As we have seen, he asserts

Buckle is unlike common men. that the intellect, and not the moral sense, is the moving power in the world's progress, because "the results of the former are permanent," while the latter "cannot transmit the maxims of preceding experience." But, in the latter part of his volume, he extols Skepticism as the chief element of progress, "because it rejects all the records of the past." As we have seen, he pronounces morals powerless, because they are the result of self-discipline and self-sacrifice, and have to be worked out by every man himself. In a later part of the volume he ascribes the superiority of English civilization over French to "the self-discipline, the self-reliance, and self-government which every Englishman learns for himself;" in which the French are deficient, "though a great and splendid people, a people full of mettle, high-spirited, abounding in knowledge, and perhaps less oppressed by superstition than any other in Europe." (p. 453).

This is a strange fulfilment of the promise to prove that "the progress of Europe from barbarism has been due entirely to intellectual activity." We may comfort ourselves, however, that it is a promise more honored in the breach than in the observance. But it is a phenomenon quite as worthy of attention as any adduced by Mr. Buckle, that a learned scholar and able writer, proposing to prove that knowledge is a mightier agent than morals in social progress, because it transmits the cumulative experience of the past, should succeed in proving that this cumulative experience of the past is the chief hindrance to progress, and must be swept away before true progress can begin: and proposing also to prove that moral character is powerless as a social agent, because it must be worked out by each man for himself, should end by proving that this very moral character gives the solidity and momentum to social progress in England, which is wanting in France, though abounding in knowledge, and that it is with the English "a matter of hereditary descent, a traditional habit."

Our author would ascribe such inconsistency in a theologian to the blinding power of "superstition." Shall we

ascribe it, in Mr. Buckle, to the blinding power of "skepticism?" These are only specimens of a suppleness which is a habit with him. We give two other illustrations.

After demonstrating in his early chapters, as he claims, the futility of metaphysics, the invalidity of consciousness, and the folly of searching one's own mind for the laws of mental action, a reader is amazed to find him paying homage to Descartes, as "the most profound among the many eminent thinkers France has produced," "who effected a revolution more decisive than has been brought about by any other single mind" (p. 417), and who is to be honored above the most successful discoverers of physical laws, because we ought to prefer freedom to knowledge, and liberty to science." (p. 421.) When he adds to this extravagant praise the confession, that "the method of Descartes rests solely on the consciousness each man has of the operations of his own mind" (p. 422), and that "it is this which has given to his philosophy the peculiar sublimity which distinguishes it from all other systems' (p. 423), one feels instinctively that it would be wise in Don Quixote to have some accurate knowledge of windmills, before running a tilt at them.

To complete the refutation of his own principles, and give the coup de grace to the last pillar of his system, our author needs only to prove the importance of the individual in the movements of the great social wheel. He is not the man to fail in an important crisis, and he does this very thing. After claiming to have proved that the individual is of no account in the great march of society, he proves, with equal clearness, in the latter part of his volume, that progress is possible "only by the exercise of private judgment;" for this alone can give men "the hope of controlling, by their individual energy, the abuses to which all great societies are liable." (p. 464). The later theory of individual influence is also illustrated by the ability of Louis XIV. and Napoleon to give a complete check to the current of intellectual progress in France, and the ability of Henry IV. and Richelieu to accelerate its progress with equal power. If the rest of Mr. Buckle's great work shall resemble this first volume of his Introduction, the epitaph which Joseph II. of

Austria enjoined to be engraven on his tombstone, will be appropriate to the historian of Civilization, "Here lies a man who failed in everything he undertook."

We regret to have been compelled to speak so disparagingly of the work under review, for it is a work of wonderful originality and power, and the author is both a learned. scholar and a vigorous thinker and writer. If he could be cured of his rabid monomania on religious topics, and his mind be left to work in a "dry light," the first historians of our age would need to look to their laurels. But with his spiritual blindness, he is condemned to grope through the night of the past, helplessly. He will miss the subtle thread which alone can guide him through the complicated and many chambered labyrinth. The treasures which fall to the lot of the happy scholar, knowing the "open sesame" which loosens the doors of caverns holding the hoarded wealth of the past, will escape the searcher, who, like Cassio in the eastern fable, has lost the watch-word.

