the lower orders of being. A description of the species oyster may answer for every individual of the species, but not so with man. In a sense, every man is a distinct species. Every man has an idiosyncracy. And as in the different species, so in the different individuals of the same species; the individualization, the idiosyncracy, will be proportioned to rank in the scale of being. A powerful mind has more that is peculiar to itself than a weak one. For this reason genius is pre-eminently idiosyncratic. Aristotle and Kant have attempted to establish certain forms, or categories, common to all human minds. Such, undoubtedly, there are, and it is highly important to understand them. But every mind has also its own categories. Do we believe that any training, any circumstances, any effort of will, could have transformed an Aristotle into a Plato, or a Schleiermacher into a Paulus?

It may be thought to militate against the assertion, that genius is idiosyncratic, that men of genius manifest a peculiarly strong sympathy with their kind. But, properly regarded, this fact confirms, instead of weakens, the other. For, in the spiritual world, as well as in the kingdom of matter, the law of attraction operates most strongly between opposites; and the more marked and peculiar is the mental constitution of a man, the more powerfully is he drawn towards his kind, and especially towards those of an opposite idiosyncracy from his own. Be it observed, however, that it is opposites, not contraries, which are thus mutually attracted; and, moreover, that with system-makers the hostile tendencies, engendered by a desire of victory, predominate over and suppress all workings of sympathy.

But to return to our former position. The falseness of the method of generalization, we have said, is greatest when applied to men. Man, above all other creatures, is individual, and cannot be treated in classes. Here is the mistake of many philosophers. They observe the resemblances between mind and mind too much, and the differences too little. Hence their astonishment at a fact which ought, by this time, to have become familiar to them, viz., the variety of answers given to the question, What is truth? In the form of an abstract proposition, or in its application to the history of the remote past, every thinking person recognizes and tolerates the fact that there is a diversity of opinions among men. He can easily reconcile himself to the know

ledge that Democritus or Plotinus, or Des Cartes, or Leibnitz, held a different set of opinions from himself; he can philosophize upon the rise and development of various systems, and trace the law of their succession. But let his neighbor rise up and say, "I differ from you on this point; you think desire is synonymous with volition, and I think, nay, I am sure, it is not ;" and no words can express the astonishment, perhaps the indignation, with which he regards his audacious opponent. He descants with vehemence upon the inconceivable blindness and stupidity of some men, and is in doubt only whether he should feel most pity or most contempt for one so signally devoid of inward illumination.

Another error sometimes committed in relation to this subject, is that of inferring, from the diversity of systems, that there is no such thing as absolute objective truth. For six thousand years, it is said, men have been disputing about all the great problems of thought, and are no nearer to uniformity of opinion than when they began. Surely, if there were any such thing as absolute truth, or if it were attaina ble by human capacities, it would ere this have been found.

There is such a thing as absolute, unchangeable, immortal truth, and by those who seek her in humility and love, she shall be found not, indeed, by all men, for all men have not the right state of heart: "there are some truths," says De Maistre," which can be apprehended only by l'esprit du cœur"-nor, perhaps, by any minds absolutely free from all admixture of error, and in all its beautiful proportions and admirable relations. But in that degree in which it is necessary to man's well-being, in the highest sense of the word, truth is attainable. Especially is it attainable in relation to the great points which concern man's spiritual nature and destiny; for here it is doubly true, that he who seeks shall find. We are the more concerned to be understood on this head, as some of the remarks which are to follow may seem to countenance a different result; and do, therefore, earnestly request that this caveat may be borne in mind.

Yet, with all our confidence in the existence and attaina

bleness of truth, we find it impossible to sympathize in the agreeable anticipations of those who predict the final triumph and exclusive reign of a single system of philosophy, which is to embody unmixed truth, and to which all men are to give in their adherence. We cannot persuade ourselves that men

will even think alike on any point not susceptible of mathematical demonstration, and not falling within the jurisdiction of the senses. For such a conviction several reasons may be given; the first of which is drawn from the history of the past. For, not only do we find that a period of six thousand years has proved insufficient to create uniformity in men's opinions, but there has been no advance towards such a result. The history of ancient philosophy, as is well known, presents only a succession of systems which chase each other like the forms in a magic lantern. And what single opinion or system, in relation to points of speculation merely, can be said to have died out? Modern philosophy treads in the steps of the ancient. Of all the great problems of human thought, we have the same solutions as were given in the stoa, the lyceum, and the groves of Academus. What would have been the astonishment of Plato and Aristotle, could they have been told that the lapse of twenty centuries would not suffice to put beyond controversy the questions which they pondered and answered, each after his own fashion? That after so long a time the same points would be contested with undiminished zeal, and established or confuted by the aid of the same arguments? As great, probably, as would be the amazement of a philosopher of our day, predicting largely of the future destiny of philosophy, and the perfectibility of man, to whom the same fact should be revealed respecting two thousand years to come. What! he would be ready to exclaim, is the progress of truth so slow? Will it take the world so long to see what is to me as clear as noon-day? But patience, friend. You may see clearly, yet not rightly. Even if it is truth at which you are looking, yet you see it through your own mental optics, and your mental eye, observe, is not an achromatic lens. It colors the rays it transmits. A man who wears green glasses sees very clearly that every thing is green; but does he see rightly?

