Chapter IV: Preface: V (3)

As to religious oratory, _that_ stands upon a different footing--the questions afloat in that province of human speculation being eternal, or at least essentially the same under new forms, receives a strong illustration from the annals of the English senate, to which also it gives a strong and useful illustration. Up to the era of James I., the eloquence of either House could not, for political reasons, be very striking, on the very principle which we have been enforcing. Parliament met only for dispatch of business; and that business was purely fiscal, or (as at times it happened) judicial. The constitutional functions of Parliament were narrow; and they were narrowed still more severely by the jealousy of the executive government. With the expansion, or rather first growth and development of a gentry, or third estate, expanded, _pari passu_, the political field of their jurisdiction and their deliberative functions. This widening field, as a birth out of new existences, unknown to former laws or usages, was, of course, not contemplated by those laws or usages. Constitutional law could not provide for the exercise of rights by a body of citizens, when, as yet, that body had itself no existence. A gentry, as the depository of a vast overbalance of property, real as well as personal, had not matured itself till the latter years of James I. Consequently the new functions, which the instinct of their new situation prompted them to assume, were looked upon by the Crown, most sincerely, as unlawful usurpations. This led, as we know, to a most fervent and impassioned struggle, the most so of any struggle which has ever armed the hands of men with the sword. For the passions take a far profounder sweep when they are supported by deep thought and high principles.

This element of fervid strife was already, for itself, an atmosphere most favourable to political eloquence. Accordingly, the speeches of that day, though generally too short to attain that large compass and sweep of movement without which it is difficult to kindle or to sustain any conscious enthusiasm in an audience, were of a high quality as to thought and energy of expression, as high as their circumstantial disadvantages allowed. Lord Strafford's great effort is deservedly admired to this day, and the latter part of it has been often pronounced a _chef-d'oeuvre_. A few years before that era, all the orators of note were, and must have been, judicial orators; and, amongst these, Lord Bacon, to whom every reader's thoughts will point as the most memorable, attained the chief object of all oratory, if what Ben Jonson reports of him be true, that he had his audience passive to the motions of his will. But Jonson was, perhaps, too scholastic a judge to be a fair representative judge; and, whatever he might choose to say or to think, Lord Bacon was certainly too weighty--too massy with the bullion of original thought--ever to have realized the idea of a great popular orator--one who

'Wielded at will a fierce democracy,'

and ploughed up the great deeps of sentiment, or party strife, or national animosities, like a Levanter or a monsoon. In the schools of Plato, in the _palæstra Stoicorum_, such an orator might be potent; not _in fæce Romuli_. If he had laboured with no other defect, had he the gift of tautology? Could he say the same thing three times over in direct sequence? For, without this talent of iteration--of repeating the same thought in diversified forms--a man may utter good heads of an oration, but not an oration. Just as the same illustrious man's essays are good hints--useful topics--for essays; but no approximation to what we, in modern days, understand by _essays_: they are, as an eminent author once happily expressed it to myself, '_seeds, not plants or shrubs; acorns, that is, oaks in embryo, but not oaks_.'

Reverting, however, to the oratory of the Senate, from the era of its proper birth, which we may date from the opening of that our memorable Long Parliament, brought together in November of 1642,[19] our Parliamentary eloquence has now, within four years, travelled through a period of two centuries. A most admirable subject for an essay, or a Magazine article, as it strikes me, would be a bird's-eye view--or rather a bird's-wing flight--pursuing rapidly the revolutions of that memorable oracle (for such it really was to the rest of civilised Europe), which, through so long a course of years, like the Delphic oracle to the nations of old, delivered counsels of civil prudence and of national grandeur, that kept alive for Christendom the recollections of freedom, and refreshed to the enslaved Continent the old ideas of Roman patriotism, which, but for our Parliament, would have uttered themselves by no voices on earth. That this account of the position occupied by our British Parliament, in relation to the rest of Europe, at least after the publication of the Debates had been commenced by Cave, with the aid of Dr. Johnson, is, in no respect, romantic or overcharged, may be learned from the German novels of the last century, in which we find the British debates as uniformly the morning accompaniment of breakfast, at the houses of the rural gentry, &c., as in any English or Scottish county. Such a sketch would, of course, collect the characteristics of each age, show in what connection these characteristics stood with the political aspects of the time, or with the modes of managing public business (a fatal rock to our public eloquence in England!), and illustrate the whole by interesting specimens from the leading orators in each generation: from Hampden to Pulteney, amongst oppositionists or patriots; from Pulteney to O'Connell; or, again, amongst Ministers, from Hyde to Somers, from Lord Sunderland to Lords Oxford and Bolingbroke; and from the plain, downright Sir Robert Walpole, to the plain, downright Sir Robert Peel.

[Footnote 19: There was another Parliament of this same year 1642, which met in the spring (April, I think), but was summarily dissolved. A small quarto volume, of not unfrequent occurrence, I believe, contains some good specimens of the eloquence then prevalent--it was rich in thought, never wordy--in fact, too parsimonious in words and illustrations; and it breathed a high tone of religious principle as well as of pure-minded patriotism; but, for the reason stated above--its narrow circuit and very limited duration--the general character of the Parliamentary eloquence was ineffective.]

