itself, seems to have fallen still-born from his delivery, a dead letter to our English mind. It was not grasped, and the existence of it in his works seems to have been forgotten. No English, or American, philosopher has yet appeared to review, expound, and complete it, in any systematic manner: this work has been left to those who are said to hold dominion of the air. Some there have been, doubtless, as capable as any of undertaking to give a complete systematic statement of all philosophy; but they probably knew too well what kind of an undertaking that would be, when a perfect work might require not only a divine man, but a book as large as the Book of God's Works. The men that are called philosophers among us are occupied with physical science only. What Bacon endeavored to re-organize, and constitute anew, as methods and instruments for obtaining a broader and surer “foundation" for a higher metaphysical philosophy, they appear to have mistaken for the whole of science and the sum total of all certain knowledge, excepting only a fantastical kind of traditional supernatural knowledge, for the most part, completely ignoring metaphysics; and, as a matter of course, they have given us as little conception of a philosophy of the universe, and, with all their physical science, have had as little to give, as a Humboldt's Cosmos, or that prodigious Frenchman, M. Auguste Comte.

Besides a physical science we have had only a theology, taking old Hebrew and some later Greek literature for all divine revelation; the Mosaic cosmogony for the constitution of the universe; Usher's chronology for an account of all time on this earth; Adamic genealogy for an ethnology of the human race; Jesus of Nazareth for the creator of the whole world and sole saviour of mankind; and some five or six fantastic miracles for all the boundless and eternal wonders of the creation. These old ones are nearly worn out, and are fast becoming obsolete: indeed, they are already well-nigh extinct. It is high time they were laid

up on a shelf, and labelled to be studied hereafter as fossils of the theological kingdom; and preachers, opening their eyes, should cast about for a new set, at least, out of all the universe of miracles that surround them, and henceforth found thier preaching on them. There would then be much less trouble about faith, and infidelity to myths and superstitions night become fidelity to God and his truth.

And so, having no philosophy, and no conception of the possibility of any, and nothing to give the name to, our English mind has appropriated the word as a superfluous synonym for physical science, and scarcely allowed free scope to that; and among us, the Newtons, Franklins, Faradays, Brewsters, and Darwins, are called philosophers, as Hegel said. These men are certainly to be ranked among the master minds of the world as original inventors and discoverers in physics, as philosophical observers and excellent writers on physical science, with the addition, in some instances, of a considerable sprinkling of orthodox theology, and in some others, as in Newton, the younger Herschel, Agassiz, Peirce, with the addition of not a few remarkable deep-soundings into the fundamental depths of things and the hidden mysteries of creation; as it were, some prophetic flashes of the most exalted intellect across the darkness of their own age and time in dim anticipation of a coming century; as when Newton says, "Only whatever light be, I would suppose it consists of successive rays differing from one another in contingent circumstances, as bigness, force, or vigor, like as the sands of the shore, the waves of the sea, the faces of men, and all other natural things of the same kind differ, it being almost impossible for any sort of things to be formed without some contingent variety." And again, "Every soul that has perception is, though in different times and in different organs of sense and motion, still the same indivisible person. There are given successive parts in duration, co-existent parts in space, but neither the one nor the other in the person of a man,

or his thinking principle; and much less can they be found in the thinking substance of God. Every man so far as he is a thing that has perception, is one and the same man during his whole life, in all and each of his organs of sense. God is the same God, always and everywhere. He is omnipresent not virtually only, but also substantially; for virtue cannot subsist without substance." 1 This is Berkeley's philosophy of a thinking substance, existing as reality, and not at all as any ideal vision of a mystical dreamer. Auguste Comte, ignoring theology and metaphysics together, calls his huge book of physical science a "Positive Philosophy" it is indeed positive enough, and in the total upshot as unphilosophical as positive; —as if a universe could be constituted and carried on by mere physics and phrenologico-biology on a basis of dead substratum, or could be conceived to go of itself as a blind perpetual-motion machine! But how shall any one, not having eyes to see, be able to see, that it goes only as the power of thought could make it go, and not otherwise? If the light within you be dark, how great is that darkness.

