opened out another, sombre and desolate- tinguished for elegance and scepticism were when, thenceforth, I was to live alone-alone for the older doctrines; those which were the with that fatal thought which had exiled me more ardent, naturally more revolutionary, thither, and which I was tempted bitterly to were for the newer ones, and in the lively discurse. The days which followed this discov-cussions which absorbed them, one could not ery were the saddest of my life. To tell the yet foresee-that which, nevertheless, in an anxieties with which they were agitated would university of young men, must necessarily be too long. Although my understanding was happen-the defeat of the past, and the comnot without some pride in considering its work, plete triumph of the new doctrines. One man, my soul could not become accustomed to a still very young, but who has never been more state so little suited to human weakness; by remarkable for his eloquence than he was then some violent reactions it strove to regain the-took the lead of the latter party. After havshore it had lost; it found amid the ashes of its past convictions, some scintillations which seemed at intervals to re-illume its faith. ing been a disciple, he became a professor. A conference of philosophy was assigned to him in the normal school, and every one interested in these discussions, to whatever party he belonged, waited with impatience the commencement of his lectures. One may judge if, in this situation, into which I was thrown. I, who had heard neither M. de La Romiguière nor M. Royer-Collard, partook of this impatience. 'But these convictions, having been overturned by reason, could be re-established by reason only. These glimmerings soon expired. If, in losing faith, I had lost all anxiety concerning those questions which it had resolved for me, doubtless this violent state of mind would not have long continued; fatigue 'Nevertheless, both the debate which stormwould have made me dull, and my life would ed around me, when I could comprehend its have become, like that of so many others, purport, and the brilliant lectures of the young drowsy in its scepticism. Happily, it was professor, fell far short of those points to which not so; never had I more felt the importance I returned ever and anon, and which distracted of those problems, than since I had lost their my understanding and my heart. My mind, solution. I was sceptical, but I hated scepti at its first essay in philosophy, felt persuaded cism. This it was which decided the direction that it was to meet a regular science-one of my life. Unable to endure my uncertainty which, after having shown its object and its upon the enigma of human destiny, and hav- processes, would conduct it to a certain knowing no more light from faith, in order to re-ledge on those things which are of most intesolve it, there only remained to me the lights of reason. I resolved then, to consecrate all the time that should be necessary, my life, even, if it was wanted, to this research. It is by this path I found myself led to philosophy -philosophy, which seemed to me to be identical with this research. *** rest to mankind. **** In one word, my understanding, excited by its wants, and enlarged by the lessons of Christianity, had assigned to philosophy the great object, the vast extent, the sublime reach of a religion. It had ranked the design of the one as equal to that of the other. It had imagined that their only difference lay in their processes and method; religion being imaginative and positive, philoso 'The moment and the place when I formed this purpose could not have been more favorable to its execution. France, after the slum-phy inquiring and demonstrative. ber of the empire, had at length aroused itself 'Such had been its hopes, and what did it to a philosophical movement. Two men, of find? All that struggle, which had awakened character and talents the most opposite the dormant echoes of the Faculty, which exthough equally rare, came forward to reani- cited the heads of my companions in study, mate it: the one, by reproducing in a style had for its object-its only object, the question admirable for its clearness and its elegance, of the origin of ideas. Condillac had resolved the metaphysical doctrines of Condillac, had, it in a mode which M. de La Romiguière had so to speak, resuscitated the philosophy of the reproduced, but modified. M. Royer-Collard, eighteenth century; the other, by attacking, treading in the footsteps of Reid, had resolved in lectures distinguished by an incomparable it in another mode, and M. Cousin, evoking all logic, these same doctrines, took the initiative the systems of ancient and modern philosoof that inevitable reaction which the genius of phers on this point, and arraying them face to the nascent nineteenth century developed face, exhausted his powers to prove that M. against that of the eighteenth. Two years of Royer-Collard was right, and that Condillac prelections had sufficed for these illustrious professors, for fixing the points of debate, and for gathering all our youth in their train; both then relapsed into silence, and the normal school