Page:Essays in Philosophy (1856).djvu/41

 philosophy of Kant is an attempt, by the application of this principle, to collect the several truths with which the soul is at first furnished, and to view them in their relation to the added facts of experience.

Philosophy has ever been a struggle between the spirit of doubt and the spirit of dogmatism—of which the one declines to admit as true any conclusion that is not the result of logical deduction, and the other assumes, in whole or in part, the principles which the sceptic assails. Men in all ages have been oscillating between these extremes. The many, in whom the love of order and simplicity naturally predominates, and who are likely to be aiming at a philosophy in which every assumption and conclusion is capable of being conceived and explained by the understanding, may find, in the singularly acute " Treatise" of Hume, the results of such shallow metaphysics. A more profound view of what is revealed to reflection, finds an infinity of things which the understanding cannot solve, and which, while not contrary to sense, are yet above sense. A love for the mystic obscurity in which this principle involves the higher truths of knowledge, may confine an enthusiastic thinker exclusively within that region of abstraction, and conduct him altogether away from sense and experience, till, lost