has always hitherto run through as a negative into the abyss of nothing.

3. Of these theories, that of SCHELLING is the only one in regard to which it is now necessary to say any thing. His opinion constitutes the third of those enumerated touching the knowledge of the absolute; and the following is a brief statement of its principal positions:

While the lower sciences are of the relative and conditioned Philosophy, as the science of sciences, must be of the absolute -the unconditioned. Philosophy, therefore, supposes a science of the absolute. Is the absolute beyond our knowledge?—then is philosophy itself impossible.

But how, it is objected, can the absolute be known? The absolute, as unconditioned, identical, and one, can not be cognized under conditions, by difference and plurality. It can not, therefore, be known, if the subject of knowledge be distinguished from the object of knowledge; in a knowledge of the absolute, existence and knowledge must be identical; the absolute can only be known, if adequately known, and it can only be adequately known, by the absolute itself. But is this possible? We are wholly ignorant of existence in itself:-the mind knows nothing, except in parts, by quality, and difference, and relation; consciousness supposes the subject contradistinguished from the object of thought; the abstraction of this contrast is a negation of consciousness; and the negation of consciousness is the annihilation of thought itself. The alternative is therefore unavoidable: either finding the absolute, we lose ourselves; or retaining self and individual consciousness, we do not reach the absolute.

All this Schelling frankly admits. He admits that a knowledge of the absolute is impossible, in personality and consciousness he admits that, as the understanding knows, and can know, only by consciousness, and consciousness only by difference, we, as conscious and understanding, can apprehend, can conceive only the conditioned; and he admits that, only if man be himself the infinite, can the infinite be known by him:

"Nec sentire Deum, nisi qui pars ipse Deorum est;"l
("None can feel God, who shares not in the Godhead.")

But Schelling contends that there is a capacity of knowledge

[This line is from Manilius. But as a statement of Schelling's doctrine it is inadequate; for on his doctrine the deity can be known only if fully known, and a full knowledge of deity is possible only to the absolute deity—that is, not to a sharer in

above consciousness, and higher than the understanding, and that this knowledge is competent to human reason, as identical with the Absolute itself. In this act of knowledge, which, after Fichte, he calls the Intellectual Intuition, there exists no distinction of subject and object—no contrast of knowledge and existence; all difference is lost in absolute indifference-all plurality in absolute unity. The Intuition itself-Reason-and the Absolute are identified. The absolute exists only as known by reason, and reason knows only as being itself the absolute. This act (act!) is necessarily ineffable:

"The vision and the faculty divine,”

to be known, must be experienced. It can not be conceived by the understanding, because beyond its sphere; it can not be described, because its essence is identity, and all description supposes discrimination. To those who are unable to rise beyond a philosophy of reflection, Schelling candidly allows that the doc. trine of the absolute can appear only a series of contradictions ; and he has at least the negative merit of having clearly exposed the impossibility of a philosophy of the unconditioned, as founded on a knowledge by difference, if he utterly fails in positively proving the possibility of such a philosophy, as founded on a

the Godhead. Manilius has likewise another (poetically) laudable line, of a similar, though less exceptionable, purport :

"Exemplumque Dei quisque est in imagine parva ;'
("Each is himself a miniature of God.”)

For we should not recoil to the opposite extreme; and, though man be not identical with the Deity, still is he "created in the image of God." It is, indeed, only through an analogy of the human with the Divine nature, that we are percipient and recipient of Divinity. As St. Prosper has it :-"Nemo possidet Deum, nisi qui possidetur a Deo."-So Seneca:-"In unoquoque virorum bonorum habitat Deus."-So Plotinus : —“ Virtue tending to consummation, and irradicated in the soul by moral wisdom, reveals a God; but a God destitute of true virtue is an empty name."-So Jacobi :"From the enjoyment of virtue springs the idea of a virtuous; from the enjoyment of freedom, the idea of a free; from the enjoyment of life, the idea of a living; from the enjoyment of the divine, the idea of a godlike-and of a God.”—So Goethe:

"Wär nicht das Auge sonnenhaft,

Wie könnten wir das Licht erblicken?
Lebt' nicht in uns des Gottes eig'ne Kraft,
Wie könnte uns das Göttliches entzücken ?”

