Tsuy shall be buried in a tomb built on purpose for her, and incense shall there be offered to raise her soul into bliss. The boy Futung shall be supported by the wealthy people of the town, and Seaou shall be punished according to law. And whereas Wang and Mrs. Le planned the murder of the woman's husband they shall both be executed without mercy, and their disgrace shall be published at the four gates of the city, that all may know of it."

In reply the Prefect returns thanks, and having sung a short eulogy on his own diligence and sagacity, exeunt omnes.

ROBERT K. DOUGLAS.

PHILOSOPHY IN THE LAST FORTY YEARS.

FIRST ARTICLE.

T

HERE are three merits to which philosophical views that seek to dominate the spirit of their time, and, if possible, of the future, always make pretension-that their highest principle cannot possibly be contradicted; that their method, which is usually everywhere the same, is simple; and finally, that the logical structure of the system in which they gather together the results they have attained, rests throughout on intuitive evidence. I should hesitate to ground upon any one of these three titles, the much more modest claim which I present to secure the favourable attention of my English readers to the thoughts which I shall here lay before them; but I may explain the reasons why I doubt the value of all three, and why I have been hitherto moved to give up all thought of attempting to impress such a character upon my own views.

When I began my philosophical studies, the predominant opinion was still that to which Fichte has given the distinctest expression, that no theory of the world should pass for truth and science which was unable to explain all the particular parts of the world's history as independent consequences of a single general principle. Bred in the traditions of the Hegelian school, which believed itself to have completely satisfied this requirement, I have never ceased to keep hold of the element of truth which Fichte's assertion seemed to me to contain; but I could not, at the same time, conceal from myself that there was a distinction which that assertion entirely effaced. For the world itself—the great subject of our investigations-I had no hesitation in presupposing this unity which drew all the individual particulars of real existence out of a common source; but it appeared to me to stand quite differently with philosophy, i.e., with the human endeavour, from the standpoint on which we find ourselves placed in the world, to wcik cut for our

selves an insight into that all-embracing system. It seemed to me that only a Spirit who stood in the centre of the universe which he himself had made, could, with the knowledge of the final aim which he had given to his creation, make all the particular parts of it pass before him in the majestic succession of an unbroken development. But we finite beings do not sit at this living root of all existence, but somewhere among the branches which have spread out from it; and only with many roundabouts, and with careful use of all the means of assistance which our position affords us, can we hope to acquire an approximate knowledge of the ground on which we stand, of the system to which we belong, and of the direction in which the motion of the great whole carries us along with it. The human mind can certainly

not be blamed for seeking, at every standpoint its knowledge reaches, to construct a complete image of the world as a whole, which shall rise, with logical rigour, from the fundamental position that has been won; but this task of a development which shall deduce the manifoldness of the world progressively out of a single fundamental principle, is in itself incapable of being completed; and, as against it, the more urgent and the greater work of philosophy must, I think, bear the shape of a regressive investigation which seeks to discover and to fix securely what principle is to be recognised and used as the living principle in the construction and course of the world.

neous.

There is still another doubt that arises in me, and makes me very uncertain whether, even at the end of my journey, I should have arrived at the same goal from which the idealistic views of that period set out. Ever since men have philosophized at all, they have moved between two extreme dispositions. The one, gloomy and diffident, holds the true core of actual existence to be a dim reality which never becomes accessible to the mind; the other, bold and full of hope, is confident that nothing is impenetrable to science, and is certain of being able to discover ideas as the inner essence of all that at first sight seems even yet so strange and inexplicable. I could share neither of these dispositions. I was certain that the first of them was erroThere might be, in the complexity of things, much, whether passing or durable, that remained hidden or obscured; but what was to me quite incredible was the notion of a universe split in two in such a way that the whole intellectual life had always to do with an external reality which was eternally impenetrable to it. But my prejudice in favour of the unity of the world, which the first of these views thus contradicted, was unable to determine me to adopt the second without reserve. Philosophy seeks to be science, and its instrument must therefore be simply the linking together of thoughts; and it is consequently easily led into the grave error of overrating, in a twofold way, the value of this instrument of its labours. It is very ready to look upon knowledge as the sole portal through which that which constitutes the essence of real existence can enter into connexion with the mind, and