Throughout the whole of this review, the same 'moral,' if one might so call it, would be apparent--viz. that in proportion as the oratory was high and intellectual, did it travel out into the collateral questions of less instant necessity, but more durable interest; and that, in proportion as the Grecian necessity _was_ or was _not_ enforced by the temper of the House, or by the pressure of public business--the necessity which cripples the orator, by confining him within the severe limits of the case before him--in that proportion had or had not the oratory of past generations a surviving interest for modern posterity. Nothing, in fact, so utterly effete--not even old law, or old pharmacy, or old erroneous chemistry--nothing so insufferably dull as political orations, unless when powerfully animated by that spirit of generalisation which only gives the breath of life and the salt which preserves from decay, through every age alike. The very strongest proof, as well as exemplification of all which has been said on Grecian oratory, may thus be found in the records of the British senate.

And this, by the way, brings us round to an aspect of Grecian oratory which has been rendered memorable, and forced upon our notice, in the shape of a problem, by the most popular of our native historians--the aspect, I mean, of Greek oratory in comparison with English. Hume has an essay upon the subject; and the true answer to that essay will open a wide field of truth to us. In this little paper, Hume assumes the superiority of Grecian eloquence, as a thing admitted on all hands, and requiring no proof. Not the proof of this point did he propose to himself as his object; not even the illustration of it. No. All that, Hume held to be superfluous. His object was, to investigate the causes of this Grecian superiority; or, if _investigate_ is too pompous a word for so slight a discussion, more properly, he inquired for the cause as something that must naturally lie upon the surface.

What is the answer? First of all, before looking for causes, a man should be sure of his facts. Now, as to the main fact at issue, I utterly deny the superiority of Grecian eloquence. And, first of all, I change the whole field of inquiry by shifting the comparison. The Greek oratory is all political or judicial: we have those also; but the best of our eloquence, by immeasurable degrees, the noblest and richest, is our religious eloquence. Here, of course, all comparison ceases; for classical Grecian religious eloquence, in Grecian attire, there is none until three centuries after the Christian era, when we have three great orators, Gregory Nazianzen, Basil--of which two I have a very fixed opinion, having read large portions of both--and a third of whom I know nothing. To our Jeremy Taylor, to our Sir Thomas Browne, there is no approach made in the Greek eloquence. The inaugural chapter of the _Holy Dying_, to say nothing of many another golden passage; or the famous passage in the _Urn Buriall_, beginning--'Now, since these bones have rested under the drums and tramplings of three conquests'--have no parallel in literature. The winding up of the former is more, in its effect, like a great tempestuous chorus from the _Judas Maccabeus_, or from Spohr's _St. Paul_, than like human eloquence.

But, grant that this transfer of the comparison is unfair--still, it is no less unfair to confine the comparison on our part to the weakest part of our oratory; but no matter--let issue be joined even here. Then we may say, at once, that, for the intellectual qualities of eloquence, in fineness of understanding, in depth and in large compass of thought, Burke far surpasses any orator, ancient or modern. But, if the comparison were pushed more widely, very certain I am, that, apart from classical prejudice, no qualities of just thinking, or fine expression, or even of artificial ornament, could have been assigned by Hume, in which the great body of our deliberative and forensic orators fall short of Grecian models; though I will admit, that, by comparison with the Roman model of Cicero, there is seldom the same artful prefiguration of the oration throughout its future course, or the same sustained rhythmus and oratorial tone. The qualities of art are nowhere so prominently expressed, nowhere aid the effect so much, as in the great Roman master.

But, as to Greece, let us now, in one word, unveil the sole advantage which the eloquence of the Athenian _assembly_ has over that of the English senate. It is this--_the public business of Athens was as yet simple and unencumbered by details_; the dignity of the occasion was scenically sustained. But, in England, the vast intricacy and complex interweaving of property, of commerce, of commercial interests, of details infinite in number, and infinite in littleness, break down and fritter away into fractions and petty minutiæ, the whole huge labyrinth of our public affairs. It is scarcely necessary to explain my meaning. In Athens, the question before the public assembly was, peace or war--before our House of Commons, perhaps the Exchequer Bills' Bill; at Athens, a league or no league--in England, the Tithe of Agistment Commutation-Bills' Renewal Bill; in Athens--shall we forgive a ruined enemy? in England--shall we cancel the tax on farthing rushlights? In short, with us, the infinity of details overlays the simplicity and grandeur of our public deliberations.

Such was the advantage--a mighty advantage--for Greece. Now, finally, for the use made of this advantage. To that point I have already spoken. By the clamorous and undeliberative qualities of the Athenian political audience, by its fitful impatience, and vehement arrogance, and fervid partisanship, all wide and general discussion was barred _in limine_. And thus occurred this singular inversion of positions--the greatest of Greek orators was obliged to treat these Catholic questions as mere Athenian questions of business. On the other hand, the least eloquent of British senators, whether from the immense advance in knowledge, or from the custom and usage of Parliament, seldom fails, more or less, to elevate his intense details of pure technical business into something dignified, either by the necessities of pursuing the _historical_ relations of the matter in discussion, or of arguing its merits as a case of general finance, or as connected with general political economy, or, perhaps, in its bearings on peace or war. The Grecian was forced, by the composition of his headstrong auditory, to degrade and personalise his grand themes; the Englishman is forced, by the difference of his audience, by old prescription, and by the opposition of a well-informed, hostile party, into elevating his merely technical and petty themes into great national questions, involving honour and benefit to tens of millions.

THE GERMAN LANGUAGE, AND PHILOSOPHY OF KANT.