So Kunt and many others. (Thus morality and religion, necessity and atheism, rationally go together.)-The Platonists and Fathers have indeed finely said, that "God is the soul of the soul, as the soul is the soul of the body."

"Vita Animæ Deus est; hæc Corporis. Hac fugiente,

Solvitur hoc; perit hæc, destituente Deo."

These verses are preserved to us from an ancient poet by John of Salisbury, and they denote the comparison of which Buchanan has made so admirable a use in his Calvini Epicedium.]

knowledge in identity, through an absorption into, and vision of, the absolute.

Out of Laputa or the Empire it would be idle to enter into an articulate refutation of a theory, which founds philosophy on the annihilation of consciousness, and on the identification of the unconscious philosopher with God. The intuition of the absolute is manifestly the work of an arbitrary abstraction, and of a selfdelusive imagination. To reach the point of indifference-by abstraction we annihilate the object, and by abstraction we annihilate the subject, of consciousness. But what remains?— Nothing. "Nil conscimus nobis." We then hypostatize the zero; we baptize it with the name of Absolute; and conceit ourselves that we contemplate absolute existence, when we only speculate absolute privation.' This truth has been indeed virtually confessed by the two most distinguished followers of Schelling. Hegel at last abandons the intuition, and regards "pure or undetermined existence" as convertible with "pure nothing;" while Oken, if he adhere to the intuition, intrepidly identifies the Deity or Absolute with zero. God, he makes the Nothing, the Nothing, he makes God;

1 [The Infinite and Absolute are only the names of two counter imbecilities of the human mind, transmuted into properties of the nature of things-of two subjective negations, converted into objective affirmations. We tire ourselves, either in adding to, or in taking from. Some, more reasonably, call the thing unfinishable—infinite others, less rationally, call it finished-absolute. But in both cases, the metastasis is in itself irrational. Not, however, in the highest degree: for the subjective contradictories were not at first objectified by the same philosophers; and it is the crowning irrationality of the Infinito-absolutists, that they have not merely accepted as objective what is only subjective, but quietly assumed as the same, what are not only different but conflictive, not only conflictive, but repugnant. Seneca (Ep. 118) has given the true genealogy of the original fictions; but at his time the consummative union of the two had not been attempted. "Ubi animus aliquid diu protulit, et magnitudinem ejus sequendo lassatus est, infinitum cœpit vocari. Eodem modo, aliquid difficulter secari cogitavimus, novissime, crescente difficultate, insecabile inventum est."]

2 [From the Rejected Addresses. Their ingenious authors have embodied a jest in the very words by which Oken, in sober seriousness, propounds the first and greatest of philosophical truths. Jacobi (or Neeb?) might well say, that, in reading this last consummation of German speculation, he did not know whether he were standing on his head or his feet. The book in which Oken so ingeniously deduces the All from the Nothing, has, I see, been lately translated into English, and published by the Ray Society (I think). The statement of the paradox is, indeed, somewhat softened in the second edition, from which, I presume, the version is made, Not that Oken and Hegel are original even in the absurdity. For as Varro right truly said :-" Nihil tam absurde dici potest, quod non dicatur ab abliquo philosophorum;" so the Intuition of God the Absolute = the Nothing, we find asserted by the lower Platonists, by the Buddhists, and by Jacob Boehme.]

Nor does the negative chimera prove less fruitful than the positive; for Schelling has found it as difficult to evolve the one into the many, as his disciples to deduce the universe and its contents from the first self-affirmation of the "primordial Nothing."

"Miri homines! Nihil esse aliquid statuantve negentve;

Quodque negant statuunt, quod statuuntque negant."