to count the particular forms of connection by which, in our own thought, we apprehend and unite the manifold, to be the nerves, and the only nerves, which also bind together its several elements in the actual nature of things. But intellectual life is more than thought. Much goes on within us which even our thinking intelligence follows and contemplates only from without, and whose peculiar contents it cannot exhaustively represent, either in the form of an idea or through a union of ideas. He, therefore, who is animated by the conviction that real existence cannot be impenetrable to the mind, cannot with equal confidence assume that thought is the precise organ which will be able to comprehend the real in its innermost essence. I will revert a little later to the exact sense of these expressions, and I will at present explain their meaning merely by recalling the multitude of those who maintain that they experience that which is the highest in the world, perfectly intellectually, in faith, in feeling, in presentiment, in inspiration, and who yet acknowledge that they do not possess it in knowledge. We shall define our standpoint towards this view at a later stage, but we shall make to it one concession here in advance. All science can, of course, only operate with thoughts, and must follow the laws of our thinking; but it must understand that in all the objects it occupies itself with, and especially in that highest principle of all which it presupposes, it will find matter which, even if intellectually it were apprehended quite perfectly, could yet not be exhausted in the form of an idea or a thought. The organization of that matter, it will also find, links together its several members on a plan which is not demonstrable according to ordinary logical laws, but which, when it is known, indicates the direction in which thought must go to find the connection it seeks.

I should be misunderstood if I were thought to give these two thoughts out as permanent doctrinal views upon whose unambiguous understanding I could here already reckon; for I really intend by them to do no more than describe the disposition and the prejudices -prejudices still ignorant of their destination-with which I entered upon the lively philosophical current of my youth. He who recollects the history of that period will call to mind how many incitements to all these doubts lay in the philosophy of Hegel. That philosophy sought to lay bare, by its dialectic method, the whole contents of the physical and moral world, every particular thing in the precise place which it occupied in the world's plan; but of what it then disclosed it had little more to say than that it occupied that particular place. The peculiar character with which every separate part of the whole filled its place in the system remained a superfluous circumstance which was little considered and was counted incapable of being explained, and the essential thing in every fact and phenomenon. consisted in its repeating, as the Nth or N+1th example in the total series of all things real, one of the few abstract thoughts, which the

Hegelian method announced as the deepest sense of the world. It is known how widespread was the reaction against this degradation of everything peculiar and concrete, and how it led Schelling to the unfulfilled promise to supplant this system of necessity by a system of freedom. At first I cherished some sympathy for the form in which it was sought to fulfil this promise; but eventually I could not feel satisfied either with its results so far as they lay before me, or with the manner in which it was sought to obtain them; and in the end I found myself standing in complete contradiction to those views.

I would not have indulged in these personal reminiscences, if I were not convinced that, except in rare cases, a prolonged philosophical labour is nothing else but the attempt to justify, scientifically, a fundamental view of things which has been adopted in early life. In fact, philosophy is always a piece of life, and as we mutually support one another in the interchange of trade, so likewise the account of a movement of thought as it has taken shape in one man's breast may be useful also to others who are striving after the same goal. least I offer my thoughts with this object only, not with the vain hope of giving a definitive turn to the stream of investigation after it has had a course of thousands of years; but with the confidence that it will be acknowledged that I have not become tired at the beginning of my journey, but that I have tried to pursue it to the end, in order to make plain to myself whether, and how far, it was possible to give a scientific justification of a view which I could, of course, previously describe only as a prejudice of my own, as the subjective principle which impelled me.

And now the question which I had to leave unanswered at first comes back with a new sense. If it was impossible to state at once, in a short and sharp expression, what I actually supposed to be the living source of reality, it was the more desirable to ascertain that certain principle of knowledge from which, as a starting-point, it would be possible to determine and to explain a thought whose contents were as yet so indefinitely known. How often in the history of philosophy have men, finding themselves entangled in the consequences of earlier errors, formed the resolution to go back to the sources of all certainty, and how little fruit have all these attempts borne? And this failure might be seen beforehand. In the ores of a mine hitherto inaccessible, it may be possible to find a new metal, or an additional elementary substance, which will increase the number of those heretofore known; but how could we seriously hope now, after human. thought has gone over everything possible and impossible, for thousands of years, still to discover a new principle of certitude which was unknown to the world before? All such attempts have, in fact, gone back again by the shortest way to the longest-trodden paths. When Descartes, with an object of this nature, set out from the certainty of his Cogito, he placed at the head of his speculation