to last, of the human mind to solve the mysteries of its own being and destiny, there lingers for him a strange and fascinating interest,-a very halo akin to that nameless, visionary glory which the imagination sees, and loves to see hovering over all created things,

"The light which is neither on land or sea,

The consecration and the poet's dream."

Nor yet, when entering the dry, and to most minds verdureless domain of medieval scholasticism, where the common ear hears only the rattle of skeletons and sapless husks, does he feel himself in fellowship with other than living forms whom he may address as acquaintances of the hour. He visits the fountains of the sharp, yet fruitless dialectics of Scotus Erigena and Roscelinus, of Peter Lombard and Amaury de Chartres, very much in the humour in which the poet fancies himself travelling to the top of Parnassus, or the waters of Helicon. And under his guidance, we are pleased to trace the stream of those old, obscure, scholastic wrangles, as it flows on calm and full, with many a turn not devoid of grace, with many an eddy sparkling with the choicest juices of the intellect, and with many a spot along its banks green with the earliest blossoming of those germs, from which have been gathered the boundless and immortal harvests of modern life and culture.

In this trait of M. Cousin-this enthusiasm, this undisguised and undisguisable love of the work, this æsthetic apprehension of all the problems, the efforts, and wanderings of philosophy, we have beyond question the secret of his wonderful success as the leader of the speculative intellect of France. Others might be named of, perhaps, equal depth and grasp of understanding, and equally possessed of the main requisites for interpreting and illustrating the course of modern philosophy; but it would be difficult to name one who, out of his own resources, could so array in living beauty and fascinating ornament the cold, unseemly tenants of that abstract realm.

We have spoken of M. Cousin's wonderful success as a lecturer on philosophy. No intellect of the day has run a career of such brilliancy and triumph in this department. Certainly there is nothing in modern times to rival the account given of the interest which his lectures inspired throughout France; or that approaches the imposing splendour of the circumstances under which they were delivered. Restored in 1827 to the chair of philosophy, after seven years of silence and virtual exile, enforced by the suspicions of arbitrary power, surrounded by the growing evidences of the genesis of a new school of thought, protestant at once towards the extravagances of German idealism, and the gross bowing down to earth of the materialism of the predominant systems of England, and his own

country, occupying the very position over which the illustrious Royer Collard had just thrown the halo of brilliant genius and honourable achievements, and with Guizot and Villemain for his associates in co-ordinate branches of the University,-under these auspices he entered upon the "Course of the History of Modern Philosophy."

His lectures won an unexampled popularity. Crowds of the keenest intellects of the rising generation of France gathered round him in enthusiastic devotion. Audiences of two and three thousand persons pressed, day after day, into the great lecture-room of the Sorbonne. The daily press eagerly reported them as among the most exciting incidents of Parisian life. For any thing like a parallel to the scene witnessed, we must go back to those days silvered over to the modern eye by the light of romance; days when the famous Abélard, returning from the school of Corbeil, and from his sweeping assault upon the Realism of his master, William of Champeaux, entered the gates of Paris amid a retinue of disciples, and from the cloisters of Notre Dame, and the gardens of St Geneviéve, unfolded with a sublime and captivating eloquence, to no less than three thousand scholars, the rival philosophies of his age.

Aside from these recorded triumphs in the actual commerce and purveyorship of philosophic thought; aside from his unequalled popularity as the founder of a school, and the leader of a new era in his own land, we have abundant evidence in what lies patent to every eye on the printed page, that in assuming the task of an expositor of the various philosophies of humanity, he made no vain or partial estimate of his powers. It was neither chance, nor favour, nor self-conceit, nor temporal advantage, nor yet any sordid lusting after a place in the literary annals of his country, that induced him first to choose, and then to persevere in the walk of philosophy. He determined to give up to this theme all the energies and acquirements of his mind; and his determination, we have reason to believe, arose from a conscientious conviction that he could do better service here than in any other field. They alone, who are familiar with the fruits of his laborious years, can tell what the world would have lost; and what a waste of princely faculty would have been seen, had he yielded to the urgent temptations, so often thrown in his way, to enter upon the line of political promotion.

We have spoken warmly of M. Cousin, because we admire his genius, and love the enthusiasm with which he has cultivated his favourite department of thought. It is impossible to know what he is, as a man, and as a thinker, and do less. The grasp and acumen of his understanding; the vast extent of his acquired resources; the accuracy and fulness of his

knowledge; his subtlety and thoroughness as an analyst; his diligence as an observer of the facts of human consciousness; his vigour and polish as a logician; his judicial fairness as a critic; and running through all, the mild and animating fervour of a large and affectionate heart,-these are attributes of character which compel the homage of minds most alienated from him by the tone and drift of his speculative theories. Nor do we, by yielding this voluntary homage to the most distinguished intellect of France, intend, in the least, to fetter our liberty of dissenting from many of his principles, or from reprobating those leading features of his system which he reckons the noblest fruits of his labours.

After a few more introductory words on a point suggested by the times, not less than the idiosyncrasies of our author, we shall go on to remark upon the method and results of his philosophy. It cannot be doubted that, of late, feelings of alienation and disgust have been growing among us toward the French character. Generally the world had come to look with a large charity on its weaknesses and wanderings, as exhibited during the close of the last century. A disposition had been shown to forgive and forget those scenes of blood and ruin which so shocked the moral sense and social order of mankind; and to look to the brighter side of the record,-to the advantages and benefits which have been conferred, by its stormy and painful experience, upon other nations, and other schools of moral and economical science.