Using a New Testament, of which (in the narrative parts at least) any one word being given will suggest most of what is immediately consecutive, you evade the most irksome of the penalties annexed to the first breaking ground in a new language: you evade the necessity of hunting up and down a dictionary. Your own memory, and the inevitable suggestions of the context, furnish a dictionary _pro hac vice_. And afterwards, upon advancing to other books, where you are obliged to forego such aids, and to swim without corks, you find yourself already in possession of the particles for expressing addition, succession, exception, inference--in short, of all the forms by which transition or connection is effected (_if_, _but_, _and_, _therefore_, _however_, _notwithstanding_), together with all those adverbs for modifying or restraining the extent of a subject or a predicate, which in all languages alike compose the essential frame-work or _extra-linear_ machinery of human thought. The filling-up--the _matter_ (in a scholastic sense)--may differ infinitely; but the _form_, the periphery, the determining moulds into which this matter is fused--all this is the same for ever: and so wonderfully limited in its extent is this frame-work, so narrow and rapidly revolving is the clock-work of connections among human thoughts, that a dozen pages of almost any book suffice to exhaust all the [Greek: epea pteroenta][20] which express them. To have mastered these [Greek: epea pteroenta] is in effect to have mastered seven-tenths, at the least, of any language; and the benefit of using a New Testament, or the familiar parts of an Old Testament, in this preliminary drill, is, that your own memory is thus made to operate as a perpetual dictionary or nomenclator. I have heard Mr. Southey say that, by carrying in his pocket a Dutch, Swedish, or other Testament, on occasion of a long journey performed in '_muggy_' weather, and in the inside of some venerable 'old heavy'--such as used to bestow their tediousness upon our respectable fathers some thirty or forty years ago--he had more than once turned to so valuable an account the doziness or the dulness of his fellow-travellers, that whereas he had 'booked' himself at the coach-office utterly [Greek: analphabêtos], unacquainted with the first rudiments of the given language, he had made his parting bows to his coach brethren (secretly returning thanks to them for their stupidity), in a condition for grappling with any common book in that dialect. One of the polyglot Old or New Testaments published by Bagster, would be a perfect Encyclopædia, or _Panorganon_, for such a scheme of coach discipline, upon dull roads and in dull company. As respects the German language in particular, I shall give one caution from my own experience, to the self-instructor: it is a caution which applies to the German language exclusively, or to that more than to any other, because the embarrassment which it is meant to meet, grows out of a defect of taste characteristic of the German mind. It is this: elsewhere, you would naturally, as a beginner, resort to _prose_ authors, since the license and audacity of poetic thinking, and the large freedom of a poetic treatment, cannot fail to superadd difficulties of individual creation to the general difficulties of a strange dialect. But this rule, good for every other case, is _not_ good for the literature of Germany. Difficulties there certainly are, and perhaps in more than the usual proportion, from the German peculiarities of poetic treatment; but even these are overbalanced in the result, by the single advantage of being limited in the extent by the metre, or (as it may happen) by the particular stanza. To German poetry there is a known, fixed, calculable limit. Infinity, absolute infinity, is impracticable in any German metre. Not so with German prose. Style, in any sense, is an inconceivable idea to a German intellect. Take the word in the limited sense of what the Greeks called [Greek: Synthesis onomatôn]--_i. e._ the construction of sentences--I affirm that a German (unless it were here and there a Lessing) cannot admit such an idea. Books there are in German, and, in other respects, very good books too, which consist of one or two enormous sentences. A German sentence describes an arch between the rising and the setting sun. Take Kant for illustration: he has actually been complimented by the cloud-spinner, Frederic Schlegel, who is now in Hades, as a most original artist in the matter of style. 'Original' Heaven knows he was! His idea of a sentence was as follows:--We have all seen, or read of, an old family coach, and the process of packing it for a journey to London some seventy or eighty years ago. Night and day, for a week at least, sate the housekeeper, the lady's maid, the butler, the gentleman's gentleman, &c., packing the huge ark in all its recesses, its 'imperials,' its 'wills,' its 'Salisbury boots,' its 'sword-cases,' its front pockets, side pockets, rear pockets, its 'hammer-cloth cellars' (which a lady explains to me as a corruption from _hamper-cloth_, as originally a cloth for hiding a hamper, stored with _viaticum_), until all the uses and needs of man, and of human life, savage or civilised, were met with separate provision by the infinite chaos. Pretty nearly upon the model of such an old family coach packing, did Kant institute and pursue the packing and stuffing of one of his regular sentences. Everything that could ever be needed in the way of explanation, illustration, restraint, inference, by-clause, or indirect comment, was to be crammed, according to this German philosopher's taste, into the front pockets, side pockets, or rear pockets, of the one original sentence. Hence it is that a sentence will last in reading whilst a man

'Might reap an acre of his neighbour's corn.'

