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ophy from Descartes, if thereby we mean a philosophy founded on the psychological method and on the observation of the Ego. All this is said of M. de Biran. I do not exaggerate. The following are M. Naville's words:

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If this credit be not properly due M. de Biran he is at least entitled to a large share of it, and should by just title be considered as the founder of the psychological method. . . . Descartes without doubt has placed at the base of his metaphysical edifice the I am, the immediate expression of the fact of consciousness. But. scarcely has he taken a step before he abandons the ground of fact in order to launch into the world of ideas. . . . All the demands he makes of experience, the rights of which he is in a hurry to forget, is to be a stepping-stone from which to sally forth... It is then very vainly, as it seems to me, that for hastily seizing upon a word, the real import of which has not been examined, men have been willing to declare him the founder of the psychological method, and the promoter of internal observation in the entire speculative department. . . . The point from which all at once Descartes has taken his departure, namely, the I am, is where M. de Biran has stopped.

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If one limits himself to showing that M. de Biran is more exclusively a psychologist than Descartes it is undeniably true. But because a great intellect, which embraced in their wholeness the problems of philosophy, did not circumscribe all his life in the study of his own nature, this is not a sufficient motive for accusing him of having forgotten the importance of that study. The allegation is indeed founded upon the smallness of the place accorded to the I think, therefore I am, in the Discourse on Method. But this discourse is but an abridgment of the philosophy of Descartes. It is unnecessary that its brevity should cause this illusion. All there is recapitulated and condensed, namely, the study of God, and that of the physical world, as well as that of the science of the soul; and that is laid at the base of all the system, not, as one has well said, a single fact taken at hazard in its domain, but, I repeat it, the science of the entire soul. The design of Descartes in this respect has nothing of doubt or of obscurity; it is developed fully enough in the Meditations, in the Responses to the Objections, and in the Principles of Philosophy. Let any one read the Meditations in particular, and he will see that Descartes is not content merely to establish the I think, therefore I am; but that before he launches forth more deeply he tries to render an account of his own nature. FOURTH SERIES, VOL. XIV.-41

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There, then, he gives but a summary of his doctrine of the soul. But we may judge of the value he attached to it by that admirable passage placed at the opening of the third Meditation: "I will firmly shut my eyes, I will close my ears, I will efface from my thought all images of things corporeal; or, at least, since I am hardly able to do this, I will consider them as vain and as false; and thus keeping on by myself and considering my interior, I will try to become little by little more acquainted and more familiar with myself." Finally, history presents us a magnificent commentary on the thought of Descartes, in the development of his school, in that succession of writings upon the knowledge of himself, on the nature of man, and on the human understanding, in which it suffices us to recall the chief works of Malebranche and Locke. Before we arrive at M. de Biran, it is necessary to go through with Kant and Reid, not to make mention of Condillac, whose school has meantime finished by placing all philosophy in psychology, confounded, it is true, with the analysis of the sensations.

M. de Biran partook of the narrow manner of viewing philosophy. More slowly his views expanded it, but he remained always within the limits of psychology; and there even he did not ascribe to all the elements of human nature their legitimate part. To the exclusive doctrine of the man-sensation he opposed the doctrine, almost as exclusive, of the man-will; and, omitting reason, he does not know how to explain the knowledge of first truths, the idea of the infinite, and even the notion of duty. Strange fact, and yet incontestable; M. de Biran has left the ethical without the pale of his philosophy. We can hardly be enough astonished that a spirit so penetrating and so conscientious should have remained so long a time plunged in the study of the will, without ever seriously preoccupying itself with the law of that will. Nothing is more true, meantime, than this apparent paradox. No writing of M. de Biran has thus far come to disprove this; and the Fragments on the Foundations of Morality, which contain the third volume of the new publication, as well as the interesting preface of M. Marc Debrit, do themselves prove but one thing, namely, the exclusive attachment of the author to the psychological analysis. They go to confirm at once the more important critiques passed upon him by his first editor, when he signalized the omissions of the system.

"The theory of M. de Biran," said he, "true in itself, is profound but narrow. M. de Biran has recovered, and properly replaced, a real order of facts entirely forgotten and effaced; he has separated from sensation and re-established in his independence the voluntary and free activity which characterizes the human personality. But, as if exhausted in this work, he did not retain enough force or light to seek and discern another order of phenomena hidden under the two first."

M. Naville, in his turn, noticed with not less force than M. Cousin this default, so to be regretted in a philosopher on the will. He expatiates on this double singularity of a profound analysis of human activity, which passes in silence the motives of our actions, and of a theory of knowledge, which separates itself from sensualism without bringing to light the ideas and notions irreducible to experience. Axioms, principles of the reason, moral law, existence of God, necessary truths, the rational order, are all wholly absent. How could a philosopher so decidedly empiric become Christian ?

