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Ay de Returning, they visited the church of Las Angustias, where there is a wonderful but tawdrily dressed image of the Blessed Virgin, who is the patroness of the town. The French sisters of charity have a large orphanage and day-school here, established originally by Madame Calderon; but the situation, in the street called Recogidas, is low and damp, and their chapel being almost underground, and into which no sun can ever enter, seriously affects the health of the sisters. Here, as every where, they are universally be loved and respected, and the present superior is one eminently qualified, by her loving gentleness and evenness of temper, to win the hearts of all around her. The dress of the people of Grana. da is singularly picturesque: the women wear crape shawls of the brightest colors, yellow, orange, or red, with flowers stuck jauntily on one side of the head just above the ear; the men have short velvet jackets, waistcoats with beautiful hanging silver buttons (which have descended from father to son, and are

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not to be bought except by chance), hats with large borders, turned up at the edge, red sashes round the waist, and gaiters of untanned leather, daintily embroidered, open at the knee, with hanging strips of leather and silver buttons. Over the whole, in cold weather, is thrown the "capa," or large cloak, which often conceals the threadbare garments of a beggar, but which is worn with the air of the proudest Spanish 'hidalgo.' This evening, the last which our travellers were to spend in Granada, they had a visit from the king and captain of the gypsies, a very remarkable man, between thirty and forty years of age, and a blacksmith by trade. He brought his guitar, and played in the most marvellous and beautiful way possible: first tenderly and softly; then bursting into the wildest exultation; then again plaintive and wailing, ending with a strain of triumph and rejoicing and victory which completely entranced his hearers. It was like a beautiful poem or a love-tale, told with a pathos indescribable. It was a

fitting last remembrance of a place so full of poetry and of the past, with a tinge in it of that sorrowful dark thread which always seems woven into the tissue of earthly lives. Sorrowfully, the next morning, our travellers paid their last visit to the matchless Alhambra,which had grown upon them at every turn. Then came the "good-by" to their good and faithful guide, Bensaken, that name so well known to all Grana

da tourists; and to the kind sisters of charity, whose white "cornettes" stood grouped round the fatal diligence which was to convey them back to Malaga. And so they bade adieu to this beautiful city, with many a hope of a return on some future day, and with a whole train of new thoughts and new pictures in their mind's eye, called forth by the wonders they had

seen.

THE papers some months since announced the death at Paris of M. Victor Cousin, the well-known eclectic philosopher and Orleanist statesman. The reëstablishment of the Imperial régime in France had deprived him of his political career, never much distinguished; and whatever interest he may have continued to take in philosophy, he produced, as far as we are aware, no new philosophical work after the revolution of July, 1830, except prefaces to new editions of his previous writings, or to other writers whose works he edited, and some "Rapports" to the Academy, among which the most notable is that on the unpublished works of Abelard, preceded by a valuable introduction on the scholastic philosophy, which he afterward published in a separate volume under the title of La Philosophie Scholastique.

M. Cousin was born at Paris in 1792, and was, the New American Cyclopedia says, the son of a clockmaker, a great admirer of Jean Jacques Rousseau, and he was, of course, brought up without any religious faith or culture, as were no small portion of the youth of France born during the Revolution. Pierre Leroux malicious

ly accuses Cousin, after he had quarrelled with him, of having been, when they were fellow-students together, a great admirer of L'Ami du Peuple, the journal in which Marat gained his infamous notoriety. His early destination was literature, and he was always the littérateur rather than the philosopher; but early falling under the influence of M. Royer-Collard, a stanch disciple of the Scottish school, founded by Reid and closed by Sir William Hamilton, he directed his attention to the study of philosophy, became masterof conferences in the Normal School, and, while yet very young, professor of the history of philosophy in the Faculté des Lettres at Paris. His course for 1818, and a part of his course for 1819 and 1820, have been published from notes taken by his pupils. Being too liberal to suit the government, he was suspended from his professorship in 1824, but was restored in 1828, and continued his lectures up to the Revolution of 1830. Since then he has made no important contributions to philosophical science.

The greater part of M. Cousin's philosophical works are left as fragments or as unfinished courses. His course of 1829-30 ends with the sen

sist school, and the critical examination of Locke's Essay on the Human Understanding. His translation of Plato was completed indeed; but the arguments or introductions, except to a few of the Dialogues, and the Life of Plato promised, have never appeared. He seems to have exhausted his philosophical forces at an early day, and after publishing a new and revised edition of his previous writings, to have devoted himself chiefly to literature, especially to the literary history of the first half of the seventeenth century, and the biography of certain eminent ladies that played a very distinguished part in the political intrigues and insurrections of the period. It is doubt ful if any man living had so thorough and minute a knowledge of the literature, the religious controversies, the philosophy, the politics, and the biography of the period from the accession of Louis XIII. to the end of the wars of the Fronde, and the triumph of Mazarin over his enemies, as he possessed. His Duchesse de Longueville, Madame de Sablé, Duchesse de Chevreuse, and Madame de Hautefort, and his history of the conclusion of the wars of the Fronde, are, as literary works, unrivalled, written with rare simplicity, purity, grace, and delicacy of expression and style, and have an easy natural eloquence and charm never surpassed by any writer even in the French language. He has resuscitated those great dames of the seventeenth century, who live, love, sin, repent, and do penance in his pages as they did in real life. He seems, as a Parisian has said, to have really fallen in love with them, and to have regard ed each of them as his mistress, whose honor he must defend at the risk of his life.

