had only then begun. The subject is difficult, the paper is short; but the statement is most luminous, and the illustration uncommonly beautiful and felicitous

ESSAY

On the Divisions of Philosophy.

In considering this subject, the question has very forcibly presented itself to us, Why in the physical department of philosophy, have the divisions and sub-divisions been carried to such a degree of minuteness, while in the moral department they are comparatively few? Not, we conceive, because in the latter the field of observation is more limited, or the materials more scanty than in the former; (for quite the reverse of this we believe to be true); but chiefly because the latter is involved in the darkness of mystery, which entirely obscures many of those lines of demarcation which even in the former are not very strongly delineated.

Let us suppose, in illustration of this, that a man wholly unacquainted with the classifications of philosophy, looked round on an ordinary landscape. There are traces of such marked distinction between some of the objects, and such strong points of resemblance between others, that he could not fail to make some general arrangement F 2

and classification of the whole. He would at once distinguish the land from the water, and the green herbage from the naked rock, and the houses from the trees, and the animate from the inanimate objects that surrounded him. If we farther suppose that while he was thus gazing on the scene, the shades of night began to gather around him, it is easy to conceive how many of the nicer lines of distinction which were before so apparent, would now become dim and undiscernible; how the sky would seem to mingle with the ocean; and how the herbage, and the trees, and the houses, and the animals, would be involved in one dark shade of unvaried sameness; and how, where he could before point out many a division and many a subdivision, two or three grand lineaments, and these but faintly perceptible, would be all he could discern within the whole range of his survey.

And thus it is with the two grand divisions of philosophy; the philosophy of matter, and the philosophy of mind. In the one we have to do with an external world, where all is luminous and distinct; in the other we have to do with the busy world within, where all is seen as through a glass, darkly. Need we wonder, then, that the one has been far more minutely divided and sub-divided than the other?

Accordingly we find that while mental science has been divided into three parts, viz. Logic, Rhetoric, and Moral Philosophy, the divisions of physical science amount to at least ten times that number.

But not only are the divisions of mental science few, but, few as they are, they have been confounded together. And this we think has arisen not so much from that obscurity which envelopes the whole subject, as from the intimate connexion with each other of its different departments.

There is here a distinction which we would notice between the physical and mental sciences; that while the materials of the former are widely scattered over the whole face of nature, and seem not to be connected by any common tie; those of the latter have all a reference to a single object-the human mind. It is thus that, as among the members of the human body, there exists among all the departments of this latter science, a common sympathy, if we may so speak ;-so that if one suffer, all suffer with it; if one is injured, all are injured. And it is this very close connexion which has been the cause of their being confounded together.

To illustrate this, let us suppose that war has been declared against one of two confederate states, and that the inhabitants of the other come promptly forward, to defend the territories of their ally, and that after they have succeeded in beating off the enemy, they still linger in the country, and become gradually so amalgamated with the original inhabitants, that in process of time the two peoples are confounded in one.

Now this, we think, is just what has happened with regard to the moral and intellectual philosophies.-Distinctly separate, yet nearly allied; the

attack which Mr. Hume made upon the one, struck, though indirectly, at the very vitals of the other, and the champions of moral science wisely took the alarm. It was then first, that with a laudable zeal, they overstepped the limits of their own domain; and had they returned when tranquillity was restored, they had done well. It is not for going forth to meet a common enemy that we censure them, but because when that enemy was defeated, they still lingered in a foreign land, and forgot to retire within their own peculiar territories.

On the 31st of the same month he read another essay in the class, on one of the topics of political economy around which the fertile genius of Dr. Chalmers has thrown a fascination and a splendour, of which the subject was not previously supposed to be susceptible. How thoroughly his pupil was imbued with the ardent spirit of his professor, this essay most powerfully illustrates. Every reader will form his own judgment of the argument. Of the composition of the paper, and the beauty of the illustration, there can be but one opinion.

ESSAY

On the Analogy which subsists between the Operations of Nature, and the Operations of Political Economy.

It has been said by some writers of natural history, that an antidote to the venom of the serpent is to be found within the body of the animal itself. We know not whether there be any truth in this assertion; but if there be, that must surely be a very beautiful mechanism by which those very organs which produce a deadly poison, produce also a remedy for its fatal effects; and surely that arrangement is a display of the most consummate wisdom by which the efficient cause of an evil is also the efficient cause of its cure.

Now there is a principle very much akin to this, which exists in almost all the operations of nature; a principle to which nature in a great measure owes that constancy for which she has been so greatly admired. The principle we

refer to is this,-That an operation of nature whenever it arrives at that stage in its progress where its effects would begin to be detrimental, by a very beautiful constitution of things, gives rise to an operation of an opposite tendency, and thus works out a cure for those very evils which