remained full of recollections of their words, and of the ardent spirit they had inspired. Among the distinguished spirits it contained, the two philosophies found their representatives, and, as in the world, the two parties arrayed themselves with greater force, enthusiasm, and vivacity. The minds dis was wrong. This was all, and in my inabiliity to seize those secret relations which link the apparently most abstract and arid problems of philosophy with the most life-giving and most practical ones, it seemed nothing worth. I could not but feel astonished that men employed themselves on the origin of ideas with an ardor so great, as to declare that it invol ed the entire of philosophy. Nevertheless, and they, in order to console and re-assure those whom they had confined to so arid and nar row a question, commenced by showing the vast and brilliant horizon of philosophy, and, in perspective, the great human problems as to their position, and the road by which to reach them, and the utility of ideas in the inquiry-then such an outline would have kept me patient. But no; this regular outline of philosophy, which did not then exist, which even now does not exist, they did not offer. and the philosophic movement was as yet too young for it to feel its need of one. M. de La Romiguière had appropriated as an heritage the philosophy of the eighteenth century, confirmed as it was to one problem; and had not expanded it. The vigorous genius of M. Royer-Collard, recognizing this problem, had plunged into it with all his weight, and had not had time to extricate himself. M. Cousin, thrown into the thick of the fight, combated it from the first, but more slowly sought its solution. The whole of Philosophy was thus in a narrow abyss, where one wanted air, and where my soul, but recently exiled from Christianity, was suffocated. Nevertheless, the authority of the masters and the fervor of the disciples were so imposing, that I dared to show neither my surprise nor my disappointment.'* We have translated this long but deeply interesting document, as introductory to some remarks upon the present state of the French eclectic philosophy. A considerable familiarity with the writings of this school convinces us that the above may be regarded as a type of its moral and intellectual tendencies. It would, indeed, be a foul wrong to charge either its founder-Cousin -or his followers in general, with the denial of Christianity; but, excepting that, they all may be said to adopt the same views as to the wants of humanity-the same conviction of the incompetence of Christianity by itself to meet these wants-and the same hope that a sound philosophy will supply them. we be impatient at the mere record of theories, and should seek for their mutual relation and dependence. Take the abovementioned as an example: compare them in their chronological order, and a new truth will be elicited. The sensualism of Condillac gradually becomes the materialism of Cabanis; but no sooner has the general mind tried it in its extreme exclusiveness, than there ensues re-action and tendencies to spiritualism, few, it may be, at first, in Royer-Collard, gradually acquiring force and number until they lead to the modified rationalism of Cousin. This is an interesting fact:-it illustrates and is illustrated by the principle that there is a general mindthat society thinks-that its processes are no more capricious or independent of laws than those of the individual. We propose more fully to explain ourselves, by adverting to these several schools as to their formation. At the middle of the last century, Cartesianism was dominant in France. It is true that among such men as Bernier, Molière, Chapelle, and Voltaire, there might be found the principles of a practical epicurism; but the metaphysical dogmas of Gassendi found no favor. It was then that 'Locke's Essay on the Understanding' was translated, and the old debate resumed its vivacity. There were but few in France who could or would comprehend our illustrious countryman. But ill-trained to metaphysical inquiry, they who did embrace his doctrine overlooked its true spirit. While Bishop Berkley and Hume, among ourselves, deduced from it a pure idealism-strange to say, Condillac, in France, discovered in it nothing but materialism. In a series of lectures, Cousin strives to prove the agree ment between Locke and Condillac. In his 'Cours de l'histoire de la Philosophie,' Cousin has elaborately, but, we think, unjustly, argued that Condillac was Locke's genuine disciple. To disprove this it will suffice to show that their starting points differ essentially. Locke, from the very first, assumes, as his postulate, the existence of the mind-enthrones it within the man The modern French philosophy has a high relative value. The systems of Condillac, of Cabanis, of Royer-Collard, of Cousin, of Jouffroy, are well worth our study, separating them each from each; but the moment we regard them as a series, their individual authors are forgotten, and they become of higher moment as the pro-and conveys to it, from without, the images gressive development of a nation's thought. If in history we