But a renaissance of the revolutionary phrenzy has recently shown itself and spread over France. Though bringing with it less to try the sensibilities,-less of terror, and death, and destruction, it has revealed a yet more flippant temper under the pressure and gloom of desperate calamities, and a yet more capricious instability of purpose amid exigencies demanding the most immovable firmness of national resolve. It has done less to startle and offend the social affections, but more to provoke public ridicule and contempt, than the great revolutionary era which preceded it. Recent events have, indeed, put to the test the bonds of international charity and respect. France has just called the world to witness a spectacle, strange in its origin, rapid in its transit, contemptible in its finale, and in spirit throughout a grotesque mixture of tragedy and farce, patriotism and treachery, magnanimity and meanness, devotion to freedom and craven submissions to daring usurpation. In a few short years, she has run through the whole circle of politi cal experience and state hazards. Starting from the point of undisturbed peace and a wholesome civil rule, she has shot, at a bound, to the depth of social anarchy; and then, under the reaction of her own disgust and amazement, has leaped back

and taken refuge, after many weak and vacillating parleys, in a despotic order, whose real crimes and meannesses and deceptions have been made tenfold worse by stalking among us in the livery of an honest purpose, and uttering a miserable cant of reverence for law and devotion to the popular will. In the same years, too, she has challenged and received the curses of indignant virtue throughout Christendom, for what she has done to pollute the public conscience, and unsettle the distinctive sanctions of truth and justice. Go where we will in our own land, whose whole moral surface, like a vast sea, reflects every vapour of evil passing over it, and we find hardly less upon its great heart where spring the sources of its vast activities, than upon its farthest borders stretching into the forest solitudes of the West, the touch of her disastrous example and the smooth defilements of her gross, yet alluring literature. Nor is the spot to be named among us, where we can escape all contact with her pestilent inventions for recasting, into mixtures palatable to the lust of fallen man, the latest issues of socialism, infidelity, and moral debauchery.

The genius of propagandism belongs to France. She inherits it in largest measure. She has only to think out evil into theories; to devise new methods of wrong doing; to hew open new tracks to ruin; and straightway, by the nimble, transparent communicativeness of her character, they become the property of her neighbours. The same elements of evil which France will mature and spread over the world in a single year, might lie unheard of, unorganised for half a generation in the more stable and impassible constitutions of England, Germany, or Spain. We repeat, then, that recent occurrences have done much to inspire toward her feelings of alienation, not to say contempt; and to revive the yet unburied prejudices generated by the excesses of the last age.

It was as a sharer in these impressions that we greeted with lively pleasure the appearance in English guise of this noble production of her most commanding intellect. It will not be the least of the services rendered by these volumes of M. Cousin, that they will call thinking men to dwell on another and better side of his nation's character, and to note its admirable faculties for achieving the highest order of intellectual greatness. The world has seen no type of mind since the Athenian, so well fitted to lead and interpret the movements of cultivated intellect; and this indeed has been the office of the French mind in modern times. It originated and fashioned the scholastic philosophy, and gave tone and direction to the speculative tendencies of the whole mediæval period. With a singular skill and boldness, it grafted on the hoary trunk of patristic theology the subtle dialectics of Aristotle; and fur

nished the metaphysical problems to whose solution that system, or combination of systems, of revealed truth and syllogistic reasoning was attempted to be applied. In the persons of Abélard and St Bernard, -the revived copies of Aristotle and Plato, the representative organs of an inquisitive reason and a docile faith, it furnished the prototypes of the two opposing orders of speculative genius in all the subsequent ages. While in the labours of John Calvin,-the strongest intellect of the Reformation,-it claims the almost exclusive paternity of that theological system which, to this day, underlies the most enduring and consistent of all those creeds which date their [formal] origin this side the sixteenth century.

To come nearer to our own time, we know as matter of fact, that German philosophy, vaunting and pretentious as it was, on account of its vast resources, and laboriously as it sought to secure for itself a universal acceptance, actually lay for years as a sealed book in the midst of the mental activity of Europe. And while it continued in its native isolation, the most it did for its own diffusion was to scatter a few stray rifacimentos over France and England. But no sooner did the French mind come in contact with it, and master its strange creations, than it became at once the property of France, and through France, of the world. In some degree the same held true of the simpler and more intelligible systems of empiricism native to the English mind of the seventeenth century. They were indebted to France for the free, full development which finally gave them general currency, and rendered them so sadly potential for evil. We might extend the remark to nearly all the late systems, not only of philosophy, but of civil policy, and political economy. To reach the masses-to secure an operative and practical influence to become powers rather than abstract theories,-they have been obliged to filter through the French genius.

It is a strange feature of the French character that its weaknesses and its virtues; its instability of purpose and its tenacity of habit; its caprice and its firmness; its provocatives of ridicule and its claims to admiration, have a common source. They all spring from a certain genial, intensely sympathetic, restlessly talkative, and communicative disposition, which, beyond all else, individualises the Frenchman, the world over. Ardent and quick in appreciation-easily interested-ever desirous to place himself just where most can be felt, heard, and seen-of a passionate zeal for publishing and propagating over the widest possible surface whatever new thing comes in his way, the Frenchman is constitutionally fitted to mediate between the ideal and the actual, the theoretic and the practical worlds. At home in both, he can readily and