of the Lord that I know of in the world, whether English, or Scotch, or French, or Dutch (and I know many), are of the same opinion with me."1 Truth seems to bear out even the stronger assertion "that not a single person who held the faith of the Christian church at that day can be named who had any other belief." Even Calef,2 Brattle, and Pike, whose authority is so often quoted, fully indorsed the popular theory as to the reality of witchcraft. "To deny the existence of it was precisely the same as to deny that the Bible was a revelation." 8

In his visitations of the "afflicted," he feels that his motives have been pure and unselfish. He says: "Truly, the hard representations wherewith some ill men have reviled my conduct, and the countenance which other men have given to these representations, oblige me to give mankind some account of my behavior. No Christian can-I say, none but evil workers can· criminate my visiting such of my poor flock as have at any time fallen under the terrible and sensible molestations of evil angels; let their afflictions have been what they will, I could not have answered it unto my glorious Lord, if I had withheld my just counsels and comforts from them; and if I have also with some exactness observed the methods of the invisible world, when they have thus become observable, I have been but a servant of mankind in doing so; yea, no less a person than the venerable Baxter has more than once or twice, in the most public manner, invited mankind to thank me for that service." 4

Even Mr. Peabody, who says that if Cotton Mather, after the frenzy was over, had lamented and publicly acknowledged the blind fanaticism under which he had acted, he would have been more generally forgiven, adds "that to the day of

1 Some Few Remarks, p. 42.

2 Calef says in his "More Wonders," "That there are witches is not the doubt; the Scriptures else were in vain, which assign their punishment to be death, but what this witchcraft is, or wherein it does consist, seems to be the whole difficulty." p. 17.

8 See Drake's Witchcraft Delusion, p. 30. * See More Wonders, pp. 10, 11.

his death he seems to have retained his full conviction that all was preternatural"; and asserts" that it is clear that no uneasiness from within, no self-upbraiding for the part he had acted, ever disturbed his repose."1 How could he have lamented and publicly acknowledged a fault which he did not feel that he had committed?

Conclusion.

In conclusion of this perhaps too protracted discussion of Cotton Mather's connection with witchcraft, I will merely add, that whilst he was strongly imbued with the superstition of his age in his belief of satanic agency and of the hold that the evil one had upon individuals in the community; whilst a curiosity which may be deemed prurient led him to interest himself enthusiastically in any new phenomenon of mind or matter, and an ability to express on paper his own thoughts and those of his compeers, and a strong desire to exert an influence on the side of what he thought right living,2 made him conspicuous in this most unfortunate movement,I cannot find evidence that he was actuated by any other than the kindest feelings, which led him to counsel the most lenient treatment of the accused, and by the most conscientious belief that in all that he did he supposed himself not only an advocate for the best interests of the colony, but faithful in his duty to God in opposition to the devil.3

That he not only did nothing intentionally to bring men under the influence of civil tribunals, but that, on the contrary, he used his influence and devised means more than any of his compeers in clerical or civil life to prevent it, and

1 Sparks's American Biography (1st Series), Vol. vi. p. 43.

2 These traits of Cotton Mather are specially conspicuous in his so successful advocacy of the introduction of inoculation for small-pox, in opposition to almost the whole medical faculty of the time.

8 Dr. Robbins well says: "That he was under the influence of any bad motives, any sanguinary feeling; that he did not verily think he was doing God service, and the devil injury; that he would not gladly have prevented the disorderly proceedings of the courts, the application of unlawful tests, and everything unmerciful in the trials, and inhuman in their issue, the most careful examination has failed to make me believe."- Old North Church, p. 111.

that when they were thus arraigned he advocated the exercise of the most extreme caution, that no other than legal evidence should be brought to bear upon them, seems to us unquestionable. Can we censure the young man under thirty very severely because he did not rise entirely above the superstitions and prejudices of his age, and, in opposition to the clergy of his own and other nations, and the legal tribunals of the civilized world, anticipate the more elevated views which a century or two has disclosed to the more enlightened nations of the earth?