are no longer to be content of sense, to be varied in their relation, and with a barren chronicle of events-if the sublimed in their essence, by virtue of that laws of the highest inductive philosophy must be applied to those events-thence to ascertain the most general facts in the progress of humanity; in like manner should * Jouffroy, pp. 111-121. mind's own proper activity. But what does Condillac? As the initiative of his system, man is assumed to be an unintelligent statue successively he is invested with his senses -the world without correspondingly awakens his sensations, and then, transformed may account for the fact, that Condillac reigned in peace. Discussions ceased. As when Aristotle was in the ascendant, his disciples had nought to do but to develop But the spirit of inquiry only wanted to recruit her strength, and the public mind in France, instead of being shocked, welcomed M. La Romiguière when he challenged it. and modified by forces from without, not by forces from within, they assume the innumerable diversities of thought and imagination. We think that this point cannot be too tenaciously maintained by ourselves. the meaning of their master. Our countryman is not justly chargeable with the materialism of France. We find the distinction between physiology and psychology in the first pages of his essay; and had Condillac studied it without an extreme In a brief critique upon La Romiguilove for simplicity of system, he had avoid- ère's Lectures in Philosophy,' Cousin proed that one-sidedness with which he esti- foundly remarks; There are, as it were, mated man. two men in M. La Romiguière-the old The philosophy of Condillac triumphed one and the new-the disciple and the opin France. It was reduced to practice. It ponent of Condillac. The opponent is was realized in the popular manners. And, frequently to be seen; but it is in this we as was to be expected, barbarism-savage- propose to mark a phenomenon. The ism followed. It became a nation's creed. disciple is still more frequently to be seen; Of God, of anything that transcends man, it spake not. It embraced no high truths. It descanted much upon the faculties of man, but little of his nature. Even those faculties with which it concerned itself were those in immediate relation to the bodyphysical sensibility, memory, imagination, it ingeniously analyzed; but of the higher acts of the intelligence, developing themselves in the conceptions of genius, in universal ideas, in sublime intellectual intuitions, in the contemplation of the ideal of those it had not even a suspicion. It could not soar beyond its own atmosphere. It had no heaven. If it did catch some reflections of the eternal light beyond its horizon, it called them hallucinations. Man it made of the earth, and he was, indeed, earthly. We and it is this which proves most clearly the reality of a nascent philosophical revolution; for, if the work of M. La Romiguière were an entirely new system, without any relation to that which preceded it, and especially with that of Condillacwhich is their common type-it would exercise no influence on the future;-it would only be one system more in a multitude of systems-a work more or less ingenious, but unproductive: for that system alone can be productive which is animated by the spirit of the age-which is bound up with its wants, its vows, its tendencies.'* quote this remark, for it so truly accords with the spirit of the philosophy of history. Every man is more or less the product of his age. Every event is one of a series, It is more than probable that Condillac and has its local as well as its absolute vadid not foresee the inevitable tendencies of lue. Every genuine system-every theoryhis system. A man of letters, he speculated is a child and a parent. La Romiguière -he dreamt not of practical results. But could not come to an open rupture with the time came when it should play its part Condillac, but the spirit of the age aroused in the convulsions of the French Revolu- him to independence. The fundamental tion. That the sentient subject in man, error of Condillac refers to the origin and were the nerves-that they thought, and de- generation of ideas. We have seen his termined, and reasoned, and judged-that theory; but his disciple strove to correct it. the body had organs, the functions of which Ideas, said he, must be distinguished as to were to think, to determine, to judge-that their matter and their form. The matter the soul, therefore, was but a function of the may be the product of sensation-the form body that it perishes with the body-that is the product of an intellectual activity. 