the foundation on which the French atheists built their whole I structure of extravagance and wickedness-and every one, will admit that German rationalism is a far more suppose, devout and respectable adversary than French atheism. It is true that Locke was neither an unbeliever nor an atheist; and it is equally true that Kant was neither a theological neologist nor a scoffer at religion. The principles of both these philosophers were seized upon by others, perverted and driven to results which the philosophers themselves never dreamed of, and would not have sanctioned. In this respect certainly there is no very great difference between them.

It is also said "that the philosophy of Locke and his Scotch successors is very plain and simple, while that of Kant and his German followers is very obscure if not wholly unintelligible." There may be some truth in this, and yet all the praise of simplicity and clearness, and all the blame of obscurity and unintelligibleness may not rest precisely where the objection places it. It is easy to follow a man who walks very slow, and goes but a short distance; but when a man walks very fast, and goes a great way, it is not always so easy to keep in sight of him. The German philosophy professes to do a great deal more than the Scotch, to investigate further, to penetrate much deeper, and of course it ought to require more pains and study to comprehend it. At least, let us not judge without investigation; let us not rashly decide that to be mere senseless jargon in which so many intelligent, able, and most learned men think they discover most important and profound truths.

I cannot pretend, within the limits assigned me, to give even an outline of this philosophy, but only a brief sketch of its history and changes. And I must say further, that these systems of German philosophy are so elaborate, that they go into investigations to which we are so little accustomed, that they imply a process of mental training so entirely unlike ours, and are withal expressed in a language so peculiar, that any attempt to give in English a sketch of them, in a popular form, must, from the very necesssity of the case, be imperfect

and unsatisfactory. This, I think, is stating the case as fairly as possible for the Germans, and I am sure I have no disposition to take any unfair advantage.

SYSTEM OF KANT.

All our knowledge (Locke is understood to say) is derived from sensation or from reflection. By the former we are made conscious of things external, by the latter we are made conscious of things internal, or of the operation of our own minds; the amount of which doctrine seems to be, that we can know nothing except that of which we are immediately

conscious.

Berkeley, taking for granted the truth of Locke's doctrine, showed that there could be no such thing as matter or the external world, or at least that we can have no evidence of the existence of any such thing. For, by our senses we are made conscious of sensations only, and not of matter itself, and sensations are affections of mind. From Aristotle to Locke, it had been asserted that our sensations are copies of the real objects which produce them. Berkeley proved that a sensation, that is, an affection of mind, can never be a copy of any thing which does not resemble mind, can never be a copy of

matter.

Hume probed the point still further. According to him, we are not more conscious of mind in itself than we are of matter in itself. All that we are immediately conscious of is -ideas and impressions; consequently nothing but ideas and impressions exist, or rather nothing else can be known to exist. Following up this train of reasoning, Hume proceeds to inquire, Whence is our notion of cause derived? Is it from sensation? Surely not, for the senses show only that the two events which we call cause and effect, follow each other, and never that they are necessarily connected. Is it then from reflection? But we reflect only on our sensations, and as these do not contain the notion of cause, so no reflection can discover it in them. Finding, therefore, that these

sources of our knowledge, which he with Locke believed to be the only ones, afford no clue to that firm belief which mankind have in the notion of cause, he declared it to be a mere idea, a habit of the mind acquired by seeing two events always succeed each other in the same order.

This of course, pushed away all the evidences of religion, natural and revealed. Hume's system was successfully opposed by Dr. Reid, Dr. Beattie, Dugald Stewart, and others.'

It was these speculations of Hume, on the origin of our idea of cause, that first started Kant, and set him on those metaphysical inquiries which have produced such a revolution in intellectual philosophy, and given so much celebrity to his own rather odd-sounding name. Before we give an account of his system, we must give a brief history of the man.

