ties of things, the effect on our minds is almost as bad as if it could do so. Was there nothing else to approve in the author before us, but his arrangement, the excellence of this, would entitle him to our warmest thanks, for the aid it must lend to the cause of true philosophy.

Brown has arranged our practical duties under three heads;— those we owe to others, those we owe to ourselves, and those we owe to God. The lectures on this department of the subject, afford lessons of morality, which could not, we think, be read by the most insensible, without new perceptions of the beauty and value of virtue, and new resolutions, (even if they remained nothing more than resolutions,) to make her paths their choice. From an analysis of them, we should obtain only familiar results; as the practical part of ethics, whatever may be the theory on which it is rested, is the same in all ages, with the exception of those refinements which the Christian religion and the progress of civilization have produced.

Brown does not lay much stress on mere metaphysical arguments, for the existence of the Deity. On the great argument of the evidence of design, which the works of nature afford, he rests the doctrine. If we could not, he says, believe that a multitude of types thrown together, would produce the principia of Newton, how can we believe that the world which he has described, is less indicative of design? In his argument for the benevolence of the Deity, he has deemed it sufficient to show, that our happiness far exceeds our misery; but, in addition to this, we find evil sometimes productive of good, especially moral good. The virtues of patience, magnanimity, and fortitude, could not have been developed, without suffering; and who is there, that would not blush to prefer the most perfect but inglorious ease and luxury, to these virtues?

The doctrine of the immortality of the soul, (says Brown,) is one so congenial to our wishes, that we might be induced to adopt it on evidence less satisfactory, than would be demanded in an impartial state of the mind. The analysis and arrangement of the phenomena of mind, are independent of any views which we may form of the nature of the substance. These may be the same, whether we adopt the opinions of the materialists or immaterialists. But they cannot be indifferent, in an inquiry which relates to the permanence of the substance, since this must, in Brown's opinion, be admitted or rejected, nearly accordingly as we admit or reject one or the other opinion. If there be nothing distinct from the material frame-if the phenomena of mind depend on organized matter, we have reason to believe, that, when this organization is destroyed, the capacity for thought, which depends on it, should also be destroyed. If our material frame be not thought, but only something which bears a certain relation to VOL. IV.-No. 7.

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the principle of thought, there is no reason to conclude, that, because the particles of our frame lose their present arrangement, and their relation to the spirit is dissolved, the spirit must, on that account, become extinct. If we might trust to consciousness, we need not go far for evidence of the unity of the thinking principle, and consequently for the proof, that it is not matter. No one but the philosopher, could be made to believe, that thought and feeling were not the properties of a simple individual substance. Much of the fallacy of the arguments of the materialists, arises from a false notion of unity. What we term a body, is not a simple substance, but a congeries of particles, each of which possesses the qualities that belong to the whole; and, if matter is in its nature divisible, no arrangement of particles can confer on it the property of indivisibility. There is an ambiguity also in the term result, which has betrayed many persons into a confidence in the doctrine of materialism. An instrument of music, it is said, consists of parts; and yet the result, which is a sound, is simple. But sound is not a quality of matter-it is an affection of mind. Can spirit then, which is essentially one, indivisible, and unextended, be dependent on any arrangement of the particles of matter, which is in its nature divisible, extended, and subject to change?

Brown lays little stress on arguments merely metaphysical, in favour of the immortality of the soul; he thinks the only foundation which reason can give for a belief in this doctrine, must rest on the immateriality of the thinking principle.

The only division of the subject which remains, is the duty we owe to ourselves. The influence of the doctrine of universals, is apparent in the various theories of happiness which were formed by the ancients, as well as in every other department of their philosophy. Because, a single term, as happiness, was employed to express the various emotions which resemble each other in the circumstance of being agreeable, however different may be their degrees, or however distinct their existing causes, it was believed that happiness was one and simple; and they denied that there could be any absolute happiness, except in that particular species which they denominated the universal good. "The Epicureans believed all happiness to be ultimately resolvable into sensual delight. The Stoics, into intellectual. Both were right in what they admitted, and wrong in what they denied." "A wider and more judicious view of our being, would show that human happiness is as various as the functions of man." "Happiness is only a name for a series of agreeable feelings, and whatever is capable of exciting these feelings is a source of happiness." Lect. 100.

Brown arranges the sources of our happiness under three heads, sensitive, intellectual, and moral and religious. Conforming to

the three aspects under which he has, throughout his work, regarded man, viz: as a sensitive, an intellectual, and a moral and religious being. But having exceeded the limits which we had proposed to ourselves, we must refer the reader to the three last lectures for his remarks on these subjects.

There are some repetitions in these lectures, which, if the author had lived to prepare them himself for the press, would doubtless have been omitted. There is also a diffuseness in the style, and, in many places, an amplification of the idea, which have with justness been condemned, as not suiting the gravity and precision of science. But it should be remembered, that this is not a system of intellectual philosophy, originally designed for the public, but a course of lectures delivered to a class of young men. An important object with the lecturer, was to render an abstract and difficult subject, intelligible and interesting to his pupils. That in this he must have been eminently successful, will not be doubted, by any one acquainted with other metaphysical writings. This study, which presents as many points of general interest, as any in the whole circle of human inquiry, has, hitherto, (in consequence of the dry and often unintelligible manner of treating it,) obtained the attention only of a small number, even of the learned. The popular form in which it is presented by Professor Brown, while it takes nothing from the accuracy and profoundness of his investigations, has rendered his work attractive to every reader of philosophical taste and curiosity, and will, we think, do much towards raising this science to its just rank.

