Page:The New Monthly Magazine - Volume 097.djvu/389

Rh ignoring the means. Béralde may well be an infidel in the ways of materia medica, when his conviction is, "que les ressorts de notre machine sent des mystères, jusqu'ici, où les hommes ne voient goutte; et que la nature nous a mis au-devant des yeux des voiles trop épais pour y connaitre quelaue chose." A like conviction, uttered or unexpressed, definite or indefinite, pervades the popular mind in the case of metaphysics, the veil which covers their secrets is pronounced impenetrable—as dense a fog of mystery as one of those November visitations which, however, have the advantage of being sensible to an oyster-knife. Long ago Mr. Carlyle deplored the condition of the two great departments of knowledge; the outward, cultivated exclusively on mechanical principles—the inward, or metaphysical, finally abandoned, because, cultivated on such principles, it is found to yield no result: and he pointed with alarm to the growing persuasion that, except the external, there are no true sciences—that to the inward world, if there be any, our only conceivable road is through the outward; that, in short, what cannot be investigated and understood mechanically, cannot be investigated and understood at all. "Among ourselves," he affirms, "the Philosophy of Mind, after a rickety infancy, which never reached the vigour of manhood, fell suddenly into decay, languished, and finally died out with its last amiable cultivator, Professor Stewart."

Cultivators, amiable or otherwise, of the Philosophy of Mind, nevertheless exist amongst us. If that philosophy died out with Dugald Stewart, it was not finally. It has had its resurrection—if to nothing better than another rickety infancy. And, with all respect for the memory of the Edinburgh professor m question, we submit that there is far more of the vigour of manhood—its bone and muscle, its condensed energy, its firm grasp, its piercing vision—in Sir William Hamilton,