In these circumstances, we might expect our author to have stated the difficulties to which his theory was exposed on the one side and on the other; and to have endeavored to obviate the objections, both of his brother-absolutists, and of those who altogether deny a philosophy of the unconditioned. This he has not done. The possibility of reducing the notion of the absolute to a negative conception is never once contemplated; and if one or two allusions (not always, perhaps, correct) are made to his doctrine, the name of Schelling does not occur, as we recollect, in the whole compass of these lectures. Difficulties, by which either the doctrine of the absolute in general, or his own particular modification of that doctrine, may be assailed, are either avoided, or solved only by still greater. Assertion is substituted for proof; facts of consciousness are alleged, which consciousness never knew; and paradoxes, that baffle argument, are promulgated as intuitive truths, above the necessity of confirmation. With every feeling of respect for M. Cousin as a man of learning and genius, we must regard the grounds on which he endeavors to establish his doctrine as assumptive, inconsequent, and erroneous. In vindicating the truth of this statement, we shall attempt to show: in the first place, that M. Cousin is at fault in all the authorities he quotes in favor of the opinion, that the absolute, infinite, unconditioned, is a primitive notion, cognizable by our intellect; in the second, that his argument, to prove the correality of his three

ries at the same university-occupiers of the same bursal room (college chums)— Hegel, somewhat the elder man, was somewhat the younger philosopher-and they were joint-editors of the journal in which their then common doctrine was at first promulgated. So far all was in unison; but now they separated, locally and in opinion. Both, indeed, stuck to the Absolute, but each regarded the way in which the other professed to reach it, as absurd. Hegel derided the Intellectual Intuition of Schelling, as a poetical play of fancy; Schelling derided the Dialectic of Hegel, as a logical play with words. Both, I conceive, were right; but neither fully right. If Schelling's Intellectual Intuition were poetical, it was a poetry transcending, in fact abolishing, human imagination. If Hegel's Dialectic were logical, it was a logic outraging that science and the conditions of thought itself. Hegel's whole philosophy is, indeed, founded on two errors ;—on a mistake in logic, and on a violation of logic. In his dream of disproving the law of Excluded Middle (between two Contradictories), he inconceivably mistakes Contraries for Contradictories; and in positing pure or absolute existence as a mental datum, immediate, intuitive, and above proof (though, in truth, this be palpably a mere relative gained by a process of abstraction), he not only mistakes the fact, but violates the logical law which prohibits us to assume the principle which it behoves us to prove. On these two fundamental errors rests Hegel's dialectic; and Hegel's dialectic is the ladder by which he attempts to scale the Absolute. The peculiar doctrine of these two illustrious thinkers is thus to me only another manifestation of an occurrence of the commonest in human speculation; it is only a sophism of relative self-love, victorious over the absolute love of truth: Quod volunt sapiunt, et nolunt sapere quæ vera sunt."]

ideas, proves directly the reverse; in the third, that the conditions under which alone he allows intelligence to be possible, necessarily exclude the possibility of a knowledge, not to say a conception, of the absolute; and in the fourth, that the absolute, as defined by him, is only a relative and a conditioned.

In the first place, then, M. Cousin supposes that Aristotle and Kant, in their several categories, equally proposed an analysis. of the constituent elements of intelligence; and he also supposes that each, like himself, recognized among these elements the notion of the infinite, absolute, unconditioned. In both these suppositions we think him wrong.

It is a serious error in a historian of philosophy to imagine that, in his scheme of categories, Aristotle proposed, like Kant, "an analysis of the elements of human reason." It is just, however, to mention, that in this mistake M. Cousin has been preceded by Kant himself. But the ends proposed by the two philosophers were different, even opposed. In their several tables: Aristotle attempted a synthesis of things in their multiplicitya classification of objects real, but in relation to thought;—Kant, an analysis of mind in its unity-—a dissection of thought, pure, but in relation to its objects. The predicaments of Aristotle are thus objective, of things as understood; those of Kant subjective, of the mind as understanding. The former are results a posteriori-the creations of abstraction and generalization; the latter, anticipations a priori-the conditions of those acts themselves. It is true, that as the one scheme exhibits the unity of thought diverging into plurality, in appliance to its objects, and the other, exhibits the multiplicity of these objects converging toward unity by a collective determination of the mind; while, at the same time, language usually confounds the subjective and objective under a common term;-it is certainly true, that some elements in the one table coincide in name with some elements in the other. This coincidence is, however, only equivocal. In reality, the whole Kantian categories must be excluded frrom the Aristotelic list, as entia rationis, as notiones secunda-in short, as determinations of thought, and not genera of real things; while the sev eral elements would be specially excluded, as partial, privative, transcendent, &c. But if it would be unjust to criticise the categories of Kant in whole, or in part, by the Aristotelic canon, what must we think of Kant, who, after magnifying the idea of investigating the forms of pure intellect as worthy of the

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mighty genius of the Stagirite, proceeds, on this false hypothesis, to blame the execution, as a kind of patch-work, as incomplete, as confounding derivative with simple notions; nay, even, on the narrow principles of his own Critique, as mixing the forms of pure sense with the forms of pure understanding? If M. Cousin also were correct in his supposition that Aristotle and his followers had viewed his categories as an analysis of the fundamental forms of thought, he would find his own reduction of the elements of reason to a double principle anticipated in the scholas tic division of existence into ens per se and ens per accidens.