'death is an eternal sleep,' were the fright- This was the first step of materialism toful metaphysical dogmas told to his coun- wards truth. tryman-told to them by Cabanis, the rigid follower of Condillac. He was believed. In our introductory extract from Jouffroy, we met with the significant expression in reference to the state of philosophy- le sommeil de l'empire.' The nation's mind needed repose. It was exhausted with its revolutionary speculations. It is thus we It was at this moment that the bewildered Jouffroy uttered the pathetic lamentations with which we introduce this article. It was then that, in common with many of the intelligent and ingenious youth of France, uncorrupted by personal commerce with * Cousin. Revue de La Romiguière, p. 1. crime and brutality, he demanded, ' Why moral stupor-the stupor incident to infiam I here for what purpose? Is my entire delity. Their spiritual appetencies are existence bounded by the limits of this life? many and intensely craving; but ChristianiWhat will be the life beyond? Who made ty is still in disfavor. They have seen her me and the world around me? When did encrusted with too many superstitionsthe human species begin to exist? when have suffered too much from the intolerance and how will it cease?' Let us conceive of and vices of her priesthood-to allow them, these as the impassioned demands of this while the recollections thereof are fresh and young man of crowds of similar young soul-harrowing, to feel any respect in her men, when, in default of the ministers of revelations, or any confidence in her overreligion, (for the altar had sunk to the dust,) tures! Nevertheless, these moral wants they crowded round their philosophical return, and they are pressing. What is professors the ministers of reason! In truth? Is it merely relative to man, or is anxious thought, they press beyond the it absolute and unconditioned? What is present and the visible. They would de- the good? Does it vary with each man's scend to the abysses of the soul. They interest and convictions, or is it inmutable would sound the depths of man's will-his and eternal? What is beauty? Is it the seat of life. They would listen to their creature of a capricious taste, or is it, in its own inmost fears, as that abyss, in myriad multiform phases, reflected from the First forms, re-echoes them. They would know Fair? Such, we say, were the questions man in the secrets, not the surface, of his urged and re-urged by the French literati. nature. They would know the problem of A spurious form of Christianity offered to the universe. uravel the enigma, and was rejected. And this must be weighed, and weighed well, in order to understand and value their next movement in philosophy. And now another step is taken. La Romiguière had answered, in reply to the questionings of his age, that man had a soul that his thoughts and imaginations, his We do not propose, at present, to furnish judgments and his resolves, were something any minute details of this movement. It more than varieties of sublime matter-at will suffice for us to remark, that in its spirit, length, As the poison was of foreign as well as in the name which Cousin, its growth, so also has been the antidote. The leader, gave to it, it was essentially eclectic. doctrine of Condillac was a corruption That the truth of which it was supposed of the doctrine of Locke; and, in returning to consist, was truth which did not belong to a better philosophy, the French are still to any one system; for it would cease to be obeying an impulsion communicated from pure and universal truth, if it took the forwithout. This impulsion may be traced to mula of any particular theory; that it was two different sources-to the philosophy of to be found in neither the works of any one Scotland, and the philosophy of Germany.' philosopher, nor in the opinions of any one The French were indebted to M. Royer-age or any one people; that it was to be found Collard for their knowledge of the Scotch in all the writings, all the thoughts, all the philosophy. And but a slight familiarity speculations of men, and, moreover, in all the with its leading truths will help us toimaginet he wonder and the interest his hearers must have felt, when, passing from the cold and unproductive theory of Condillac, they luxuriated in the warm and generous doctrines of Reid and Stewart. The soul -its immortality-its moral relations-its first principles descanted on before young men, who had been wont to hear that man was mere matter, that good was evil, and evil good! This was a vast stride towards spiritualism. We have approached the period of the French eclectic philosophy. In order to appreciate this, the last movement in metaphysical science, the exact moral position of the French public ought never to be forgotten. We have seen them aroused from facts by which the life of humanity has been manifested; and, therefore, man had not to make a system of philosophy; that it was already made for him by the actual development of the world, of which man, himself, is but an integer; and, hence, that the task of the philosopher is to disengage it from the perishable forms under which it has revealed itself, and thus determine that which is immutable and necessary, in the very midst of that which is variable and contingent; —these were its characteristic outlines. It was very certain that this philosophy would be miserably defective if it stopped here. It had been a mass of human opinions without any consolidation. It had been an assemblage of limbs and organs, gathered together indiscriminately, adjusted with the threshold of the temple of truth-had ruthlessly defaced its inscriptions-had