the importance on the paramount dignity of the pursuit. It is as the best gymnastic of the mind, as a mean, principally and almost exclusively conducive to the highest education of our noblest powers, that we would vindicate to these speculations the necessity which has too frequently been denied them. By no other intellectual application (and least of all by physical pursuits), is the soul thus reflected on itself, and the faculties concentered in such independent, vigorous, unwonted, and continued energy; by none, therefore, are its best capacities so variously and intensely evolved. Where there is most life, there is the victory.""

We shall not say that we unreservedly subscribe to each particular clause in this powerful passage; but we hold that it furnishes an overpowering argument against the Positive Philosophy. That philosophy annihilates a hemisphere of human thought and endeavor; and the hemisphere which it annihilates is that in which all the sublime constellations burn. It can be necessary to add no word on the value of metaphysics as a discipline of mind; but a few words may not be out of place to suggest the corresponding value of religion.

The Positive Philosophy is explicit in its denunciation both of the former and of the latter; religion was the first great human delusion, metaphysics was the second: the course of humanity, according to it, has been that of the North American Indian, who, as he gradually imbibes ideas and forms habits of civilization, lays aside, one by one, the bits of painted glass, and the strings of beads, and the gaudy feathers, which were erewhile his glory; we should rather, on its hypothesis, say, that it was that of the monarch, who ruled well, and looked proudly, in his youth and manhood, but on whom the dotage of age came, and who laid aside his diadem, and unclasped his royal robe, and shut himself into a grave that he had hewn

for himself in a rock. If we might venture on indicating a difference and relation, more or less partial and strict, between the nature and influence of the mental gymnastic of metaphysics, and what results from that element in religion which is not of the nature of a truth discovered, but of a truth accepted, not of reason but of faith, we should say it might be figured by the difference and relation between light and heat, between truth and beauty, between strength and gentleness. The moral world, alleges the positive philosopher, requires no Sun. Not so, answers the metaphysician, for then there were no light, no knowledge; what you call Positive Science, when taken alone, is no knowledge at all. Not so, answers the religious man, for then there were no heat; the culinary fire of your provision shop, the Plutonic fire of your furnaces, will never array earth in its summer raiment, or cause its face to break into its summer smile. And if metaphysical training makes man intellectually strong, religion is required to give him a beauty and a gentleness. We found pantheism wrap man in a mail of pride, which we could pronounce none other than a mail of *madness. Positive Science seems to make man very humble, but it too leaves him proud; only the pride of pantheism was that of a monarch who said he was well enough, and required no aid from God; that of atheism is the pride of him who, though beggared, prefers living on husks to returning to his Father.

There must not be taken from man the belief in an Infinite; in that belief alone can his whole nature be developed and displayed: thus alone does he find the humility that does not degrade him, and the honor that makes him not proud, the faith that clothes him in strength, and the reverence that breathes over his face a softened majesty, the love that makes him a fellow of angels, and the fear that reminds him he is still on the earth, the blessing that breathes tenderly on his

pathway here, and the hope that beckons from the golden walls. There is a beauty in the face of man when his God smiles on it, as on the face of the babe in his cradle on which a father looks in joy, which must not be taken away. There is an earnestness in the heart and life of a man, when he knows that the eye of the Eternal is on him, which must not be foregone. There is an eternity of consequence in every act of an immortal, which he can not deny and continue to work. The finite being staggers in bewilderment when separated from the Infinite; he can not stand alone in the universe; he can not defame his spirit without darkening it, he can not scorn faith without weakening reason, he can not deny God and reach the full strength and expansion of his faculties as a man. Coleridge says truly that religion makes all glorious on which it looks. How poor the education for my highest faculties, obtained by going round the world to learn in what order its phenomena are ranged, and discover, as my highest reward, new food to eat and new raiment wherewithal I may be clothed! How effectual and sublime is the education I receive in the survey, if every object I meet is gifted with a power of' exhaustless suggestion, and every leaf of the forest and star of the sky is a commissioned witness for God, and not the most careless trill of woodland melody, no chance gleam of sunlight over the fountain that leaps from the crag, and reckless as it is, must stay to reflect in its rainbowed loveliness the beauty of heaven, no wild wave tossing joyously on the pathless deep, but has power to call into action my highest and holiest powers, of wonder, of reverence, of adoration! Could no other argument be brought against the Positive Philosophy, than the effect it would necessarily have on the education of the race, by excluding, so to speak, religion and metaphysics from the worldschool, it were argument sufficient.

Listening to the magniloquent professions of this philosophy, and looking at the results to which it may in some sort lay claim, it is important to inquire whether, and to what extent, its teaching is likely to be accompanied with success. We must not omit, however, to remark, that the atheistic science can nowise lay claim to the whole achievement of Baconian induction. Physical pursuits managed at least to subsist when unallied with atheism, nay, we suspect that even for them the alliance would be cramping and pernicious. Bacon denounced atheism in absolute and unmeasured terms, and Newton never turned his eye toward the stars without looking for the light of God, which they revealed.

Of the ultimate success of the Positive Philosophy we have no fear. Instinct is stronger than argument. It is not natural for man to find his all in this world. The gravitation of reasoning beings toward the moral Sun of the universe is too strong to be permanently or altogether broken. Where untutored man acts in the mere strength of nature, we are met by spectacles which, however sad, have one element of sublimity, in that they bear witness to man's belief in his spiritual nature; at the other end of the scale, where the loftiest intellects of the human race rest in the solitude of greatness, we receive the same assurance. If I visit the banks of some lone Indian river, where the Hindoo superstition still reigns supreme, I find I have not yet descended to a rank of humanity in which an invisible world is denied or forgotten, and man can name no motive strong enough to silence the remonstrances or to defeat the offers of sense. The widow is brought out to die on the funeral pile of her husband. I may weep over that fair form, in its simple beauty, where the blush and the dimple of girlish hope are just yielding to the matron smile of perfect womanhood, and deem it all too lovely for the embrace of fire. But

even here I will have within me a haughty consolation, and I will gaze with pride in my melancholy, because that here also the human spirit asserts its supremacy over pain and death, even here, for duty and devotion, a weak woman can die. And, if the disciples of M. Comté tell us that this is just one of those spectacles which it is their boast to do away with forever, we point them, as we said, to those minds which the acclamations of the race pronounce the greatest and best. While men gaze in revering pride toward Plato, and honor the lofty contempt with which Fichte looked down on the joys of sense, while there is rapture in the eye of Poetry, and majesty on the brow of Philosophy, sight will not altogether prevail against faith, the sense will not, with its foul exhalations, wholly choke the spirit. Your light Anacreons, and careless Horaces, and frivolous Moores may continue to sing; even your Gibbons and Humes may still work; your system-builders, with ears deafened by their own hammering and backs bent with stooping to their own toil, will not cease to build; but no Homer or Dante, no Shakespeare or Milton, no Coleridge and, we even add, no Shelley, will sing under the auspices of the Positive Philosophy; your Fichte, your Carlyle, your De Quincey, your Tennyson, your Ruskin, will refuse to serve nature on such conditions; they will throw up their commissions at once. What men have deemed best deserving of the name of thought would expire.

"Why thought! To toil, and eat,

Then make our bed in darkness, needs no thought."

We have been told that immortality inspires the lyric Muse; that it is the light in the distance which kindles her eye; but now her song would be a funeral dirge. We might add quotation to quotation from our poetry, in indefinitely extended