The French, we believe, usually count M. Villemain as the most perfect master of their beautiful language; but to our taste he was surpassed by Cousin, if not in the delicacy of phrase, which only a Frenchman born or bred can appreciate, in all the higher qualities of style, as much as he was in

depth and richness of feeling, and variety and comprehensiveness of thought. Cousin was by far the greater man, endowed with the richer ge nius, and, as far as we can judge, equally polished and graceful as a writer. As a philosophical writer, for beauty, grace, elegance, and eloquence he has had no equal since Plato; and he wrote on philosophical subjects with ease and grace, charmed and interested his readers in the dryest and most. abstruse speculations of metaphysics. His rhetoric was captivating even if his philosophy was faulty.

M. Cousin called his philosophical system eclecticism. He starts with the assumption that each philosophical school has its special point of view, its special truth, which the others neglect or unduly depress, and that the true philosopher weds himself to no particular school, but studies them all with impartiality, accepts what each has that is positive, and rejects what each has that is exclusive or negative. He resolves all possible schools into four-1st, The Sensist; 2d, the Idealistic subjectivistic; 3d, the Sceptical; 4th, the Mystic. Each of these four systems has its part of truth, and its part of error. Take the truth of each, and exclude the error, and you have true philosophy, and the whole of it. Truth is always something positive, affirmative; what then is the truth of scepticism, which is a system of pure negation, and not only affirms nothing, but denies that anything can be affirmed? How, moreover, can scepticism, which is universal nescience, be called a system of philosophy? Finally, if you know not the truth in its unity and integrity beforehand, how are you, in studying those several systems, to determine which is the part of truth and which the part of error?

There is no doubt that all schools, as all sects, have their part of truth, as well as their part of error; for the human mind cannot embrace pure unmixed error any more than the will can pure unmixed evil; but the eclectic method is not the method of construct

ing true philosophy any more than it is the method of constructing true Christian theology. The Catholic acknowledges willingly the truth which the several sects hold; but he does not derive it from them, nor arrive at it by studying their systems. He holds it independently of them; and having it already in its unity and integrity, he is able, in studying them, to distinguish what they have that is true from the errors they mix up with it. It must be the same with the philosopher. M. Cousin was not unaware of this, and he finally asserted eclecticism rather as a method of historical verification, than as the real and original method of constructing philosophy. The name was therefore unhappily chosen, and is now seldom heard.

Eclecticism can never be a philosophy. All it can be is a method, and is, as Cousin held, a method of verification rather than of construction. Cousin's own method was not the eclectic, but avowedly the psychological; that is, by careful observation and profound study of the phenomena of consciousness, to attain to a real ontological science, or science of the soul, of God, and nature. This method was severely criticised by Schelling and other German philosophers, and has been objected to by ontologists generally, as giving not a real ontology, but only a generalization. Dr. Channing called the God asserted by Cousin "a splendid generalization"-a very just criticism, but perhaps not for the precise reason the eloquent Unitarian preacher assigned. Cousin does not maintain, theoretically at least, that we can, by way of induction or deduction from purely psychological facts, attain to a real ontological order. His real error was in the misapplication of his method, which led him to deny what he calls necessary and absolute ideas, and terms the idea of the true, the idea of the beautiful, and the idea of the good, are being, and therefore God, and to represent them as the word of God-the precise error which, Gioberti rightly or wrongly

maintains, was committed by Rosmini. It must be admitted that Cousin is not on this point very clear, and that he often speaks of ontology as an induction from psychology, in which case the God he asserts would be, for the reason Channing supposes, only a generalization.

But we think it is possible to clear him from this charge, so far as his intention went, and to defend the psychological method as he professed to apply it. He professed to attain to ontology from the phenomena of consciousness, or the facts revealed to consciousness; but he labors long and hard, as does every psychologist who admits ontology at all, to show, by a careful analysis and classification of these phenomena or facts, that there are among them some, at least, which are not derived from the soul itself, which do not depend on it, and do actually extend beyond the region of psychology, and lead at once into the ontological order. In other words, he claims to find in his psychological observation and analysis real ontological facts. It is from these, not from purely psychological phenomena, that he professes to rise to ontology. So understood, what is called the psychological method is strictly defensi ble. Every philosopher does and must begin by the analysis of thought, that is, in the language of Cousin, the fact of consciousness, and there is no other way possible. That the ideal formula enters into every one of my thoughts is not a fact that I know without thought, and it can be determined only by analyzing the thought one thinks, that is, the fact of consciousness. The quarrel here between the psychologists and the ontologists is quite unnecessary.

What is certain, and this is all the ontologist need assert, or, in fact, can assert, that ontology is neither an induction nor a deduction from psychological data. God is not, and cannot be, the generalization of our own souls. But it does not follow from this that we do not think that which is God,