work is not yet done, that her development is not yet. completed. With her starting point in the feebleness of infancy, surrounded by a nature with which she knew not how to place herself in harmony, made as she was, subject to passion and error, her past history could be only what it has been. That is, with the given antecedents, the consequents which have actually followed were inevitable; with the data furnished, it was impossible to draw other conclusions. So far as this is fatalism we admit it, but do not undertake to defend it, for it needs no defence. We admit it, for to deny it, were to deny Providence, and to assert that history is a mere jumble of facts, which have taken place without law, without cause either in God, man, or the nature of things.

According to Cousin, then, philosophy accepts the past and trusts the future. The past was not all wrong. The past has been; and in that is its apology. But it did not attain to all perfection, to all the truth, wisdom, and goodness desirable, or attainable even, reference had to the capacities of the race; and therefore we should not seek to recall and make it the present. In its place it was good, and had a right to be; out of its place it has no right to be, and would be bad. In the present it would be out of its place. Herein is the condemnation of those who turn their faces from the future, look back, sigh for the return of what has been, and deem all departure from it a deterioration. And herein too is their impotence. The past never returns. Yesterday never becomes to-day. The middle ages are gone. The age of authority in matters of faith and opinion is with the ages beyond the flood. Vain is the attempt to recall it. They who seek to recall it are warring against God and Humanity, and should therefore provoke not our anger, but our compassion. What are individuals in a war against Humanity, and Humanity's Maker?

The race is in a continual process of development. Its course is ever from the imperfect towards the perfect. Not yet has it reached its goal; not yet is its

career ended. The future then must differ from the present and the past; but though differing from them it must always be superior to them. Instead then o lamenting that the past has gone, or grieving that the present must pass away, we should turn our faces with hope to the future.

The office of philosophy, when applied to history, is not to rave or to weep, to praise or condemn, but simply to comprehend and explain. If it be philosophy, it is not destructive but constructive, at once radical and conservative, Janus-faced, looking before and after, historian and prophet, recounting the past and foretelling the future, complacent and hopeful, peaceful and active. It looks into all the doing and driving of the race, into all its victories and defeats, into all systems, creeds, sects, schools, and parties, with a keen, penetrating eye, without fear or prejudice; calm and impartial, tolerant but not indifferent, it seeks the part of truth in each, explains the errors in connexion with which it is always found, and sets it forth in a clear light for the nourishment and guidance of the race. It is startled by no forms of error or heresy, and deterred by no misplaced reverence for the past, or attachment to the present, or apprehension for the future, by no noise of the crowd, warnings of the timid, or fulminations of the interested, from making its investigations thorough, or from calmly but firmly proclaiming its results.

So much we have thought it proper to say in defence of philosophy, as we find it represented by Cousin, and as we ourselves embrace it. If there be any force in what we have thus far said, the other charges brought in the pamphlet under consideration, require no refutation. What we have said, if it prove anything, proves that the philosophy we are defending is sound, so far as concerns fundamental principles. Admitting then, for the sake of the argument, that some erroneous applications or unwarrantable deductions have been made, either by Cousin himself, or by individuals among ourselves, we need not be disturbed;

for they will be resisted by the fundamental principles themselves, be soon detected, exposed, and therefore, as a matter of course, pass away. If your

system is right, sound in its elements, you have nothing to apprehend from its applications. The race is a logician, and never draws or accepts an illogical inference. Let its premises be true, and its conclusions will be just.

The Reviewer questions the sincerity of the faith Cousin professes to have in Christianity. We think we have shown that one may adopt Cousin's philosophy, and yet believe in Christianity. It perhaps would not be amiss for this orthodox Reviewer to be aware that the men, who subject themselves to the reproach of bringing out new doctrines, are about as likely to be sincere in their professions, as those who take their faith. from tradition, and their morals from the fashion of the day. The men he condemns have as much interest in upholding religion both for themselves and others as he has; and it is not impossible but they may see as clearly what must be favorable to religion, and what must be the tendency of their own doctrines, as he does, especially since he owns these doctrines are to him incomprehensible. Perhaps he, and they who think with him, are not all who are acquainted with the traditions of the fathers, nor all who have hearts for the beautiful and good, minds for the perception and comprehension of truth, or zeal and energy for its furtherance. He should look to it, that, while he is condemning them, and compassing sea and land to hold back the ever-advancing mind to his superannuated formulas, he be not found among those who neither enter into the kingdom of heaven themselves, nor suffer those that would to enter. They were not Jesus and his disciples who were thrust out of the kingdom, and prohibited from sitting down with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the wise and the good of every age and nation, but the scribes and pharisees, who made void the law through their traditions. Nevertheless let him take his own course, as we shall ours.

VOL. III. NO. III.

41

We are also told that the philosophy we defend is not new, that it is identical with the philosophy which has from time immemorial prevailed in the East, that it is but a republication of the Gnostic philosophy, or the Alexandrian. The human mind is everywhere the same, and in its developments follows ever the same laws. It would be singular, then, if there should not be a sameness in all philosophy. That the philosophy we are defending has its prototype wherever man has philosophized, is one of the evidences of its fidelity to the mind, and therefore of its truth. All possible systems of philosophy, according to Cousin, are reducible to four, and of course the human race can only reproduce from time to time one or another, or all of them. We are now in an epoch of history, analagous to that of the first three or four centuries of our era, and therefore our philosophy ought to be analagous to Gnosticism and to the Alexandrian Eclecticism. We not only admit this, but contend that it is so. The Alexandrians were philosophers who sought to reconcile the newly developed reason with the old religious and theological traditions, precisely as French and German philosophers are seeking to reconcile reason and the Church. The Gnostics were men who sought to reconcile the Christian movement, the simple faith and piety of the early Christians, with the teachings of science; precisely the work to be done at this time, as well as at that. The historical facts of our epoch being analogous, our philosophy should be analogous. But although it must be analogous, it may be superior; and it is precisely in its superiority, in its more advanced state, more perfect development, that its difference ought to consist. This superiority, this more perfect development, we apprehend will by no competent judge be denied it.

In conclusion, we would say, that we have thus far accepted the name Transcendentalism, although it is not one of our own choosing, nor the one we approve. So far as Transcendentalism is understood to be the recognition in man of the capacity of knowing truth

intuitively, or of attaining to a scientific knowledge of an order of existence transcending the reach of the senses, and of which we can have no sensible experience, we are Transcendentalists. But when it is

understood to mean, that feeling is to be placed above reason, dreaming above reflection, and instinctive intimation above scientific exposition; in a word when it means the substitution of a lawless fancy for an enlightened understanding, as we apprehend it is understood in our neighborhood, by the majority of those who use it as a term of reproach, we must disown it, and deny that we are Transcendentalists.

EDITOR.

CHAT IN BOSTON BOOKSTORES. - No. II.*

ART. II- Letter writing- Spenser's Faerie Queene Mr. Ripley and Mr. Norton-Jouffroy-MilneShelley.

Rev. Mr. Nightshade. Again well met. It is so pleasant to find you here, that I can hardly make up my mind to scold you for not answering my letters. Prof. Partridge. - Why should you? I was pleased with the letters.

Rev. Mr. N. — Much good did that to me; I wrote to you, poor, credulous country parson, that I am, according to your desire, a full, and straight forward account of what our little coterie, one and all, thought of the books you recommended. I looked for an answer in the same business-like style sent to the post, no letter made excuses, sent again, no letterdered, again no letter. I lamented, but at last weary

* See Boston Quarterly Review, No. IX.

won