Age passes gradually into age. The morning rises on the night in forerunning streaks of purple. Particular minds begin to initiate the future epoch in the bosom of the present. Accordingly, to say nothing of Spinoza and Leibnitz, or of Kant, Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel in Germany; it may be remarked that Cousin in France, and Coleridge in Britain, have respectively headed a small but strenuous opposition to the predominant naturalism of the present historical epoch.

The

History proceeds by antagonism. Naturalism engenders transcendentalism. These children of the new light are accordingly so many shapes of the idealist. The passing age has long been and still is occupied with sensations, and with those general conceptions or natural laws which are derivable from the sensuous life. new scholars, on the other hand, are possessed by ideas and conversant with such general conceptions as they are able to deduce from the ideal life. Apart from whatsoever vatic men may possibly be extant amongst us, and apart from the residue of a bygone age, yet lingering in the world, the men of the present time are divisible into two great classes. There is the very large one, which properly constitutes the actual time; and there is also the very small one, which announces and represents the age which is to come. The former are sensationists, and the latter idealists, in the senses in which these words have already been defined. They are the genuine opposites of one another, but they are not yet brought historically into unity by the mediation of a third. They still exclude one another. The sensationists utterly ignore and reject the idealists as insane and dangerous; while the latter despise the men of the day as drivellers. It is only here and there in Coleridge, and a little more frequently in Emerson, that

there can be perceived any traces of those 'organic filaments,' which are destined to weave them into one; but the ulterior development of these living threads is relegated to the age beyond the next. Transcendentalism must first be exhausted by the race, as well as by such individuals as constitute the vanguard and forlorn-hope of humanity. The cup of Tantalus must be drunk at for many a weary day, as soon as that of Circe shall have been drained to the dregs.

The man of ideas is certainly nearer to God than the man of sensations can ever be; yet most of the idealistic schools have assuredly sublimated their notion of the Deity into a sheer abstraction of the mind. It is the tendency of the sect; that is, of man percurring this distinctive phasis of his earthly existence. Ideas, and those conceptions which descend from ideas properly so called, are apt to overmaster and unman the idealists, somewhat in the same manner as sensations and ascendental generalisations have overcome and animalised the naturalists. The latter are prone to neglect and flout the human act of prayer just like their predecessors in the school. This unhappy proclivity proceeds in both cases from one cause, or rather from the same negation of a cause. It is owing to the absence of the holy personality of Jehovah from before their interior eye. It is because they have both alike extinguished or lost that inborn instinct of humanity by and in which God looks upon them face to face. Once lost, the ascendentalist cannot find it again, for his inductive method is incompetent to the task; and the philosopher, properly so called, has not yet recovered it as a philosopher, for his analysis of self-conciousness has hitherto been imperfect, as appears in what has been said above. Prone to idealism, but embracing Nature also in my view, I

have in the foregoing paragraphs first held by the Theopathic sentiment or Godward intuition of the race, like Jacobi, Lamennais, and some of the common-sense schoolmen; and then endeavoured to make a new analysis of self-consciousness, in which the Infinite Person of the Ineffable appears as the inevitable opposite of every finite Me in the world.

Those readers, however, who are unpractised in the sort of dialectics that has been employed in the demonstration referred to, will scarcely be able to feel the reality of the analysis in which that demonstration consists. They will probably be distrustful of it. It may sound like a juggle of words in their ears. Yet it is possible that it is not only the very truth, but also the sole philosophical ground of appeal to the nations that forget God.' We say the only philosophical foundation, because there always remains the cumulative pleading of science in favour of religion, as well as the direct address to the dormant intuition of the race in the Godless individual. The latter, indeed, the assault upon the conscience namely,—has hitherto been and will always continue to be the great and wonder-working method of the true preacher. But he will hardly reach the mind which has awaked to the spheral music of pure ideas, and become accustomed to expect every conviction to flow out of some ratiocinative harmony, for ratiocination is the song or singing of reason; while the arguments of the scientific kind, which can never attain to anything higher than the summit of mere presumptive evidence at the best, are quite unable to move so rooted a spirit at all. Not only this rare species of scholar, moreover, but many less cultivated members of the reading community have become well-nigh impervious to the argumentative sermon, and willingly deaf to the long-drawn pleas of

Paley and his Bridgewater reiterators. In such an emergency it may be worth the preacher's while to master the analytical paragraphs of this fragment before dismissing them as either unintelligible or inconclusive. The difficulty of doing so consists, not in following the steps of the analysis considered as an abstract process, but in investing that naked abstraction with the life of man. It is the same kind of difficulty as obstructs and often withstands the artist when he is willing to shed his idea of beauty into this or that individual combination of forms. It is like that which the philosopher has to overcome, although he never wholly conquers it, when he proceeds to clothe his deepest thought in words. It is even akin to that hard problem which every son of man must strive and struggle, and strive again and struggle without ceasing, to solve, when he has the grace to aspire toward the setting forth of the diviner life upon the earth. The only way of coping with this grave impediment in the way of our analysis, in so far as its reception by the untrained mind may be concerned, is to assume the function of the historical painter for a paragraph or two; and to essay the imaginative description of the spontaneous resolution of self-consciousness in the ideal of a perfect and virginal man. In this perilous attempt, we must depart altogether from the thought of ourselves, or of the men and women around us; for we are all the children of a particular and a partial time, and that time lies in the sorrowful way upward from the fall. The spirit of our age has modified, if it has not altogether fashioned, every one of us. If we be sensationists, then we are beclouded, and do not see the heavens. If we belong rather to the entering time and are idealists, we are certainly above the clouds; but the air is too thin, and

the clouds conceal the fair body of Nature from our view. It is the very circumstance of this alternative, in fact, that renders the marriage of ideal truth with the sensuous life of man in any one so slow of consummation.

But endeavour to realise in the imagination the first moment of the Adamic life. Conceive the voluntary dust of the ground to have just gathered itself up into the glorious figure of man, at the impulsion of the Word Divine; and also that the spirit has instantly stolen into the awaking members. The sure resultant of those new-created factors of his dual unity, self-consciousness, arises within the sublime automaton like a sun; and what does he behold? Not his animal person, sculptured out in perfect beauty from the rest of Nature, and lifting up its capitol beneath the dome. He does not yet enucleate his body from the body universal of the world: when he walks abroad, all things remove as well as he, and the warm earth sucks his steps. Where does his body end and the rest of Nature begin?-HE IS AS YET THE SOUL OF ALL. What, then, does he see in the morning radiance of this primeval selfconsciousness? He beholds himself, and without words upon the lip or in the mind, he feels in the heart, 'It is I and― And whom? Ah, it is THOU. O Thou only one, I am thine and Thou art mine. I am finite and Thou art infinite. I am thy creature and Thou art my Creator, I am thy child and Thou art my Father.' And it is thus that he speaks face to face with God in the garden of life. But the second analysis having been achieved, and his body set free from and within the universal organism, Nature soon overfloods his senses and usurps the sovereignty of his soul; and so he hides himself among the leaves of place and time. Yet God will