II. The empiricism of M. de Biran, according to the remark of his editor, is of a nature entirely peculiar, and ought not to be confounded with any other. The author of the Essays belongs, then, it is true, to the school of experience; but this is due "to the omissions of his method rather than to his method itself."

In short, if M. de Biran did not ascribe to thought a suitable place in his analysis, it did not proceed so much from a resolution taken to deny reason, as from a profound sentiment of the activity of the will, and from a desire of establishing its reality by means of experience. If he had for a long time the fault of rejecting all distinction between the intellect and the will, it was not that he wished to weaken or suppress the most elevated conceptions of the soul. It was rather the exaggeration of a truth too little remarked even then, and which M. Naville has developed with a just complaisance, namely, that the spontaneous activity of the soul does not necessarily suppose thought, but that, on the contrary, intelligence has for an indispensable condition the first activity, of which it is but a manifestation, either as it sought truth, or as it adhered to it with more or less energy. Now this preoccupation of the character of the will in the acts of intelligence carried its remedy with it. Precisely,

because M. de Biran constantly demanded, What are our powers? he was obliged to recognize sooner or later, as formerly the later stoics, but in a different manner, the limits of our voluntary power. So we see him, in 1813, avowing to himself that attention is not cognition, and that effort no more creates ideas than the fact of opening the eyes creates light. "To open the eyes of the spirit," says he, "to direct them to the spot from whence comes the light, to hold their gaze fixed upon an object, comprise all our powers, and all in which our liberty consists. From this, then, he more and more clearly distinguishes two sorts of thought: on one part, cognition, properly so called, which he continues to call experience, and which rests on the consciousness of the voluntary and free action, or of the Ego; on the other part, belief, that is to say, the fated and necessary conviction of all truths, which he calls absolute, such as the soul in its substance, the existence of the corporeal substance, universal notions, principles, and above all the infinite, the eternal, in short, God; of whom the idea daily acquired grandeur in his soul and took a place in his philosophy. From the year 1818 M. de Biran entered decidedly into a new phase, in which the philosophy of the will, which he had at first joined to, or rather substituted for, that of sensation, found itself completed and corrected in its turn by a higher philosophy. We can judge of the channel of his thought by the following passage, in which he lays down the division and plan of his New Essays on Anthropology, commenced in 1823:

I shall form three divisions of the science of man, such as I conceive it to be. This notion of man is infinitely complicated, since it includes all the passive modes of our existence, all the diverse products of the living forces which constitute it. These living forces, or these lives which interior experience knows how to distinguish, and which the inner sense does not allow us to mistake, are three, and not merely one; although there is but one man logically, and psychologically but a unique Ego. I shall lay down, therefore, three divisions of this work. The first comprehends the phenomena of animal life, which I do not distinguish from that which has been distinguished under the title of organic life. I shall say why this distinction, futile in itself, is useless for my object. The second division will include the facts relative to the proper life of man as a feeling and thinking subject, obedient to the passions of the animal life, and at the same time free to act in its proper force and in virtue of this force alone, a moral person, an Ego, which knows itself, and knows other things, exercises diverse intellectual oper

ations which have their common principle in the consciousness of the Ego, or in the active force which constitutes it. The third division, the most important of all, is that which philosophy even to the present time has felt it necessary to abandon to the speculations of mysticism, although it also resolves itself in facts of observation, exploring an elevated nature, it is true, superior to sense, but not foreign to the spirit which knows God and itself. This division will comprehend, then, the facts or modes and acts of the spiritual life. . . . All the faculties relative to the spiritual life constitute the spirit of man in a state of pure receptivity of an influence superior to itself, but not foreign to its most elevated nature. This influence, in manifesting itself to the spirit's interior view, reveals at the same time the spirit itself as at the base of all, and as in connection with an ideal of beauty, of intellectual and moral perfection, etc. (New Essays. Introduction, tome iii, pp. 356-357.)

The New Essays were destined, in the thought of their author, to explain the nature of each of these three lives, in showing their differences, their mutual connections, and their hierarchy. Death did not permit him to finish his work; but we have an outline of it, which suffices at the least to give us a knowledge of its essential traits, and to attest the presence of a definitive doctrine, of which we find remaining but the indications. We shall examine soon, in another article, the import of this later evolution of his thought."

ART. VII.-THE EXPLOITS AND MIRACLES OF FRANCIS XAVIER.

Life of St. Francis Xavier, Confessor, Apostle of the Indies. By Rev. ALBAN BUTLER. Dublin: 1833.

Life of a Jesuit Missionary.

London: 1852.

By Rev. W. H. RULE, D. D.

THE Church of Rome, from the period of her pretension to ecumenical supremacy, has sought in various ways to profit by the credulity of mankind. She has forged apostolical constitutions, she has sought to authenticate false decretals; and to say nothing now of her system of indulgences, by which she has made merchandise of the souls of men, she has encouraged the traffic in relics till Europe and other portions of the Catholic

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