concealed behind an impenetrable curtain, and to be wholly independent of the world of mental phenomena. The existence of a material world, therefore, is entirely assumed by the very terms of the theory; and the theory itself is consequently far more naturally connected with a purely ideal system. Indeed, Leibnitz himself seems much more inclined to adopt some modification of that system, than to admit the real existence of the material world, in the ordinary sense of these words. Some curious statements to this effect may be found in the Eclaircissements, by which, not without reason, he attempts to remove objections to his theory. We shall not insist upon other arguments against a theory on which, though it may have found some advocates in the age of Leibnitz, certainly has not a single adherent in our day. To suppose a material world, all the movements of which, so to speak, are parallel and coincident with those of mind, but totally disconnected with them, and created to answer no assignable or imaginable purpose, is surely to impute to the Deity a clumsy, cumbrous, irrational method of procedure. Yet Leibnitz principally values himself on having excogitated a system, which opens to us the most sublime views of the Omnipotence which could thus effect an entire harmony and parallelism, in the infinitely complicated and varied functions of two perfectly heterogeneous and separate substances. And if mere intricacy and superfluous complexity of apparatus were the highest trophy of wisdom, there would be some force in this reasoning; but as long as it is true, that simplicity in the means conjoined with variety in the ends is an attribute of the works of the Supreme Being, we may well doubt whether this theory be any such notable compliment to the Deity. In this system, as well as in every other which the impatience of phi

*Nous concevons l'étendue en concevant un ordre dans les coexistences; mais nous ne devons pas la concevoir, non plus que l'espace, à la façon d'une substance. C'est comme le tems, qui ne présente à l'esprit qu'un ordre dans les changemens. Et quant au mouvement, ce qu'il y a de réel est la force ou la puissance, c'est-à-dire, ce qu'il y a dans l'état présent, qui porte avec soi un changement pour l'avenir.'-Opera Omnia, vol. ii. p. 79. But he expresses himself yet more strongly towards the close of his career. In the last year of his life, in a Letter to M. Dangicourt, he says,- Je suis d'opinion qu'à parler exactement il n'y a point de substance étendue. C'est pourquoi j'appelle la matière non "substantiam" sed "substantiatum." J'ai dit en quelques endroits (peut-être de la Theodicée, si je ne me trompe) que la matière n'est qu'un phénomène réglé et exact, qui ne trompé point quand on prend garde aux règles abstraites de la raison.'

losophers has suggested, for the purpose of ridding themselves of a supposed interaction of two totally distinct substances, our sages forget, while magnifying the sublime views which their respective theories give us of the Divine Power and Wisdom necessary to realize them, that there is a very simple way of still more effectually doing justice to that power and wisdom; namely, by supposing it possible that the Divine Being may effect a mysterious connexion between two perfectly distinct substances, though the philosopher cannot conceive it possible; and in a way which may far more transcendently display the infinitude of the Divine resources, than the realization of any complicated scheme of his could do. But this would just be humbly to admit certain ordinary facts which all the world admits, and few are the philosophers who can submit to that. It is much more pleasant to them, having condescendingly decided for the Deity the question of what is possible and what is impossible, and having relieved Him from the necessity of performing the latter, to devise a scheme which will still afford ample scope for His omnipotence.-On the moral difficulties which beset this and every other theory which would get rid of a material world, we have not spoken. But we cannot help thinking that the Ideal Theory is hardly consistent with the most worthy views of the Creator. Considering the deep, universal, indelible impression of an external world of matter, we can scarcely reconcile it with the supposition of His perfect truthfulness, to imagine Him the projector of a general system of illusion. So strong is the impression of the existence of a material world, that immaterialists have acknowledged that they find it impossible to eradicate it; and we have known disciples of Bishop Berkeley who have ingenuously confessed, that, somehow, the conviction haunted them, that the solitary Palm still exists in the desert after the traveller has passed it, and is not an ideal phenomenon, to be reproduced after a certain interval to another mind.' We regard this invincible belief, like the voice of conscience in the moral world, to be a species of Revelation.

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Extravagant as the system of The Pre-established Harmony may now appear, certain it is that Newton himself would not have ventured to predicate such glorious things of his true system of the Universe, as Leibnitz does of his supposed sublime discovery. It was to be the grand reconciling principle of at least half a dozen different, and in some respects contradictory, theories; it was to bring Aristotle and Plato, Des Cartes and Malebranche into happy harmony; and at once to redound to the glory of God, and silence the controversies of man. It is thus

he speaks of it under his assumed name of Theophile, in an amusing passage of the first chapter of his Dialogues on Locke's Essay. J'ai été frappé d'un nouveau système, dont j'ai lû quelque chose dans les journaux des savans de Paris.

Depuis, je crois voir une nouvelle face de l'intérieur des choses. 'Ce système parait allier Platon avec Democrite, Aristote avec Descartes, les scholastiques avec les modernes, la théologie 'et la morale avec la raison. Il semble qu'il prend le meilleur 'de tous côtés, et que puis aprés il va plus loin qu'on n'est allé 'encore.' And so he goes on for two or three pages, with equally or more extravagant promises of this wonder-working theory. The other imaginary Dialogist, Philalethe, may well say, Vous m'étonnez en effet avec toutes les merveilles, dont vous me faites un récit un peu trop avantageux pour que je les 'puisse croire facilement.'

Into the long controversy between Leibnitz and Newton, which so much embittered the latter years of both, we have already declared our intention of not entering further than is rendered necessary by the remarks of Dr Guhrauer; who is disposed, in his zeal to do justice to the memory of his great countryman, to urge those claims not a little unwisely.

Most persons of the present day, who have investigated the subject, have pretty well made up their minds as to the following points: first, that the system of Fluxions is essentially the same with that of the Differential Calculus-differing only in notation; secondly, that Newton possessed the secret of Fluxions as early as 1665-nineteen years before Leibnitz published his discovery, and eleven before he communicated it to Newton; thirdly, that both Leibnitz and Newton discovered their methods independently of one another-and that, though the latter was the prior inventor, the former was also truly an inventor.

With regard to the first of the three points above mentioned, -the alleged identity of the two methods,-Dr Guhrauer is disposed to demur, and contends that the claims of Newton and Leibnitz could not interfere, as they respected two different discoveries. Speaking of Sir David Brewster's affirmation, in his Life of Newton, that the latter was the first, and Leibnitz the second inventor, he says, There is, in truth, no first and no 'second in the discovery of dissimilar things.' This we cannot but think uncandid, though he endeavours to justify his

*

* Es giebt nemlich keinen ersten, und keinen zweiten, in der Erfindung unähnlicher Dinge. Vol. i. p. 180.