Nor is this any peculiarity of Kant's. It is common to the whole family of prose writers of Germany, unless when they happen to have studied French models, who cultivate the opposite extreme. As a caution, therefore, practically applied to this particular anomaly in German prose-writing, I advise all beginners to choose between two classes of composition--ballad poetry, or comedy--as their earliest school of exercise; ballad poetry, because the form of the stanza (usually a quatrain) prescribes a very narrow range to the sentences; comedy, because the form of dialogue, and the imitation of daily life in its ordinary tone of conversation, and the spirit of comedy naturally suggesting a brisk interchange of speech, all tend to short sentences. These rules I soon drew from my own experience and observation. And the one sole purpose towards which I either sought or wished for aid, respected the pronunciation; not so much for attaining a just one (which I was satisfied could not be realised out of Germany, or, at least, out of a daily intercourse with Germans) as for preventing the formation, unawares, of a radically false one. The guttural and palatine sounds of the _ch_, and some other German peculiarities, cannot be acquired without constant practice. But the false Westphalian or Jewish pronunciation of the vowels, diphthongs, &c., may easily be forestalled, though the true delicacy of Meissen should happen to be missed. Thus much guidance I purchased, with a very few guineas, from my young Dresden tutor, who was most anxious for permission to extend his assistance; but this I would not hear of: and, in the spirit of fierce (perhaps foolish) independence, which governed most of my actions at that time of life, I did all the rest for myself.

'It was a banner broad unfurl'd,
The picture of that western world.'

These, or words like these, in which Wordsworth conveys the sudden apocalypse, as by an apparition, to an ardent and sympathising spirit, of the stupendous world of America, rising, at once, like an exhalation, with all its shadowy forests, its endless savannas, and its pomp of solitary waters--well and truly might I have applied to my first launching upon that vast billowy ocean of the German literature. As a past literature, as a literature of inheritance and tradition, the German was nothing. Ancestral titles it had none; or none comparable to those of England, Spain, or even Italy; and there, also, it resembled America, as contrasted with the ancient world of Asia, Europe, and North Africa.[21] But, if its inheritance were nothing, its prospects, and the scale of its present development, were in the amplest style of American grandeur. _Ten thousand_ new books, we are assured by Menzel, an author of high reputation--a _literal myriad_--is considerably below the number annually poured from all quarters of Germany, into the vast reservoir of Leipsic; spawn infinite, no doubt, of crazy dotage, of dreaming imbecility, of wickedness, of frenzy, through every phasis of Babylonian confusion; yet, also, teeming and heaving with life and the instincts of truth--of truth hunting and chasing in the broad daylight, or of truth groping in the chambers of darkness; sometimes seen as it displays its cornucopia of tropical fruitage; sometimes heard dimly, and in promise, working its way through diamond mines. Not the tropics, not the ocean, not life itself, is such a type of variety, of infinite forms, or of creative power, as the German literature, in its recent motions (say for the last twenty years), gathering, like the Danube, a fresh volume of power at every stage of its advance. A banner it was, indeed, to me of miraculous promise, and suddenly unfurled. It seemed, in those days, an El Dorado as true and undeceiving as it was evidently inexhaustible. And the central object in this interminable wilderness of what then seemed imperishable bloom and verdure--the very tree of knowledge in the midst of this Eden--was the new or transcendental philosophy of Immanuel Kant.

[Footnote 20: [Greek: Epea pteroenta], literally _winged words_. To explain the use and origin of this phrase to non-classical readers, it must be understood that, originally, it was used by Homer to express the few, rapid, and significant words which conveyed some hasty order, counsel, or notice, suited to any sudden occasion or emergency: _e. g._ 'To him flying from the field the hero addressed these winged words--"Stop, coward, or I will transfix thee with my spear."' But by Horne Tooke, the phrase was adopted on the title-page of his _Diversions of Purley_, as a pleasant symbolic expression for all the non-significant particles, the _articuli_ or joints of language, which in his well-known theory are resolved into abbreviations or compendious forms (and therefore rapid, flying, _winged_ forms), substituted for significant forms of greater length. Thus, _if_ is a non-significant particle, but it is an abbreviated form of an imperative in the second person--substituted for gif, or give, or grant the case--put the case that. All other particles are shown by Horne Tooke to be equally shorthand (or _winged_) substitutions.]

[Footnote 21: It has been rather too much forgotten, that Africa, from the northern margin of Bilidulgerid and the Great Desert, southwards--everywhere, in short, beyond Egypt, Cyrene, and the modern Barbary States--belongs, as much as America, to the New World--the world unknown to the ancients.]