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Nor is our author correct in. thinking that the categories of Aristotle and Kant are complete, inasmuch as they are co-extensive with his own. As to the former, if the Infinite were not excluded, on what would rest the scholastic distinction of ens categoricum and ens transcendens? The logicians require that predicamental matter shall be of a limited and finite nature; God, as infinite, is thus excluded: and while it is evident from the whole context of his book of categories, that Aristotle there only contemplated a distribution of the finite, so, in other of his works, he more than once emphatically denies the infinite as an object not only of knowledge, but of thought;-7ò άπeipov äyvwotov î ἄπειρον-τὸ ἄπειρον οὔτε νοητὸν, οὔτε αἰσθητόν. But if Aristotle thus regards the Infinite as beyond the compass of thought, Kant views it as, at least, beyond the sphere of knowledge. If M Cousin indeed employed the term category in relation to the Kantian philosophy in the Kantian acceptation, he would be as erroneous in regard to Kant as he is in regard to Aristotle; but we presume that he wishes, under that term, to include not only the "Categories of Understanding," but the "Ideas of Reason." But Kant

1 See the Critik d. r. V. and the Prolegomena.

2 [M. Peisse, in a note here, quotes the common logical law of categorical entities, well and briefly expressed in the following verse:

"Entia per sese, finita, realia, tota."

He likewise justly notices, that nothing is included in the Aristotelic categories but what is susceptible of definition, consequently of analysis.]

3 Phys. L. iii. c. 10, text. 66, c. 7, text. 40. See also Metaph. L. ii. c. 2, text. 11. Analyt. Post. L. i. c. 20, text. 39-et alibi.-[Aristotle's definition of the Infinite (of the areɩpov in contrast to the dópiorov)—“that of which there is always something ἄπειρον αόριστον)beyond," may be said to be a definition only of the Indefinite. This I shall not gain. say. But it was the only Infinite which he contemplated; as it is the only Infinite of which we can form a notion.]

4 ["The Categories of Kant are simple forms or frames (schemata) of the Understanding (Verstand) under which, an object to be known, must be necessarily thought. Kant's Ideas, a word which he expressly borrowed from Plato, are concepts of the

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limits knowledge to experience, and experience to the categories of the understanding, which, in reality, are only so many forms of the conditioned; and allows to the notion of the unconditioned (corresponding to the ideas of reason) no objective reality, regarding it merely as a regulative principle in the arrangement of our thoughts. As M. Cousin, however, holds that the unconditioned is not only subjectively conceived, but objectively known; he is thus totally wrong in regard to the one philosopher, and wrong in part in relation to the other.

In the second place, our author maintains that the idea of the infinite, or absolute, and the idea of the finite, or relative, are equally real, because the notion of the one necessarily suggests the notion of the other.

Correlatives certainly suggest each other, but correlatives may, or may not, be equally real and positive. In thought contradictories necessarily imply each other, for the knowledge of contradictories is one. But the reality of one contradictory, so far from guaranteeing the reality of the other, is nothing else than its negation. Thus every positive notion (the concept of a thing by what it is) suggests a negative notion (the concept of a thing by what it is not;) and the highest positive notion, the notion of the conceivable, is not without its corresponding negative in the notion of the inconceivable. But though these mutually suggest each other, the positive alone is real; the negative is only an abstraction of the other, and in the highest generality, even an abstraction of thought itself. It therefore behoved M. Cousin, instead of assuming the objective correality of his two elements on the fact of their subjective correlation, to have suspected, on this very ground, that the reality of the one was inconsistent with the "eality of the other. In truth, upon examination, it will be found that his two primitive ideas are nothing more than contradictory relatives. These, consequently, of their very nature, imply each other in thought; but they imply each other only as affirmation and negation of the same.

We have already shown, that though the Conditioned (conditionally limited) be one, what is opposed to it as the Unconditioned, is plural: that the unconditional negation of limitation Reason (Vernunft;) whose objects transcending the sphere of all experience actual or possible, consequently do not fall under the categories, in other words, are positively unknowable. These ideas are God, Matter, Soul, objects which, considered out of relation, or in their transcendent reality, are so many phases of the Absolute.”—--M, Peisse.]

gives one unconditioned, the Infinite; as the unconditional affirmation of limitation affords another, the Absolute. This, while it coincides with the opinion, that the Unconditioned in either phasis is inconceivable, is repugnant to the doctrine, that the unconditioned (absoluto-infinite) can be positively construed to the mind. For those who, with M. Cousin, regard the notion of the unconditioned as a positive and real knowledge of existence in its allcomprehensive unity, and who consequently employ the terms Absolute, Infinite, Unconditioned, as only various expressions for the same identity, are imperatively bound to prove that their idea of the One corresponds-either with that Unconditioned we have distinguished as the Absolute-or with that Unconditioned we have distinguished as the Infinite-or that it includes both-or that it excludes both. This they have not done, and, we suspect, have never attempted to do.

Our author maintains, that the unconditioned is known under the laws of consciousness; and does not, like Schelling, pretend to an intuition of existence beyond the bounds of space and time Indeed, he himself expressly predicates the absolute and infinite

of these forms.

Time is only the image or the concept of a certain correlation of existences—of existence, therefore, pro tanto, as conditioned. It is thus itself only a form of the conditioned. But let that pass. Is, then, the Absolute conceivable of time? Can we conceive time as unconditionally limited? We can easily represent to ourselves time under any relative limitation of commencement and termination; but we are conscious to ourselves of nothing more clearly, than that it would be equally possible to think without thought, as to construe to the mind an absolute commencement, or an absolute termination, of time; that is, a beginning and an end, beyond which, time is conceived as non-existent. Goad imagination to the utmost, it still sinks paralyzed within the bounds of time; and time survives as the condition of the thought itself in which we annihilate the universe :

"Sur les mondes détruits le Temps dort immobile."

But if the Absolute be inconceivable of this form, is the Infinite more comprehensible? Can we imagine time as unconditionally unlimited? We can not conceive the infinite regress of time; for such a notion could only be realized by the infinite addition in thought of finite times, and such an addition would, itself, require