broken its columns-he, with a heart indignant We at the sacrilege, vowed to give himself no rest until he had restored even its entablature. It was at this moment that Jouffroy caught the ardor of his master: 'A reasonable man,' said he, 'will belong to no one school, no one sect, no one party; nevertheless, he will be neither skeptical nor indifferent. He will be eclectic. more or less art, but which could never constitute a living body. But we have,' says Cousin, a criterion by which to separate and select from among these elements. have the criterion of truth, of necessity. It is not in any human doctrine-not in any individual reason. It is reason universalreason absolute. It is objected, eclecticism is a syncretism which confounds all systems together. We answer, eclecticism does not confound all systems together; for it leaves no one system intact; it decomposes each one of them into two parts-the one false, the other true; it destroys the first, and ad- denies that there is truth, or denies that we can Eclecticism is not skepticism. Skepticism mits only the second in its work of recom- distinguish it from error. Eclecticism admits position. The true portion of one system not only the existence of truth, it establishes in it adds to the true portion of another system what it consists, and thence how it may be re-one truth to another truth, that so it may cognized. Two things exist: reality and idea form a true aggregate. It never confounds-which is its image. Reality is neither true one entire system with another entire system: it does not then confound all systems. Eclecticism, therefore, is not syncretism: the one is the exact opposite of the other. The one is a choice-the other is a mixture. The one discriminates-the other confounds.'* Now, be it observed, that this took place at a time and in a country when and where every question that was proposed was one concerning principles; every one asked for principles, knowing full well that there was no stability without them. There were few men, then, who did not aspire to the glory of being founders. Mankind seemed to them to have been born only yesterdaythe world to have just issued out of chaos -and each one's reason to have the mission to organize it. nor false. Idea only is susceptible of truth or ality, it is false when it differs from it. In conof falsity; it is true when it is conformed to resequence of the infirm and limited nature of our intelligence, which would perceive realityidea can never be either complete or faithful; never complete, for never can our intelligence embrace entire reality; never faithful, lor nevof reality which it embraces,-never can it er can our intelligence seize exactly that part translate faithfully into the language of ideas that which it has seen, nor into the language of words that which it has translated into the language of ideas. Every opinion, then, is as necessarily false as it is necessarily true. Eclecticism, then, based upon the nature of idea, must neither wholly admit, nor wholly reject, which is the necessary type of all opinion, must any one opinion, but, starting from reality; seek and admit that which it finds of each opinion in agreement with that type,―must seek and reject that which it finds of each opinion to be exclusive and inexact. Still less is eclecticism to be called indiffer ence; while it admits exclusively no one opinion, it does not pretend that no one is preferable to another-but only that no one is perfect. It prefers some one code, some one formulary, some one system; but, because of its love of truth, it cannot admit that that code, or that formulary, or that system, contains the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. Cousin reveals his state of mind at this period in his Preface to the first edition of his 'Philosophical Fragments: The spirit of analysis has destroyed much around us. Born in the midst of ruins of all kinds, we feel the necessity of reconstructing them. This necessity is pressing-is imperious. We are in peril while we continue in our present state.'+ Could any other feeling have been more natural to a man that had which gives birth to it, is the profound sentiThat which distinguishes eclecticism, that mused long and thoughtfully upon the past, ment that the world of opinions is only the imand within whom the fire had burned as he age of the world of realities, and that therefore, communed with Plato and Aristotle, with opinions can be judged neither in themselves, Proclus and Plotinus? The re-action bore nor by their consequences, nor by the authorihim to the opposite extreme of his age.ty of their author, nor by their antiquity, nor Philosophers around him proclaimed, All the past is false !' He retorted, 'All the past is true!' They had rushed across * Euvres de Victor Cousin, tom. ii. p. 25. + Ibid. p. 28. by the quality or number of the men who have professed them, nor by any other sign than their conformity to reality; whence it follows, that to examine an opinion without having beforehand taken cognizance of the reality which it pretends to express, is to aim at the end and to renounce the means. The substitution of |