I have described the gorgeousness of my expectations in those early days of my prelusive acquaintance with German literature. I have a little lingered in painting that glad aurora of my first pilgrimage to the fountains of the Rhine and of the Danube, in order adequately to shadow out the gloom and blight which soon afterwards settled upon the hopes of that golden dawn. In Kant, I had been taught to believe, were the keys of a new and a creative philosophy. Either '_ejus ductu_,' or '_ejus auspiciis_'--that is, either directly under his guidance, or indirectly under any influence remotely derived from his principles--I looked confidingly to see the great vistas and avenues of truth laid open to the philosophic inquirer. Alas! all was a dream. Six weeks' study was sufficient to close my hopes in that quarter for ever. The philosophy of Kant--so famous, so commanding in Germany, from about the period of the French Revolution--already, in 1805, I had found to be a philosophy of destruction, and scarcely, in any one chapter, so much as _tending_ to a philosophy of reconstruction. It destroys by wholesale, and it substitutes nothing. Perhaps, in the whole history of man, it is an unexampled case, that such a scheme of speculation--which offers nothing seducing to human aspirations, nothing splendid to the human imagination, nothing even positive and affirmative to the human understanding--should have been able to found an interest so broad and deep among thirty-five millions of cultivated men. The English reader who supposes this interest to have been confined to academic bowers, or the halls of philosophic societies, is most inadequately alive to the case. Sects, heresies, schisms, by hundreds, have arisen out of this philosophy--many thousands of books have been written by way of teaching it, discussing it, extending it, opposing it. And yet it is a fact, that all its doctrines are negative--teaching, in no case, what we _are_, but simply what we are _not_ to believe--and that all its truths are barren. Such being its unpopular character, I cannot but imagine that the German people have received it with so much ardour, from profound incomprehension of its meaning, and utter blindness to its drift--a solution which may seem extravagant, but is not so; for, even amongst those who have expressly commented on this philosophy, not one of the many hundreds whom I have myself read, but has retracted from every attempt to explain its dark places. In these dark places lies, indeed, the secret of its attraction. Were light poured into them, it would be seen that they are _culs-de-sac_, passages that lead to nothing; but, so long as they continue dark, it is not known whither they lead, how far, in what direction, and whether, in fact, they may not issue into paths connected directly with the positive and the infinite. Were it known that upon every path a barrier faces you insurmountable to human steps--like the barriers which fence in the Abyssinian valley of Rasselas--the popularity of this philosophy would expire at once; for no popular interest can long be sustained by speculations which, in every aspect, are known to be essentially negative and essentially finite. Man's nature has something of infinity within itself, which requires a corresponding infinity in its objects. We are told, indeed, by Mr. Bulwer, that the Kantian system has ceased to be of any authority in Germany--that it is defunct, in fact--and that we have first begun to import it into England, after its root had withered, or begun to wither, in its native soil. But Mr. Bulwer is mistaken. The philosophy has never withered in Germany. It cannot even be said that its fortunes have retrograded: they have oscillated: accidents of taste and ability in particular professors, or caprices of fashion, have given a momentary fluctuation to this or that new form of Kantianism,--an ascendency, for a period, to various, and, in some respects, conflicting, modifications of the transcendental system; but all alike have derived their power mediately from Kant. No weapons, even if employed as hostile weapons, are now forged in any armoury but that of Kant; and, to repeat a Roman figure which I used above, all the modern polemic tactics of what is called metaphysics, are trained and made to move either _ejus ductu_ or _ejus auspiciis_. Not one of the new systems affects to call back the Leibnitzian philosophy, the Cartesian, or any other of earlier or later date, as adequate to the purposes of the intellect in this day, or as capable of yielding even a sufficient terminology. Let this last fact decide the question of Kant's vitality. _Qui bene distinguit bene docet._ This is an old adage. Now, he who imposes new names upon all the acts, the functions, and the objects of the philosophic understanding, must be presumed to have distinguished most sharply, and to have ascertained with most precision, their general relations--_so long as his terminology continues to be adopted_. This test, applied to Kant, will show that his spirit yet survives in Germany. Frederic Schlegel, it is true, twenty years ago, in his lectures upon literature, assures us that even the disciples of the great philosopher have agreed to abandon his philosophic nomenclature. But the German philosophic literature, since that date, tells another tale. Mr. Bulwer is, therefore, wrong; and, without going to Germany, looking only to France, he will see cause to revise his sentence. Cousin--the philosophic Cousin, the only great name in philosophy for modern France--familiar as he is with North Germany, can hardly be presumed unacquainted with a fact so striking, if it _were_ a fact, as the extinction of a system once so triumphantly supreme as that of Kant; and yet Mr. Bulwer, admiring Cousin as he does, cannot but have noticed his efforts to naturalise Kant in France. Meantime, if it were even true that transcendentalism had lost its hold of the public mind in Germany, _primâ facie_, this would prove little more than the fickleness of that public which must have been wrong in one of the two cases--either when adopting the system, or when rejecting it. Whatever there may be of truth and value in the system, will remain unimpeached by such caprices, whether of an individual or of a great nation; and England would still be in the right to import the philosophy, however late in the day, if it were true even (which I doubt greatly) that she _is_ importing it.

Both truth and value there certainly _is_ in one part of the Kantian philosophy; and that part is its foundation. I had intended, at this point, to introduce an outline of the transcendental philosophy--not, perhaps, as entering by logical claim of right into any biographical sketch, but as a very allowable digression in the record of that man's life to whom, in the way of hope and of profound disappointment, it had been so memorable an object. For two or three years before I mastered the language of Kant,[22] it had been a pole-star to my hopes, and _in hypothesi_ agreeably to the uncertain plans of uncertain knowledge, the luminous guide to my future life--as a life dedicated and set apart to philosophy. Such it was some years _before_ I knew it: for, at least ten long years _after_ I came into a condition of valueing its true pretensions and measuring its capacities, this same philosophy shed the gloom of something like misanthropy upon my views and estimates of human nature; for man was an abject animal, if the limitations which Kant assigned to the motions of his speculative reason were as absolute and hopeless as, under _his_ scheme of the understanding and _his_ genesis of its powers, too evidently they were. I belonged to a reptile race, if the wings by which we had sometimes _seemed_ to mount, and the buoyancy which had _seemed_ to support our flight, were indeed the fantastic delusions which he represented them. Such, and so deep and so abiding in its influence upon my life, having been the influence of this German philosophy, according to all logic of proportions, in selecting the objects of my notice, I might be excused for setting before the reader, in its full array, the analysis of its capital sections. However, in any memorial of a life which professes to keep in view (though but as a secondary purpose) any regard to popular taste, the logic of proportions must bend, after all, to the law of the occasion--to the proprieties of time and place. For the present, therefore, I shall restrict myself to the few sentences in which it may be proper to gratify the curiosity of _some_ readers, the two or three in a hundred, as to the peculiar distinctions of this philosophy. Even to these two or three out of each hundred, I shall not venture to ascribe a larger curiosity than with respect to the most general 'whereabouts' of its position--from what point it starts--whence and from what aspect it surveys the ground--and by what links from this starting-point it contrives to connect itself with the main objects of philosophic inquiry.