Mr. Buckle's antipathy to religion has led him to build his imposing structure on the sand, and it must fall. It has given him a true standard of civilization, as measured by man's mastery over nature, instead of by the nobler test of man's mastery over himself. It has led him to exalt knowledge above character; to institute a dangerous code of morals, which makes a criminal the helpless victim of social laws, instead of a voluntary and responsible transgressor. It has nurtured in him a love of railery and scoffing, which is fatal to all sober and candid investigation. It has seduced him into habits of partial induction, and hasty generalization, and specious reasoning, which are likely to inflict on him the mournful destiny of Cassandra in Grecian story, not to be believed when speaking the truth.

ART. IX.-EARLY GERMAN PHILOSOPHERS.

BEFORE the two young Giants of the Future, Russia and the United States, appeared upon the stage of history, the great powers of Europe had divided the world very satisfactorily among themselves. Britannia ruled the waves, French valor was triumphant on the firm land, and poor old Germany had the airy world of the mind for her realm. Matters have changed since: the young Republic boldly claims equal rights for her flag, and the youthful Empire in the East pants for a battle-field on which to prove that want of experience only deprived it of victory in the Crimea. But Germany has not yet been dethroned, and however superior we may think Englishmen and Frenchmen in many a science, the Philosophy of Germany has known no peer as yet since the days of ancient Greece.

And yet, who reads a book of German philosophy ?Coleridge did, and praised it; De Quincey forgets his keen, merciless analysis, and even grows enthusiastic, when speaking of Kant; but few indeed are those who dare dip into Hegel or Schelling, and try to digest their ponderous volumes. The fact is, our English fathers were no great admirers of German dreamers, as they contemptuously styled them, and we have strengthened the inherited prejudice by the practical tendencies of our national life. Our great scholars rarely rise from one of the few translated works of the kind without exclaiming, as true children of a Cui Bono age:

"Alas! what boots the long laborious quest ?"

If we ask our theologians and our literary men, why they judge German philosophy so harshly, and venture perhaps to inquire besides, why they know so little of what a great,

intellectual people consider the very flower and fruit of their national mind, we are generally met with three serious objections. We are told that the language of German philosophers is intolerably clumsy and obscure, that their theories are mostly fancies only and dreams, and that lastly, philosophy is inimical to religion, because it substitutes. Reason for Faith. Let us inquire how far these objections are well founded.

There is no denying that the phraseology of German philosophers appears, at first sight, little more than a jargon of German, Greek and Latin. It might, after all, be learned, as we familiarize ourselves with the outlandish vocabulary of Carlyle, but then again every German philosopher has his own language, and we might as well ask for a dictionary as for an index to the works of each one. How different are in this respect the French writers! There we find, ever since the vernacular was used for philosophic treatises, a pure, often an elegant language, and always a due regard to that charming rule of French style: What is not clear, is not French. Already in the seventeenth century their greatest master, Descartes, appears with his well known work, which marks the birth-day of Modern Philosophy, and exhibits in its beautiful language the rare combination of the clear head of the Mathematician with the refined elegance of the-high-bred courtier. Diderot, undoubtedly the first scholar of the last century, writes classic French. And so it is with him, to whom our thoughts involuntarily revert when the philosophy of Modern France is mentioned, with Victor Cousin, who is justly considered one of the best of modern writers, and even feels flattered when blamed for the exaggerated purity of his language. How the reader of such works must shudder when he first opens a German work on the same subject! Perhaps he has been told that Germany also has her Descartes, Kant, and eagerly he seizes upon his most renowned work and reads, almost dumbfounded, the first sentence: "How are synthetic judgments a priori possible?" He hopes to see more clearly at the end, and glancing at the final result, he finds recorded. there the mystic words: "Third part of the transcendental