:

Among the theologians, we have had a class of writers, who have been sometimes called metaphysicians, but who were, in truth, merely metaphysical theologians, swimming, like Jean Paul's fish, in a box, and the box tied to the shore of church or state with a given length of rope; or materialistic anti-theologians, and in either case, no more metaphysicians than philosophers. Of the one sort were Locke, Reid, Brown, Stewart, and Hamilton; and of the other, Hobbes, Halley, Hume, Mill, Lewes, and Harriet Martineau. Not one of either sort appears ever to have been able to cross the threshold of that Higher Philosophy, which Bacon, following the dim light of Plato, but mainly by the help of his own Boanergic genius, endeavored to erect and constitute as the one universal science, and in which he was followed, in their own way, by Berkeley and 1 Principia, (ed. Chittenden, N. Y. 1848,) p. 505.

Swedenborg. After these, Kant seems to have been the next to make a clear breach over that threshold, when prying off into the palpable obscure of the previous darkness, as a Vulcanian miner drifts into the bowels of the earth after unknown ores, or as a Columbus launches upon an unexplored ocean, believing with such as Bacon and all high philosophic genius, that beyond the pillars of Hercules there may be lands yet undiscovered, he began to make that darkness visible to some few, through the Transcendental Esthetic of Time and Space. It has been easier, since, even for lesser lights, to follow and enlarge and clear the drift, thus roughly cut into solid darkness by the lifelabor of all powerful thought; and hence that modern school of philosophy, which has done something toward a critical exegesis of the fundamental and eternal laws of thought, the true nature of substance or matter, a true knowledge of cause and "the mode of that thing which is uncaused," a sound and rational psychology, and some more scientific, intelligible, and satisfactory account of the constitution of this universe, and of the order of divine providence and the destiny of man in it: in fine, a Universal Philosophy.

German scholars of this modern school, whether special students of this philosophy, or debtors to its results for their ideas and methods, have been filled with admiration of the super-eminent genius of Shakespeare. "The poetry of Shakespeare," says Frederick Schlegel, "has much accord with the German mind." Goethe, despairing to excel him, ranks him first among modern poets, and honors Hamlet with a place in the Wilhelm Meister; and Richter, no less, discovering at once the amazing depth of his philosophy, makes him rule sovereign in the heart of his Albano,-"not through the breathing of living characters, but by lifting him up out of the loud kingdom of earth into the silent realm of infinity." How wonderful, indeed, is

1 Titan, by Brooks, I. 154.

all this! Is it, then, that we have here a born genius, to whose all-seeing vision schools and libraries, sciences and philosophies, were unnecessary, were an idle waste of time, forsooth? - whose marvellous intuition grasped all the past and saw through all the present? whose prophetic insight spans the future ages as they roll up, measures the highest wave of the modern learning and philosophy, and follows backward the tide of civilization, arts, and letters, to the very borders of the barbaric lands? - before whose almost superhuman power, time and place seem to vanish and disappear, as if it had become with him " an everlasting Now and Here"? or, as if it had pleased the Divine Majesty to send another Messiah upon our earth, knowing all past, all present, and all future, to be leader, guide, and second Saviour of mankind? What greater miracle need be!

Being translated into German, Shakespeare became "the father of German literature," says Emerson. But it so happens, that the parts of him, which have been more especially quoted as the basis of this German appreciation, are precisely those, which have been least noticed at home, or if seen, appreciated on quite other grounds. Those transparent characters, which, said Goethe, are "like watches with crystalline plates and cases," where the whole frame and order of discovery are placed, as it were sub oculos, under the very eye, and those most pregnant passages, which are written, like the Faust, or the Meister, with a double aspect, whether because it was then dangerous to write otherwise, or because the highest art made such writing necessary and proper, being the highest wisdom as well as that true poetry which requires the science of sciences and the purest of all study for knowing it," making these plays magic mirrors like "the universal world " itself, in which any looker may see as much as he is able to see and no more, have passed in the general mind for little more than ingenious poetical conceptions,