[Footnote 22: I might have mastered the philosophy of Kant, without waiting for the German language, in which all his capital works are written; for there is a Latin version of the whole, by Born, and a most admirable digest of the cardinal work (admirable for its fidelity and the skill by which that fidelity is attained), in the same language, by Rhiseldek, a Danish professor. But this fact, such was the slight knowledge of all things connected with Kant in England, I did not learn for some years.]

Immanuel Kant was originally a dogmatist in the school of Leibnitz and Wolf; that is, according to his trisection of all philosophy into dogmatic, sceptical, and critical, he was, upon all questions, disposed to a strong _affirmative_ creed, without courting any particular examination into the grounds of this creed, or into its assailable points. From this slumber, as it is called by himself, he was suddenly aroused by the Humian doctrine of cause and effect. This celebrated essay on the nature of necessary connection--so thoroughly misapprehended at the date of its first publication to the world by its _soi-disant_ opponents, Oswald, Beattie, &c., and so imperfectly comprehended since then by various _soi-disant_ defenders--became in effect the 'occasional cause' (in the phrase of the logicians) of the entire subsequent philosophic scheme of Kant--every section of which arose upon the accidental opening made to analogical trains of thought, by this memorable effort of scepticism, applied by Hume to one capital phenomenon among the necessities of the human understanding. What is the nature of Hume's scepticism as applied to this phenomenon? What is the main thesis of his celebrated essay on cause and effect? For few, indeed, are they who really know anything about it. If a man really understands it, a very few words will avail to explain the _nodus_. Let us try. It is a necessity of the _human_ understanding (very probably not a necessity of a higher order of intelligences) to connect its experiences by means of the idea of _cause_ and its correlate, _effect_: and when Beattie, Oswald, Reid, &c. were exhausting themselves in proofs of the indispensableness of this idea, they were fighting with shadows; for no man had ever questioned the practical necessity for such an idea to the coherency of human thinking. Not the practical necessity, but the internal consistency of this notion, and the original right to such a notion, was the point of inquisition. For, attend, courteous reader, and three separate propositions will set before your eyes the difficulty. _First Prop._, which, for the sake of greater precision, permit me to throw into Latin:--_Non datur aliquid_ [A] _quo posito ponitur aliud_ [B] _à priori_; that is, in other words, You cannot lay your hands upon that one object or phenomenon [A] in the whole circle of natural existences, which, being assumed, will entitle you to assume _à priori_, any other object whatsoever [B] as succeeding it. You could not, I say, of any object or phenomenon whatever, assume this succession _à priori_--that is, _previously to experience_. _Second Prop._ But, if the succession of B to A be made known to you, not _à priori_ (by the involution of B in the idea of A), but by experience, then you cannot ascribe _necessity_ to the succession: the connection between them is not necessary but contingent. For the very widest experience--an experience which should stretch over all ages, from the beginning to the end of time--can never establish a _nexus_ having the least approximation to necessity; no more than a rope of sand could gain the cohesion of adamant, by repeating its links through a billion of successions. _Prop. Third._ Hence (_i. e._ from the two preceding propositions), it appears that no instance or case of _nexus_ that ever can have been offered to the notice of any human understanding, has in it, or, by possibility, could have had anything of necessity. Had the _nexus_ been necessary, you would have seen it beforehand; whereas, by Prop. I. _Non datur aliquid, quo posito ponitur aliud à priori._ This being so, now comes the startling fact, that the notion of a _cause_ includes the notion of necessity. For, if A (the cause) be connected with B (the effect) only in a casual or accidental way, you do not feel warranted in calling it a cause. If heat applied to ice (A) were sometimes followed by a tendency to liquefaction (B) and sometimes not, you would not consider A connected with B as a cause, but only as some variable accompaniment of the true and unknown cause, which might allowably be present or be absent. This, then, is the startling and mysterious phenomenon of the human understanding--that, in a certain notion, which is indispensable to the coherency of our whole experience, indispensable to the establishing any _nexus_ between the different parts and successions of our whole train of notices, we include an accessary notion of necessity, which yet has no justification or warrant, no assignable derivation from any known or possible case of human experience. We have one idea at least--viz. the idea of causation--which transcends our possible experience by one important element, the element of _necessity_, that never can have been derived from the only source of ideas recognised by the philosophy of this day. A Lockian never can find his way out of this dilemma. The experience (whether it be the experience of sensation or the experience of reflection) which he adopts for his master-key, never will unlock this case; for the sum total of human experience, collected from all ages, can avail only to tell us what _is_, but never what _must be_. The idea of necessity is absolutely transcendant to experience, _per se_, and must be derived from some other source. From what source? Could Hume tell us? No: he, who had started the game so acutely (for with every allowance for the detection made in Thomas Aquinas, of the original suggestion, as recorded in the _Biographia Literaria_ of Coleridge, we must still allow great merit of a secondary kind to Hume for his modern revival and restatement of the doctrine), this same acute philosopher broke down confessedly in his attempt to hunt the game down. His solution is worthless.

