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And yet it would not be easy to discover any substantial ground for this contemptuous pride in those literati, who have most distinguished themselves by their scorn of BEHMEN, DE THOYRAS, GEORGE FOX, &c. ; unless it be, that they could write orthographically, make smooth periods, and had the fashions of authorship almost literally at their finger's ends, while the latter, in simplicity of soul, made their words immediate echoes of their feelings. Hence the frequency of those phrases among them, which have been mistaken for pretences to immediate inspiration; as for instance, "it was delivered unto me," "I strove not to speak," "I said, I will be silent,” “but the word was in my heart as a burning fire," " and I could not forbear." Hence, too, the unwillingness to give offence; hence the foresight, and the dread of the clamours which would be raised against them, so frequently avowed in the writings of these men, and expressed, as was natural, in the words of the only book with which they were familiar. "Woe is me that

I am become a man of strife, and a man of contention-I love

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yet because I seek for O! it requires deeper

peace: the souls of men are dear unto me: light, every one of them doth curse me!" feeling, and a stronger imagination, than belong to most of those to whom reasoning and fluent expression have been as a trade learnt in boyhood, to conceive with what might, with what inward strivings and commotion, the perception of a new and vital TRUTH takes possession of an uneducated man of genius. His meditations are almost inevitably employed on the eternal, or the everlasting; for "the world is not his friend, nor the world's law." Need we then be surprised, that under an excitement at once so strong and so unusual, the man's body should sympathize with the struggles of his mind; or that he should at times be so far deluded as to mistake the tumultuous sensations of his nerves, and the coexisting spectres of his fancy, as parts or symbols of the truths which were opening on him? It has indeed been plausibly observed, that in order to derive any advantage, or to collect any intelligible meaning, from the writings of these ignorant mystics, the reader must bring with him a spirit and judgment superior to that of the writers themselves :

“And what he brings, what needs he elsewhere seek?"

PARADISE Regained.

-A sophism, which, I fully agree with Warburton, is unworthy of Milton; how much more so of the awful person, in whose mouth he has placed it? One assertion I will venture to make, as suggested by my own experience, that there exists folios on the human understanding, and the nature of man, which would have a far juster claim to their high rank and celebrity, if in the whole huge volume there could be found as much fulness of heart and intellect as burst forth in many a simple page of GEORGE Fox, JACOB BEHMEN, and even of Behmen's commentator, the pious and fervid WILLIAM LAw.

The feeling of gratitude which I cherish towards these men has caused me to digress further than I had foreseen or proposed; but to have passed them over in an historical sketch of my literary life and opinions, would have seemed to me like the denial of a debt, the concealment of a boon. For the writings of these mystics acted in no slight degree to prevent my mind from being imprisoned within the outline of any single dogmatic system. They contri buted to keep alive the heart in the head; gave me an indistinct, yet stirring and working presentment, that all the products of the mere reflective faculty partook of DEATH, and were as the rattling twigs and sprays in winter, into which a sap was yet to be propelled from some root to which I had not penetrated, if they were to afford my soul either food or shelter. If they were too often a moving cloud of smoke to me by day, yet they were always a pillar of fire throughout the night, during my wanderings through the wilderness of doubt, and enabled me to skirt, without crossing, the sandy deserts of utter unbelief. That the system is capable of being converted into an irreligious PANTHEISM, I well know. The ETHICS of SPINOZA may, or may not, be an instance. But, at no time could I believe, that in itself, and essentially, it is incompatible with religion, natural or revealed; and now I am most thoroughly persuaded of the contrary. The writings of the illustrious sage of Konigsberg, the founder of the Critical Philosophy, more than any other work, at once invigorated and disciplined my understanding. The originality, the depth, and the compression of the thoughts; the novelty and subtlety, yet solidity and importance, of the distinctions; the adamantine chain of the logic; and, I will venture to add, (paradox as it will appear to those who have taken their notion of IMMANUEL KANT, from Reviewers and Frenchmen,) the clear

ness and evidence of the "CRITIQUE OF THE PURE REASON;" of the "JUDGMENT;" of the " METAPHISICAL ELEMENTS OF NATURAL PHILOSOPHY," and of his "RELIGION WITHIN THE BOUNDS OF PURE REASON," took possession of me as with a giant's hand. After fifteen years familiarity with them, I still read these and all his other productions with undiminished delight and increasing admiration. The few passages that remained obscure to me, after due efforts of thought, (as the chapter on original apperception,) and the apparent contradictions which occur, I soon found were hints and insinuations referring to ideas, which KANT either did not think it prudent to avow, or which he considered as consistently left behind in a pure analysis, not of human nature in toto, but of the speculative intellect alone. Here, therefore, he was constrained to commence at the point of reflection, or natural consciousness: while in his moral system he was permitted to assume a higher ground (the autonomy of the will) as a POSTULATE deducible from the unconditional command, or (in the technical language of his school the categorical imperative, of the conscience. He had been in imminent danger of persecution during the reign of the late king of Prussia, that strange compound of lawless debauchery, and priest-ridden superstition; and it is probable that he had little inclination, in his old age, to act over again the fortunes and hairbreadth escapes of Wolf. The expulsion of the first among Kant's disciples, who attempted to complete his system, from the university of Jena, with the confiscation and prohibition of the obnoxious work, by the joint efforts of the courts of Saxony and Hanover, supplied experimental proof, that the venerable old man's caution was not groundless. In spite, therefore, of his own declarations, I could never believe it was possible for him to have meant no more by his Noumenon, or THING IN ITSELF, than his mere words express; or, that in his own conception he confined the whole plastic power to the forms of the intellect, leaving for the external cause, for the materiale of our sensations, a matter without form, which is doubtless inconceivable. I entertained doubts likewise, whether, in his own mind, he even laid all the stress, which he appears to do, on the moral postulates.

