ONE pernicious effect of amplification is, that it allows no opportunity for the mind to pursue a separate train or process of its own. It is also excessively irksome to persons of enlarged and rapid apprehension, to whom those authors are the most instructive as well as agreeable, who suggest only leading ideas, omitting subordinate remarks and illustrations. Barrow had other merits besides that copiousness or exuberance which even in him sometimes borders on prolixity, and which elicited from Charles the Second the compliment, or complaint, that he was an unfair preacher, leaving nothing for others to do after him but however this may be, it has been well said, I think by Fontenelle, that to exhaust a subject is to be very tedious. The best excuse for spreading out thought over a broad surfacethough hardly to such tenuity as is sometimes met with, like gold-leaf beat out by the skill of the craftsman-seems to be, that to the majority, intellectual as natural food is most nutritious when presented in a somewhat bulky form; few minds, as few stomachs, being able to digest what is highly concentrated.

A PROPOSITION expressed in the form of an aphorism communicates more pleasure, or more dislike, than when delivered in a different shape. If approved, its compression, and consequent separation from extraneous ideas, increase enumerated by Dugald Stewart, in which the doctrine commonly ascribed to Hume, respecting necessary connexion, had been anticipated by other writers. (a) Among the examples mentioned, those of Malebranche and Hobbes must have preceded Edwards by a considerable period. The same may be said of Berkeley; for the passages quoted by Stewart are taken from the treatise called Siris, published in 1744; whereas similar views on causation occur in a much earlier production, the Principles of Human Knowledge, which appeared in 1710, when Edwards was only seven years old:-views indeed which formed an essential part of the Bishop's theory, according to which all sensations or perceptions are but ideas immediately imprinted on the mind by the Author of our being.

(a) Stewart's Introduction to the Encyclopædia; and Note C in his Elements of the Philosophy of the Human Mind.

its force, and enhance the delight which it imparts. But if disapproved, its condensation only renders it the more repulsive. Had the same sentiment been conveyed in a less concentrated manner, it would haply have been mingled with other reflections, or with gleams of fancy, some of which might have served to divide attention, if not to gratify. Or the very attempt to exhibit it in a favourable light, or to connect it with argumentation, would have diminished the offence, by the deference and compliment thus indirectly conceded to its opponents.

It is not uncommon for the understanding to grasp a great general truth, without a minute perception of its elements, or of the various principles which it involves. Certain truths, especially to intellects of a certain class, are like the New World when first discovered by Columbus, of which he could little dream the vastness or undeveloped capabilities. It is but of a piece with this circumscription of view, and strangely illustrative of the dire torpor of an unawakened spirit, that it will admit the most wonderful propositions without the least consciousness or suspicion of their wonderfulness.

COMPRESSION of style is the effect of compression of thought. But a wide disparity usually exists between the space which a subject occupies in the understanding, and that which it fills when embodied in words; resembling in the former case the Genie of the Arabian tale while shut up in the copper vessel; in the latter, the monster when he had emerged in the shape of an enormous mist.

MIGHT there not be a kind of intellectual dialect, or algebra of speech, to be confined of course to intellectual men, which should include little more than the leading conceptions, in words suggestive rather than continuous? In this case, would not the subject be more vigorously grasped

than when spread out into a wider space? and might not such a compression of sentiment and diction be especially serviceable in argumentative essays, by keeping the attention fixed on the demonstration, without being diverted by the phraseology? The chain of reasoning in Edwards on the Will, for example though one of the closest and most compact logical pieces ever produced, and from which a philosophic reader would hesitate in wishing a single sentence subtracted-might thus perhaps be presented, advantageously for the purposes of comprehension, whether before or after perusal, within limits answering mentally to the story of the Iliad in a nutshell. Some such process, in fact, is performed internally by every discursive and powerful intellect, which resolves, concentrates, and reduces to manageable dimensions, the materials submitted to its examination, operating in matters of thought somewhat as an inverted telescope in perspective, by which the largest object, or a landscape itself, is embraced within the compass of a point.

PROGRESS AND LIMITATION.

|HILOSOPHY has been spread out before us for

ages, though with little effect from the specimens

which Nature herself has exhibited. How much might have been discovered respecting the laws of motion, and the applications of which they are susceptible, by observing the structure of birds, especially of the fishes which swim the most rapidly! While mankind were employing, for the purposes of writing, the skins of beasts, the inner bark of trees, waxen tablets, the papyrus, or other materials more durable, as brass or stone, the wasp tribe of insects were fabricating paper, with no small ingenuity, in the formation of their nests. The principle of the telescope, and even its latest improvements, might have been suggested by careful examination of the human eye; not to mention that several of the most interesting and useful problems in mechanics might have been learned from the architecture or anatomy of animal bodies. The general course has been, to ascertain the positions of science in some abstract or circuitous manner, and afterward to notice the exemplifications of them which the universe affords.

THERE is a profusion in the works of God Almighty worthy of his infinitude. Perhaps the larger proportion of those which are confined within the narrow boundaries of our own world, are concealed from our view. To say nothing

of the contents of the ocean, or of regions unexplored by man, we have reason to believe in the existence of innumerable objects which we are unable to descry with our present senses or means of discernment. Yet it is conceivable that the universe may include orders of being capable of apprehending minutely all these objects; and probably man, in a future state, will be furnished with additional and more exquisite instruments of perception, or rather with a new species of insight, able to discover not only the portions of nature which are now invisible, but the wonders comprehended in the range of immaterial existence. For what but the want of certain organs-supersensuous, that is, not physical-or of such faculties in a state different from the comparative dormancy in which they at present perhaps lie folded up in all human souls, could prevent us from now discerning myriads of ethereal intelligences, did they, in pursuance of whatever mystic or benevolent aims, frequent our globe, as Milton so beautifully fables ?—

Millions of spiritual creatures walk the earth

Unseen, both when we wake, and when we sleep.*

WHATEVER significance a wise interpretation of the Past may assign to individual men, compared with the aggregate of qualities and influences that constitute the character of an era, it can scarcely be questioned, that even if Lord Bacon had never lived, or never composed his Novum Organum, the advancement of science and philosophy would have been certain and rapid. Some other master spirit would have supplied his place; or the general diffusion of facts and habits of investigation, consequent on the invention of printing, would speedily have demolished both the authority of the scholastic system, and the ancient absurdities of opinion. No doubt the genius of Bacon accelerated the crisis, as that of Luther did the Reformation, which would have been effected ere long without his intervention.

* Paradise Lost, book iv.

E