So far from finding that intellectual cultivation leads to unanimity of opinion, the reverse is true. The more cultivated is the mind of a nation, the more numerous are its moral, political, and philosophical sects. The only periods of apparent advance towards unanimity, are periods of intellectual stagnation, when indifference may be taken for harmony, and no-thinking regarded as evidence of thinking But whenever intellectual activity re-commences,

alike.

and thought revives, then arise on every side," thick as the leaves in Vallambrosa," swarming sects. Men take hold anew of the so-often picked bones of contention; each thinker again imagines that he has found the golden clue which leads out of the labyrinth of error, and that he can take all the world with him. There is a universal ferment; every body talks, and reads, and writes, discusses, reasons, analyzes, and synthesizes, and nobody seems to know that he is doing just what his progenitors, back to Adam, have done as well before him, and what his descendants, down to the last man, will do again.

Increase of knowledge does not, then, tend to union. Science, says St. Paul, puffeth up, (and so disuniteth,) but love buildeth up.

The history of an individual mind is a type of that of the species, and illustrates the same truth. Its first progress is from multiplicity to unity; it classifies, generalizes, combines. But when this process has reached a certain limit, an opposite one begins. We find that we had mistaken resemblance for identity. That which we had regarded as one, begins to scem multifold and diverse; we return to multiplicity, but not to that multiplicity from which we started. Our classifi cation is now a new one. The alternation of these processes constitutes the law by which the progress of the individual mind, and also that of the species, is regulated.

But it may be objected, that we cannot reason with certainty from the past to the future, and that the fact that something never has been, does not warrant the inference that it never will be. Let us then endeavor to ascertain the grounds of this endless diversity of opinions which meets us in the past and the present, and determine whether they are accidental or permanent in their nature. If we select a single individual, and examine the sources of his opinions, we shall find them to be the result of various causes. The places in which he has lived, the persons by whom he has been surrounded, the books he has read, and ten thousand other circumstances, have exerted a modifying influence. But to modify is not to create. The varying circumstances of soil and climate, the accidental distribution of sun-light and shade, may determine whether the young sapling shall be stunted or vigorous, crooked or erect, but no circumstances can make an clm or a poplar grow from an acorn. What the tree shall be is pre-determined before the sced has begun

to germinate; how high it shall grow will depend on circumstances. Every mind is a seed containing in itself the law of its development, and pre-determined to this or that direction before its unfolding.

Allow as much as possible for habit, education, prejudice, for the idola tribus, theatri, etc. etc., and there still remains, broad, clear, and inevitable, this fact-men are born with different opinions; or, which is the same thing, they are born with mental constitutions, which will infallibly originate different opinions so soon as they begin to think. Place two men under the same outward influences from birth, and the one shall grow up a mystic, the other a utilitarian; the one a conservative, the other a radical, the one a Platonist, the other an Aristotelian.

The error common on this point is one of frequent occurrence on other subjects, namely, a hysteron proteron, or, vulgarly, putting the cart before the horse. We have other examples of it in the reasoning which makes motives the causes of volition, when it is in fact from an act of the will that they become motives; or in that which asserts the revival of a certain philosophical system at a particular epoch-that of Aristotle, for instance, in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries to be the cause of the direction of mind at that cpoch, whereas the previous direction of mind was the occasion of the revival of the system. In the present case, it is absurd to say that circumstances determine opinions and habits of thought, since the influence of these very circumstances is so modified by the character of the mind on which they act, that men shall draw support for the most opposite systems from the same source, each mind assimilating its food to itself, even as the sweet rose and the poisonous nightshade derive their nourishment from the same soil.

It is admitted that these remarks apply, in their widest extent, only to minds of uncommon power. Weak men borrow their opinions from others, and this is equivalent to having none. No man has an opinion unless he has made it his own by thinking. With others we have nothing to do. In treating of the formation of opinions, we of course select thinking minds, just as a physician, in determining the functions of a certain organ, chooses for examination a sound and healthy, not a feeble and diseased organization.

But if truth be one and unchangeable, how is it possible that men's views of it should difler so widely? For the very