An IDEA, in the highest sense of that word, cannot be conveyed but by a symbol; and, except in geometry, all symbols of necessity involve an apparent contradiction. Φώνησε Συνέτοιςεν : and for those

who could not pierce through this symbolical husk, his writings were not intended. Questions which can not be fully answered without exposing the respondent to personal danger, are not entitled to a fair answer; and yet to say this openly, would in many cases furnish the very advantage which the adversary is insidiously seeking after. Veracity does not consist in saying, but in the intention of communicating truth; and the philosopher who cannot utter the whole truth without conveying falsehood, and at the same time, perhaps, exciting the most malignant passions, is constrained to express himself either mythically or equivocally. When Kant, therefore, was importuned to settle the disputes of his commentators himself, by declaring what he meant, how could he decline the honours of martyrdom with less offence than by simply replying, "I meant what I said; and at the age of near four score, I have something else, and more important to do, than to write a commentary on my own works."

FICHTE'S Wissenschaftslehre, or Lore of Ultimate Science, was to add the key-stone of the arch; and by commencing with an act, instead of a thing or substance, Fichte assuredly gave the first mortal blow to Spinozism, as taught by Spinoza himself; and supplied the idea of a system truly metaphysical, and of a metaphysique truly systematic (i. e. having its spring and principle within itself.) But this fundamental idea he overbuilt with a heavy mass of mere notions, and psychological acts of arbitrary reflection. Thus his theory degenerated into a crude egoismus,* a boastful and hyper

*The following burlesque on the Fichtean Egoismus may, perhaps, be amusing to the few who have studied the system, and to those who are unacquainted with it, may convey as tolerable a likeness of Fichte's idealism as can be expected from an avowed caricature.

The categorical imperative, or the annunciation of the new Teutonic God, EгNENKAIПIAN: a dithyrambic Ode, by QUERKOPF VON KLUBSTICK, Grammarian, and Subrector in Gymnasio.****

Eu! Dei vices gerens, ipse Divus,

(Speak English, Friend!) the God Imperativus,
Here on this market-cross aloud I cry:

I, I, I! I itself I!

The form and the substance, the what and the why,
The when and the where, and the low and the high,

The inside and outside, the earth and the sky,`

I, you, and he, and he, you and I,

All souls and all bodies are I itself I!

All I itself I!

(Fools a truce with this startling!)

stoic hostility to NATURE, as lifeless, godless, and altogether unholy while his religion consisted in the assumption of a mere ORDO ORDINANS, which we were permitted exoterice to call God; and his ethics in an ascetic, and almost monkish mortification of the natural passions and desires.

In Schelling's" NATUR-PHILOSOPHIE," and the "SYSTEM DES TRANSCENDENTALEN IDEALISMUS," I first found a genial coincidence with much that I had toiled out for myself, and a powerful assistance in what I had yet to do.

I have introduced this statement, as appropriate to the narrative nature of this sketch; yet rather in reference to the work which I have announced in a preceding page, than to my present subject. It would be but a mere act of justice to myself, were I to warn my future readers, that an identity of thought, or even similarity of phrase will not be at all times a certain proof that the passage has been borrowed from Schelling, or that the conceptions were originally learnt from him. In this instance, as in the dramatic lectures of Schlegel to which I have before alluded, from the same motive of self-defence against the charge of plagiarism, many of the most striking resemblances; indeed, all the main and fundamental ideas, were born and matured in my mind before I had ever seen a single page of the German Philosopher; and I might, indeed, affirm with truth, before the more important works of Schelling had been writ

All my I! all my I!

He's a heretic dog who but adds Betty Martin!
Thus cried the God with high imperial tone: 1
In robe of stiffest state, that scoff'd at beauty,
A pronoun-verb imperative he shone-
Then substantive and plural-singular grown,
He thus spake on: Behold in I alone
(For ethics boast a syntax of their own)
Or if in ye, yet as I doth depute ye,

In O! I, you, the vocative of duty!

I of the world's whole Lexicon the root!

Of the whole universe of touch, sound, sight,

The genitive and ablative to boot:

The accusative of wrong, the nom'native of right,
And in all cases the case absolute!

Self-construed, I all other moods decline:

Imperative, from nothing we derive us;

Yet as a super-postulate of mine,
Unconstrued antecedence I assign

To X, Y, Z, the God infinitivus!

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