us.

On the other hand, there are some points of knowledge, on which we necessarily distrust our own private decision, until it is confirmed by the consent of other minds around Would any man venture to lay down a canon respecting the sublime or beautiful, merely from his own personal feeling? Is it not universally acknowledged, that we can only pronounce as to the real forms of beauty, by the extent to which they appeal to the sensibilities of mankind at large? Would any one, again, venture to maintain that his own individual conception of virtue, or the highest good, is absolutely true and adequate? Is it not, on the contrary, tacitly admitted, that this is a conception which grows up more and more into brightness and reality in the common consciousness of mankind?

We find then that the universal judgment must be our guide in all cases where our knowledge depends upon intuition, that is, upon the direct perception of fundamental and essential ideas.

Now, if all our knowledge were duly apportioned into these two divisions - if we could at once say, This is of a logical and this of an intuitional character, decision would be easy. But as science contains within it, for the most part, two elements, the respective offices of the individual and of the universal consciousness are often blended in one result. All we can say, therefore, is, that just in proportion as a science is predominantly of a formal character, in that proportion it may be perfected by individual thinking; but the more it involves of an intuitive element, the more it must depend upon the development of the univer

sal mind. Verbal logic, for example, is entirely formal, and it sprung forth in the person of Aristotle almost to its full bloom; but the higher sciences depend for their advancement on the gradual unfolding of those great intuitions upon which they are founded. This fact, we declare, ought never to be lost sight of. No error is more common, none more mischievous, than for men to imagine that their own intuitions are absolutely perfect, and that all the discrepancies which exist in the higher branches of truth, arise from false reasoning upon fixed and sufficient data. The fact is, that men of sound mind more commonly than not reason correctly; and the discrepancies that appear in their systems will, in the great majority of cases, be found to depend upon their starting with different conceptions or intuitions as to the primary data they respectively assume. And so it often happens, after the logical combatants have exhausted their weapons, their strength, and their last relics of mutual toleration, that the mighty spirit of humanity rolls forward in its course, sweeps all their verbal trifling into oblivion, pours new light on the very conceptions they regarded as fixed points, merges the question discussed in some higher principle, and leads us over every obstacle nearer and nearer to the centre of eternal truth.

This view of the subject gives us a high idea of man as man, and presents intense motives to a universal and enlightened philanthropy. Sects, systems, nations, and even individuals, have imagined themselves to be the favored and privileged medium by which truth was to be

unveiled, and the world to be illuminated and blessed. Miserable delusion! So far from this, it is at our cost that we accept as perfect the conceptions of any one people, or of any one class, and overlook the rays of light which other and perhaps humbler minds reflect from the great central sun of truth's eternal day.

Already in politics have we learned the lesson that society is incomplete, if any one class of men is wanting, or the labor of any class set at naught. There is another and a holier truth yet to be learned, namely, that it is not in his physical relations only that man needs the help of his brother, but equally so in the progress of his knowledge, the enlightenment of his mind, the development of his moral principles, the perfection of his religious nature. Individuals, parties, nations, classes, are alike insufficient of themselves; their ideas become partial, their principles one-sided, their whole inward life incomplete; they need to be balanced by other ideas, other principles, other inward perceptions and feelings; there is need of the combined influence of humanity in its whole solid mass, to aid on the progress of truth and usher in the reign of love.

Every estate of human life, in this point of view, becomes dignified and worthy. The poor, who are too often looked on as merely the work-tools of society, are seen to have their part to perform in the advancement of knowledge and moral principle as well as the rest. Their necessary dependence upon their own individual resources, the healthy effect of labor upon the mind, nay, the very toils and struggles through which they have to pass, give them

certain views of great human truths, which, without such experience, would have been lost and forgotten. More commonly than not, great social improvements rise from the lower to the higher circles of society, showing that those who most need justice and benevolence to be exercised towards them, are the first to see the principles by which justice and sympathy between man and man can be legally secured.

In opposing the principle of private judgment, it must be carefully kept in mind, that there is a very broad distinction between the right of private judgment in matters of conscience, and the possibility of it in the pursuit of moral and spiritual truth. The right of private judgment we are infinitely far from denying. But this is a totally different thing from the principle, which makes man's individual reason the supreme test of truth. Morell.

In nine cases out of ten the intuitional faculty is developed in inverse proportion to the logical. ib.

Those who excel in logical powers, have a completeness, though a narrow one, and they have often great clearsightedness in carrying their convictions into action. They are therefore apt to feel themselves centres of power.

The tendency of the Greek mind was deductive, rather than inductive; of unrivalled subtlety in obtaining results from principles, and results again from them, ad infinitum; deficient in that steady moral patience which is required

for the examination of facts, and which has made Britain at once a land of practical craftsmen, and of earnest scientific discoverers.

After all, if we will consider, induction being the right path to knowledge, every man, whether he knows it or not, uses induction, more or less, by the mere fact of his having a human reason, and knowing any thing at all.

Since Archimedes spoke, (of the lever and of hydrostatic pressure,) the thing seems self-evident to every schoolboy. There is something to me very solemn in such a fact as this. It brings us down to some of the very deepest questions of metaphysics. This mental insight of which we boast so much, what is it? Is it altogether a process of our own brain and will? Or is it that no man can see a thing unless God shows it him? Is it that in each separate act of induction, that mysterious and transcendental process which cannot, let logicians try as they will, be expressed by any merely logical formula,- is it, I say, that in each separate act of induction we do not find the law, but the law is shown to us, by Him who made the law? Bacon thought so. May not Bacon be right?

As with individuals, so with races, nations, societies, schools of thought; youth is the time of free fancy and poetry; manhood of calm and strong induction; old age of deduction, when men settle down upon their lees, and content themselves with reaffirming and verifying the conclusions of their earlier years, and too often, alas! with denying and anathematizing all conclusions which have been arrived at since their own meridian. It is sad to