IMMANUEL KANT, the son of an honest, intelligent harnessmaker, was born in Königsburg, Prussia, in April, 1725, and in this city he lived to be eighty years old, scarcely ever going without its walls, and having never in his life been more than thirty miles distant from his birth-place. His mother was a woman of extraordinary talent and piety. Immanuel, though very poor, contrived with her help to get a university education in his native city, and soon distinguished himself by superior scholarship. He made marked progress in metaphysics, but at that time mathematics and astronomy were his favorite studies. In 1755, when only twenty-one years old, he published an astronomical treatise, in which he clearly pointed out the existence of the planet afterwards called Georgium Sidus, the supposed discovery of which has since given such celebrity to the name of Dr. Herschell. This was twenty-seven years before Herschell's discovery, and if the planet ought to bear the name of its first discoverer, it should be called Kant, and not Herschell. This will be done, I suppose, when America is named Columbia. Kant became a professor in the university of Königsburg, and his lectures were much

1 See For. Quart. Review, vol. i. p. 360-65.

frequented. His metaphysics at first attracted but little attention; it was six years before his first metaphysical work, the "Critique of Pure Reason," began to sell at all; and the publisher was on the point of disposing of the sheets to hucksters and confectioners for wrapping paper, when it suddenly became immensely popular, and Kant lived to see his metaphysics supersede all other systems almost throughout continental Europe.

Kant was never married, his whole life was that of a laborious student; but he usually took his dinner at the table of a large hotel, for the sake of observing the manners and conversation of the company he met there. A contemporary thus describes him: "Leaner, nay, drier than his small body none probably ever existed; and no sage probably ever passed his life in a more tranquil and self-absorbed manner. A high, serene forehead, a fine nose, and clear, bright eyes, distinguished his face advantageously."-" He loved mirthful company and a good dinner, and was himself an agreeable companion, who never failed to entertain and enliven by his extensive knowledge, and an inexhaustible store of amusing anecdotes, which he used to tell in the driest way, without ever laughing himself." He was always remarkably neat in his person, and strict in his morals.

On reading Hume, Kant felt perfectly satisfied that he had proved that the idea of cause is not derived from experience; and he was equally well satisfied that it is impossible for the mind to get rid of the idea. Well, what then? Is it a mere habit of thought? No, it must be a necessary truth; a truth not derived from experience, but arising with experience -an idea written, as it were, in the mind with invisible ink, and requiring only the scorch of experience, the contact of the external world, to make it legible.

This, then, was his starting point-there are necessary truths, which we do not derive from experience, which come neither from sensation nor reflection, which can neither be proved nor disbelieved. This is the corner-stone, the fundamental idea of his whole philosophy.

He then began to inquire, How many of these necessary truths are there, and what are they? He ascertained the number, as he supposed, to be twelve, and that they could be arranged in four classes, under the heads of quantity, quality, relation, and modality. These necessary truths he called categories, a name borrowed from the philosophy of Aristotle. He also gave them the name of transcendental truths, or ideas, because they transcend, go beyond, the bounds of experience. Hence the name transcendental philosophy, by which he always distinguished his own theory (though it has since by its dvocates unanimously been called the critical philosophy); and hence the modern term transcendentalism.

Kant introduced several distinctions which are important to his philosophical system. Thus he distinguished between universal or necessary truths, and merely general or contingent truths. For example, that the sun will rise to-morrow, that all substances have weight, are merely general or contingent truths; for the sun may never rise again, and there may be substances that have no weight. This class of truths we derive from experience, and it is the only class of truths which experience is capable of teaching us. But that "every thing which begins to exist must have a cause," is a universal, a necessary truth; it is not derived from experience, experience can neither add to nor take from the evidence of it. So of all the twelve categories.

The twelve categories are these: Under the head of quantity he has unity, multitude, totality,-under quality, are reality, negation, limitation,-under relation, we have substance and accident, cause and effect, action and reaction, and under modality, possibility, existence, necessity. The way in which these several terms are applied, and the exact meaning which they have in the system, can be learned only by a perusal of his treatises.

Space and time, he affirms, are not the properties of objects without us, but exist only in the mind itself, being pure intuitions of the internal sense; and they are the universal forms of thought, that is, it is impossible for us to think of any thing as unconnected with time and space.