Kant, however, having caught the original scent from Hume, was more fortunate. He saw, at a glance, that here was a test applied to the Lockian philosophy, which showed, at the very least, its _insufficiency_. If it were good even for so much as it explained--which Burke is disposed to receive as a sufficient warrant for the favourable reception of a new hypothesis--at any rate, it now appeared that there was something which it could _not_ explain. But next, Kant took a large step in advance _proprio morte_. Reflecting upon the one idea adduced by Hume, as transcending the ordinary source of ideas, he began to ask himself, whether it were likely that this idea should stand alone? Were there not other ideas in the same predicament; other ideas including the same element of necessity, and, therefore, equally disowning the parentage assigned by Locke? Upon investigation, he found that there were: he found that there were eleven others in exactly the same circumstances. The entire twelve he denominated categories; and the mode by which he ascertained their number--that there were so many and no more--is of itself so remarkable as to merit notice in the most superficial sketch. But, in fact, this one explanation will put the reader in possession of Kant's system, so far as he could understand it without an express and toilsome study. With this explanation, therefore, of the famous categories, I shall close my slight sketch of the system. Has the reader ever considered the meaning of the term _Category_--a term so ancient and so venerable from its connection with the most domineering philosophy that has yet appeared amongst men? The doctrine of the Categories (or, in its Roman appellation, of the _Predicaments_), is one of the few wrecks from the Peripatetic philosophy which still survives as a doctrine taught by public authority in the most ancient academic institutions of Europe. It continues to form a section in the code of public instruction; and perhaps under favour of a pure accident. For though, strictly speaking, a _metaphysical_ speculation, it has always been prefixed as a sort of preface to the _Organon_ (or _logical_ treatises) of Aristotle, and has thus accidentally shared in the immortality conceded to that most perfect of human works. Far enough were the Categories from meriting such distinction. Kant was well aware of this: he was aware that the Aristotelian Categories were a useless piece of scholastic lumber: unsound in their first conception; and, though illustrated through long centuries by the schoolmen, and by still earlier Grecian philosophers, never in any one known instance turned to a profitable account. Why, then, being aware that even in idea they were false, besides being practically unsuitable, did Kant adopt or borrow a name laden with this superfetation of reproach--all that is false in theory superadded to all that is useless in practice? He did so for a remarkable reason: he felt, according to his own explanation, that Aristotle had been _groping_ [the German word expressive of his blind procedure is _herumtappen_]--groping in the dark, but under a semi-conscious instinct of truth. Here is a most remarkable case or situation of the human intellect, happening alike to individuals and to entire generations--in the situation of yearning or craving, as it were, for a great idea as yet unknown, but dimly and uneasily prefigured. Sometimes the very brink, as it may be called, of such an idea is approached; sometimes it is even imperfectly discovered; but with marks in the very midst of its imperfections, which serve as indications to a person coming better armed for ascertaining the sub-conscious thought which had governed their tentative motions. As it stands in Aristotle's scheme, the idea of a category is a mere lifeless abstraction. Rising through a succession of species to genera, and from these to still higher genera, you arrive finally at a highest genus--a naked abstraction, beyond which no further regress is possible. This highest genus, this _genus generalissimum_, is, in peripatetic language, a category; and no purpose or use has ever been assigned to any one of these categories, of which ten were enumerated at first, beyond that of classification--_i. e._ a purpose of mere convenience. Even for as trivial a purpose as this, it gave room for suspecting a failure, when it was afterwards found that the original ten categories did not exhaust the possibilities of the case; that other supplementary categories (_post-prædicamenti_) became necessary. And, perhaps, 'more last words' might even yet be added, supplementary supplements, and so forth, by a hair-splitting intellect. Failures as gross as these, revisals still open to revision, and amendments calling for amendments, were at once a broad confession that here there was no falling in with any great law of nature. The paths of nature may sometimes be arrived at in a tentative way; but they are broad and determinate; and, when found, vindicate themselves. Still, in all this erroneous subtilisation, and these abortive efforts, Kant perceived a grasping at some real idea--fugitive indeed and coy, which had for the present absolutely escaped; but he caught glimpses of it continually in the rear; he felt its necessity to any account of the human understanding that could be satisfactory to one who had meditated on Locke's theory as probed and searched by Leibnitz. And in this uneasy state--half sceptical, half creative, rejecting and substituting, pulling down and building up--what was in sum and finally the course which he took for bringing his trials and essays to a crisis? He states this himself, somewhere in the Introduction to his _Critik der reinen Vernunft_; and the passage is a memorable one. Fifteen years at the least have passed since I read it; and, therefore, I cannot pretend to produce the words; but the substance I shall give; and I appeal to the candour of all his readers, whether they have been able to apprehend his meaning. I certainly did not for years. But, now that I do, the passage places his procedure in a most striking and edifying light. Astronomers, says Kant, had gone on for ages, assuming that the earth was the central body of our system; and insuperable were the difficulties which attended that assumption. At length, it occurred to try what would result from inverting the assumption. Let the earth, instead of offering a fixed centre for the revolving motions of other heavenly bodies, be supposed itself to revolve about some one of these, as the sun. That supposition was tried, and gradually all the phenomena which, before, had been incoherent, anomalous, or contradictory, began to express themselves as parts of a most harmonious system. 'Something,' he goes on to say, 'analogous to this I have practised with regard to the subject of my inquiry--the human understanding. All others had sought their central principle of the intellectual phenomena out of the understanding, in something external to the mind. I first turned my inquiries upon the mind itself. I first applied my examination to the very analysis of the understanding.' In words, not precisely these, but pretty nearly equivalent to them, does Kant state, by contradistinction, the value and the nature of his own procedure. He first, according to his own representation, thought of applying his investigation to the mind itself. Here was a passage which for years (I may say) continued to stagger and confound me. What! he, Kant, in the latter end of the 18th century, about the year 1787--he the first who had investigated the mind! This was not arrogance so much as it was insanity. Had he said--I, first, upon just principles, or with a fortunate result, investigated the human understanding, he would have said no more than every fresh theorist is bound to suppose, as his preliminary apology for claiming the attention of a busy world. Indeed, if a writer, on any part of knowledge, does _not_ hold himself superior to all his predecessors, we are entitled to say--Then, why do you presume to trouble us? It may _look_ like modesty, but _is_, in effect, downright effrontery for you to think yourself no better than other critics; you were at liberty to think so whilst no claimant of public notice--as being so, it is most arrogant in you to be modest. This would be the criticism applied justly to a man who, in Kant's situation, as the author of a new system, should use a language of unseasonable modesty or deprecation. To have spoken boldly of himself was a duty; we could not tolerate his doing otherwise. But to speak of himself in the exclusive terms I have described, does certainly seem, and for years did seem to myself, little short of insanity. Of this I am sure that no student of Kant, having the passage before him, can have known heretofore what consistent, what rational interpretation to give it; and, in candour, he ought to own himself my debtor for the light he will now receive. Yet, so easy is it to imagine, after a meaning is once pointed out, and the station given from which it shows itself _as_ the meaning--so easy, under these circumstances, is it to imagine that one has, or that one could have, found it for one's self--that I have little expectation of reaping much gratitude for my explanation. I say this, not as of much importance one way or the other in a single case of the kind, but because a general consideration of this nature has sometimes operated to make me more indifferent or careless as to the publication of commentaries on difficult systems, when I had found myself able to throw much light on the difficulties. The very success with which I should have accomplished the task--the perfect removal of the obstacles in the student's path--were the very grounds of my assurance-that the service would be little valued. For I have found what it was occasionally, in conversation, to be too luminous--to have explained, for instance, too clearly a dark place in Ricardo. In such a case, I have known a man of the very greatest powers, mistake the intellectual effort he had put forth to apprehend my elucidation, and to meet it half way, for his own unassisted conquest over the difficulties; and, within an hour or two after, I have had, perhaps, to stand, as an attack upon myself, arguments entirely and recently furnished by myself. No case is more possible: even to apprehend a complex explanation, a man cannot be passive; he must exert considerable energy of mind; and, in the fresh consciousness of this energy, it is the most natural mistake in the world for him to feel the argument which he has, by considerable effort, appropriated to be an argument which he has originated. Kant is the most unhappy champion of his own doctrines, the most infelicitous expounder of his own meaning, that has ever existed. Neither has any other commentator succeeded in throwing a moonlight radiance upon his philosophy. Yet certain I am, that, were I, or any man, to disperse all his darkness, exactly in that proportion in which we did so--exactly in the proportion in which we smoothed all hindrances--exactly in that proportion would it cease to be known or felt that there had ever been any hindrances to be smoothed. This, however, is digression, to which I have been tempted by the interesting nature of the grievance. In a jesting way, this grievance is obliquely noticed in the celebrated couplet--