Those who accuse Cotton Mather with so much severity seem to forget that "by taking an individual of a past generation out of his relations with his own times, and putting him upon the background of modern civilization and refinement, and then reproaching him with opinions and practices now shown to be erroneous, but which he shared in common with all his contemporaries, it is very easy to make any character appear ridiculous, and even culpable. But this is not the historical method of dealing with the reputations of men of a former age. We of the present shall need a more charitable interpretation of our own opinions and acts on the part of those who follow us. Did the man act well his part with the light he had? Did he, in a time of intense excitement, when life and reputation were at stake, act with reference to his duty to God and in charity to his fellow-men?"1

1 Mr. Poole in the North American Review, April 1869, p. 349. I have often, as here, quoted from, and referred to, the able Article of Mr. Poole, and gladly acknowledge my obligation to it in the preparation of this Paper. I have so often found the view that my study of the character of Cotton Mather and his relation to the Witchcraft Delusion has given me, so well expressed by him, that I have felt constrained repeatedly to give his expression of it rather than my own.

ARTICLE VI.

ARISTOTLE.

BY D. MCGREGOR MEANS, MIDDLEBUry, vt.

No. II. HIS CRITICISM OF THE PLATONIC IDEAS.

FEW subjects in the whole range of philosophy have excited, or indeed deserved, more interest than the Platonic theory of ideas. The charm of this theory is ever fresh; for in the higher walks of philosophy every new generation of men finds itself strange and unaccustomed to what has gone before. The society and religion of the ancients indeed arrest our attention, but we are conscious, however great our sympathy, that we are looking down, that we have reached a higher plane of development, and that "the gray barbarian" is "lower than the Christian child." But in philosophy every one must begin for himself anew from the starting point of the old Greeks, and he will not come into the inheritance of the intervening ages, nor fully understand his own position, unless he shall have penetrated into the spirit of the earlier times. For many centuries all science slumbered; but what was to natural science a new birth, to philosophy was but a re-awakening. "Die Griechen, die Griechen, und immer die Griechen," cried Goethe, intoxicated with their art; and it is still to the Greeks that the philosopher looks back.

The first encounter with Plato's theory as given by himself, especially in the great passage in the Republic, is to the young student a veritable shock. For a moment there is the feeling of having received a revelation. The name of the theory had, perhaps, long been known, but the matchless words of the author add to it a fascination that transforms theory into living truth. The theory itself seems to acquire the creative force of its own ideas, and to impress itself instantly on the whole universe of fleeting phenomena,

bringing out of unintelligible chaos a beautiful order. As Plato himself says: "Any young man when he first tastes of these subtilties is delighted, and fancies that he has found a treasure of wisdom."1 Nor is the charm confined to youth alone, for genuine Platonists are by no means extinct even in modern days. Even those who reject the theory can never be uninfluenced by it, and it will continually reassert its power over every poetic and aspiring mind. "The light dove, while cleaving in free flight the air whose resistance she feels, might easily imagine that her movements would be even freer in airless space. So Plato left the sensible world as setting too narrow limits to the mind, and ventured beyond on the wings of the ideas into the empty space of the pure understanding."2 While such imaginative natures exist there will always be such wanderings, and it is, perhaps, well that there should. The office of those who attract and interest is not less important than that of those who analyze speculation and reduce it to system.

It would be a mistake to suppose that the controversy concerning the ideas is of interest to the metaphysician alone. All science is colored by metaphysics; and it is not a difficult task to classify the writers whose disputes occupy the pages of our periodicals according to the metaphysical schools to which they sometimes unconsciously belong. The discovery that the battles in which they are now engaged had been fought out by the Academics and the Peripatetics, the Realists and the Nominalists, might excite an astonishment less agreeable than, though similar to, that of the Frenchman who found out that all his life he had been writing prose. In the special field of philology, and the larger one of biology, the great controversy as to the origin of language, and the greater one as to the origin of species, are really metaphysical, and depend upon the definition of metaphysical terms. Species, be it remembered, is the word by which the Greek form or idea was rendered into Latin. The Platonic theory has a modern representative in Max Müller, and a still more 2 Kant, Kritik Einl. iii.

1 Phil. 15. extr.