ART. II.-EGYPTIAN HISTORY.

1.-Aperçu des Resultats Historiques de la découverte de l'alphabete Hieroglyphique Egyptiene, par M. CHAMPOLLION LE JEUNE, from the Bulletin Universel for May and June, 1827. 2.-Description de l'Egypte.-Paris, 1821. PANCKOUCKE. Preface Historique.

IN a former number of this journal, we have given an account of the Egyptian System of Hieroglyphic writing.* We have, in one more recent,† attempted to fix the dates of the settlement of Egypt, and of the reign of Sesostris. This subject possesses

No. II. p. 438. † No. IV. p. 509.

to us so much of interest, that, to judge from our own views, we conceive that we shall not weary our readers by again recurring to it. We shall therefore devote a few pages to the consideration of the historical results that have already been drawn from the discovery of the method of decyphering hieroglyphic writing, results which we have only partially and incidentally mentioned, in describing the hieroglyphic system, and in inquiring into the two most important dates of ancient Egyptian chronology. We shall be chiefly guided in this discussion, by Champollion's own papers, published in the Bulletin Universel, as quoted at the head of this article.

There is a strange and mysterious interest awakened, whenever we inquire into the history of bygone ages. Darkness and doubt enveloping their annals, serve only to render our curiosity more intense, and we eagerly catch at the most insignificant monuments or remains of people, that have passed from the face of the earth, in the hopes of being by them enabled to pierce the opaque medium which obscures their annals. As the interval of time that separates our epoch from theirs, increases, so also increases the ardour of inquiry, and thus we find ourselves more and more powerfully attracted, as we proceed step by step, to consider the mouldering tombs of the fathers of our own nation; the remains of rude art, and of savage tribes that preceded them in their occupation of this country; the mounds, the pyramids, and other traces of a more civilized race of yet earlier date; and the more perfect reliques of the power, the arts, and, we may almost venture to say, the science of the Aztecs. The old world possesses still stronger powers of allurement. No American can ever forget his first impressions on visiting the yet existing edifices of Gothic date; the long drawn aisle of the cathedral, the pale religious cloister, rich in graven brass and monumental marble; the baronial castle that still seems ready to echo the trumpets of the tournament, and from whose gates we almost expect to see the chivalric train issue to the lists, sheathed in panoply of steel. Even such impressions must fade into insignificance, on treading the masses of rubbish which cover the forum, where Tully poured the tide of eloquence, and Curtius devoted himself for his country, or the sacred way up which the conquerors of the world bore the opima spolia to the temple of Feretrian Jove. These feelings must be still more intense, in those who gaze upon the Parthenon, the unrivalled specimen of purity of taste, and beauty of design, rich in associations of those philosophers, poets, and orators, who have for centuries, and must, while the globe endures, serve as the models of all who pursue the same path to honour. But to us, we must confess, a greater and more powerful interest hangs around those distant tribes who first attained the rank of nations, and were the earliest in their civilization, and in the cul

tivation of the arts; of whom scanty and uncertain notices have alone reached us through the Greek historians, and their incidental connexion with sacred writ: nations whose records and traditions were as much hidden by distance of time from those whom we call ancient, as those of the latter are from us; to whom the Greeks resorted, in those very ages when we are accustomed to look up to them with reverence, to learn their practical wisdom, and admire their greater proficiency in the arts.

The Euphrates and the Nile saw upon their banks the first formation of civil society. In the very early accumulation of mankind into communities, in the vast works they so speedily undertook, we see civilization to be the natural state of man, and law and government to be the emanations of a wisdom superior to his own. He was not left to the unassisted efforts of his own reason, to attain, in the lapse of successive generations, the knowledge and experience essential to the maintenance of well-ordered society, but we trace him by his works of art, up to a period little posterior to the last great catastrophe, of which our planet still shows traces upon its surface, and find him existing in wellordered communities. If the first nations mentioned in history were far less enlightened in science, and inferior in skill in the useful arts, to those of modern times, they still astonish us by their vast conceptions, and the labour they bestowed upon their edifices, labour such as no modern government could command, or bring to bear even upon objects of utility. All is colossal and exaggerated in the works of these primeval nations, and in principle, recalls forcibly to our memory the periods when, as we are informed in the most ancient of histories, the life of our race extended centuries beyond its present duration, and where edifices such as we now construct for our posterity, would have mouldered into dust long before the builders felt the approach of age. The change in the duration of human life, from the longevity of the antediluvians to its present contracted limit, occupied several generations; and in the vivid recollection of the period when it was thus extended, we are to seek the cause of the almost imperishable monuments which these early nations have left us. The Birs Nimbrod, after a lapse of more than forty centuries, still stands like a mountain in the midst of the surrounding waste, and the inscriptions of Egypt, of a date little posterior, maintain their original, bold, and decided relief.

In the absence of written annals, it is to inscribed monuments that we must refer for information, in relation to the history of vanished ages. Even where the former are not wanting, we may still recur to the latter with advantage; and the Arundelian and Capitoline marbles, are considered to be better authorities for chronology than Herodotus or Livy. No nation has transmitted to our times such abundant monuments as the Egyptian. Not