To Schelling, indeed, it has been impossible, without gratuitous and even contradictory assumptions, to explain the deduction of the finite from the infinite. By no salto mortale has he been able to clear the magic circle in which he had enclosed himself, Unable to connect the unconditioned and the conditioned by any natural correlation, he has variously attempted to account for the phenomenon of the universe, either by imposing a necessity of self-manifestation on the absolute, i. e. by conditioning the unconditioned; or by postulating a fall of the finite from the infinite, i. e. by begging the very fact which his hypothesis professed its exclusive ability to explain.-The veil of Isis is thus still unwithdrawn;' and the question proposed by Orpheus at the dawn of speculation will probably remain unanswered at its setting: “Πῶς δέ μοι ἔν τι τὰ πάντ ̓ ἔσται καὶ χωρὶς ἕκαστον;” ("How can I think each, separate, and all, one ?")

In like manner, annihilating consciousness in order to reconstruct it, Schelling has never yet been able to connect the faculties conversant about the conditioned, with the faculty of absolute knowledge. One simple objection strikes us as decisive, although we do not remember to have seen it alleged. "We awaken," says Schelling, "from the Intellectual Intuition as from a state of death; we awaken by Reflection, that is, through a compulsory return to ourselves." We can not, at the same moment, be in the intellectual intuition and in common consciousness; we must therefore be able to connect them by an act of memoryof recollection. But how can there be a remembrance of the absolute and its intuition? As out of time, and space, and relation, and difference, it is admitted that the absolute can not be construed to the understanding? But as remembrance is only pos1 [Isis appears as the Ægypto-Grecian symbol of the Unconditioned. (Iois-Iola Οὐσία: Ισειον—γνῶσις τοῦ ὄντος. Plut. I. et O.) In the temple of Athene-Isis, at Sais, on the fane there stood this sublime inscription :

I AM ALL THAT WAS, AND IS, AND SHALL BE;
NOR MY VEIL, HAS IT BEEN WITHDRAWN BY MORTAL.

(“Εγώ εἰμι πᾶν τὸ γεγονὸς, καὶ ὄν, καὶ ἐσόμενον, καὶ τὸν ἐμὸν πέπλον οὐδείς πω θνητὸς ἀπεκάλυψε.”)]

2 In Fichte's u. Niethhammer's Phil. Journ. vol. iii. p. 214.

sible under the conditions of the understanding, it is consequently impossible to remember any thing anterior to the moment when we awaken into consciousness; and the clairvoyance of the absolute, even granting its reality, is thus, after the crisis, as if it had never been. We defy all solution of this objection.

4. What has now been stated may in some degree enable the reader to apprehend the relations in which our author stands, both to those who deny and to those who admit a knowledge of the absolute. If we compare the philosophy of COUSIN with the philosophy of Schelling, we at once perceive that the former is a disciple, though by no means a servile disciple of the latter. The scholar, though enamored with his master's system as a whole, is sufficiently aware of the two insuperable difficulties of that theory. He saw, that if he pitched the absolute so high, it was impossible to deduce from it the relative; and he felt, probably, that the Intellectual Intuition-a stumbling-block to himself -would be arrant foolishness in the eyes of his countrymen. Cousin and Schelling agree, that as philosophy is the science of the unconditioned, the unconditioned must be within the compass of science. They agree that the unconditioned is known, and immediately known: and they agree that intelligence, as competent to the unconditioned, is impersonal, infinite, divine. But while they coincide in the fact of the absolute, as known, they are diametrically opposed as to the mode in which they attempt to realize this knowledge; each regarding, as the climax of contradiction, the manner in which the other endeavors to bring human reason and the absolute into proportion. According to Schelling, Cousin's absolute is only a relative; according to Cousin, Schelling's knowledge of the absolute is a negation of thought itself. Cousin declares the condition of all knowledge to be plurality and difference; and Schelling, that the condition, under which alone a knowledge of the absolute becomes possible, is indifference and unity. The one thus denies a notion of the absolute to consciousness; while the other affirms that consciousness is implied in every act of intelligence. Truly, we must view each as triumphant over the other; and the result of this mutual neutralization is—that the absolute, of which both assert a knowledge, is for us incognizable.'

1 [" Quod genus hoc pugnæ, qua victor victus uterque !"

is still further exhibited in the mutual refutation of the two great apostles of the Ab solute, in Germany-Schelling and Hegel. They were early friends--contempora