'Had you seen but these roads before they were made,
You'd lift up your hands and bless Marshal Wade.'

The pleasant bull here committed conceals a most melancholy truth, and one of large extent. Innumerable are the services to truth, to justice, or society, which never _can_ be adequately valued by those who reap their benefits, simply because the transition from the early and bad state to the final or improved state cannot be retraced or kept alive before the eyes. The record perishes. The last point gained is seen; but the starting-point, the points _from_ which it was gained, is forgotten. And the traveller never _can_ know the true amount of his obligations to Marshal Wade, because, though seeing the roads which the Marshal has created, he can only guess at those which he superseded. Now, returning to this impenetrable passage of Kant, I will briefly inform the reader that he may read it into sense by connecting it with a part of Kant's system, from which it is in his own delivery entirely dislocated. Going forwards some thirty or forty pages, he will find Kant's development of his own categories. And, by placing in juxtaposition with that development this blind sentence, he will find a reciprocal light arising. All philosophers, worthy of that name, have found it necessary to allow of some great cardinal ideas that transcended all the Lockian origination--ideas that were larger in their compass than any possible notices of sense or any reflex notices of the understanding; and those who have denied such ideas, will be found invariably to have supported their denial by a _vitium subreptionis_, and to have deduced their pretended genealogies of such ideas by means of a _petitio principii_--silently and stealthily putting _into_ some step of their _leger-de-main_ process everything that they would pretend to have extracted _from_ it. But, previously to Kant, it is certain that all philosophers had left the origin of these higher or transcendent ideas unexplained. Whence came they? In the systems to which, Locke replies, they had been called _innate_ or _connate_. These were the Cartesian systems. Cudworth, again, who maintained certain '_immutable ideas_' of morality, had said nothing about their origin; and Plato had supposed them to be reminiscences from some higher mode of existence. Kant first attempted to assign them an origin within the mind itself, though not in any Lockian fashion of reflection upon sensible impressions. And this is doubtless what he means by saying that he first had investigated the mind--that is, he first for such a purpose.