Ideal carries us back, and up, to the Original and Ground of all things or particular existences; the doctrine of Ideas, or Ideism, carries us back, and up, only to particular existences, to individual beings themselves. Here is seen the great distance which philosophy has fallen from its original sublimity, and how low and superficial it has finally become. Its highest doctrines relate now only to particular beings, individual existences, leaving entirely out of view the Highest Being, Being of beings, Essence of essences, the object of the researches and contemplation of the older philosophers. But what is the philosophy which leaves out of view the infinite God, the primitive Essence, Unity, and Creator of all particular beings, or creatures, and which stops short with the creatures themselves? It is, disguise the matter as we will, atheism, and nothing but atheism. Is it wonderful, then, that our youth, who are taught this philosophy in our schools, and in nearly all modern literature, should find it so exceedingly difficult to obtain a firm and living faith in the Gospel?

But we are too favorable to modern philosoply. It has not only fallen from the Ideal, but it has fallen from even particular existences, and has come to amuse itself with the mere notions which the mind has of them. This is seen in the modern use of the word Idea. In the older philosophical language, the term Idea designated the thing itself, or rather the essence, the essential peculiarity of the particular being in question. It was the presence of the formative principle, or, as we prefer to say, creative principle, the Ideal in the Real. "The reality of the body," say Democritus and Leucippus, "is not in its external surface." The essence of any particular being, we may add, is not in its outward appearance, but in its vital or formative principle, in what some of our transcendental friends term the spirit, though without the necessary exactness of language. This essential, formative, or creative, principle, which must be in every particular existence, whether of the sensible world, or the intelli

gible, and which is that which makes it be, and be what it is, is what the older and profounder philosophy meant by the word idea. Idea was, therefore, a term which belonged to a philosophy that dealt with ontology, to speak after the Latins, with essential forms, the essences of things; and which sought, from the essences of things, to rise to the Primitive Essence, the Essence of essences, -to rise to God, as Plato poetically expresses it, borne on the wings of ideas. Here the term had a profound significance, which led those, who used it, to deal immediately with things, with realities. But the moment we come down to modern philosophy, especially to the Essay on the Human Understanding, all this profound significance disappears, and, instead of Ideas, regarded as the essences of things, we have Ideas which are merely our mental affections, taken as the object of the mind's own action; and, therefore, instead of a philosophy studying the essences of things, we have a fruitless psychology studying merely the soul's own phenomena. Even Ideism becomes now a term, etymologically interpreted, too expressive, for it obviously bears the same relation to Idealism that Idea does to Ideal. Strictly speaking, our philosophy has fallen as much below Ideism, as Ideism is below Idealism. Idealism rises to the Primitive Essence, for the Ideal is the Creative Logos, or Word, one with God; Ideism rises to the essences of individual things, or creatures; but modern philosophy, which is nothing but the veriest psychology, aspires only to the mere phenomena of the creature. Is it possible to fall lower, or to approach nearer to the infinite Inane? But we return to Leroux, and Berkeley.

"We feel how very obscure what we have just advanced must appear to our readers. Unhappily, we can only vaguely indicate here our thoughts on a subject, which it will be the object of all our metaphysical articles to demonstrate, and make clear. Yet it was necessary to trace a line of demarcation between the two senses of the word Idealism. We have done it. We come now to Berkeley, and his system, which we must be permitted to call ideism or immaterialism, so as to escape the confusion of which we have complained.

"Towards the year 1680, William Molineux, author of a treatise on Dioptrics, and founder of the Society of Dublin, proposed an interesting psychological problem: 'Suppose a man born blind, and now adult, and taught by his touch to distinguish between a cube and a sphere of the same metal, and nighly of the same bigness, so as to tell, when he felt one and the other, which is the cube, which the sphere; suppose then the cube and sphere placed on a table, and the blind man made to see; query, whether by his sight before he touched them, he could now distinguish and tell, which is the globe, which the cube.' Molineaux answers, Not. For though he has obtained experience of how a globe, how a cube, affects his touch, yet he has not yet attained the experience, that that which affects his touch so and so, must affect his sight so and so; or that the protuberant angle in the cube, that pressed hist hand unequally, shall appear to his eye as it does in the cube.' "Locke published this problem of Molineux in his Essay on the Human Understanding, (B. II. c. ix.), and gave it the same answer. 'I agree,' he says, with this thinking gentleman, whom I am proud to call my friend, in his answer to this problem; and am of opinion, that the blind man, at first sight, would not be able with certainty to say, which was the globe, which the cube, whilst he only saw them.' This answer, adopted by Locke, moreover, conformed, perfectly, to his general principle of sensation and experience. The soul, in the beginning, as he held, being a mere tabula rasa, void of all character and without any ideas whatever, to suppose it possessed of a natural power to refer to the spherical figure the tactile sensations of the sphere, and to the cubic figure those of the cube, would have been to return to those innate ideas, to those marvellous instincts, or those essential faculties of the soul, which he had combated throughout his book, by striving to substitute for them the mere combination of sensations.

Berkeley, born in 1684, was instructed in Locke's Essay, which had a very great influence on him; and afterwards, on bringing out his own views, so far was he from rejecting its principles, which he regarded as sound, he honestly believed, that he was merely following, correcting, and developing them. But, endowed with a very religious disposition, he deduced from them consequences very different from the sensualist metaphysics which others deduced from them about the same time, both in England and in France. The problem of Molineux above all engaged his attention, and became the source of all his ulterior intellectual labor. He adopted the

solution of Molineux and Locke; but he returned to it so often, and studied it so profoundly, that it suggested to him, still in his youth, a system for explaining, in a new manner, the phenomena of vision. As we shall soon see, this explication reduces all the cognitions, which sight gives us of the external world, to a certain number of colored sensations, having only a conventional value. Sure of having Locke to back him, he abandoned himself with confidence to this view; generalized it for the other senses, and made it the foundation of the whole edifice which Locke had constructed, and presented as the model of the human understanding; and he came, thus, very rapidly, and with full confidence, to the theory which bears his name, and whose peculiarity, as every body knows, is the denial of the reality of matter and of the external world. The origin of the system is evident; it is the doctrine of Locke pushed to its last consequences. Locke had reduced intelligence to sensation. But how can sensations, added, combined, multiplied, produce understanding, — give, I say, not man merely, but animal? What are sensations, collected, as in a reservoir, in a being deprived of every kind of intellectual power, and having, therefore, no other faculty than that of receiving them, and, to a certain degree, of retaining them? We must go farther than Locke; we must explain how something results from these sensations which pass over the sensitive being, as the breath of air over the surface of the waters. the mystery of this being, which we call man, or animal, is not at all in himself, if there is in him only the single faculty of feeling, we must look elsewhere for this mystery. It is, then, in God. The veritable being, then, is God, and only God. What we take to be beings are only mirrors, which reflect at each instant, and all passively, the Divine emanations. By annihilating the being in man, or animal, we are forced to refer all causes to God; and man, or animal, being in no seuse a cause, God is the only cause. Man, or animal, being only a purely sensitive being, what, I demand, are all the sensations perceived by this being? I see in him, indeed, different senses, sight, touch, taste, smelling, hearing; but how pass from one order of sensations to another? What relation, for example, between a tactile sensation, and a sensation of sight? How pass from the world, which touch reveals, to the world which sight discovers? Is there in man and animal a mysterious harmony, which joins together these two worlds, and creates, naturally, a relation and connexion between the sensations of the one, and the sensations of the other? No, says Locke; there are only sensations. Then, says Berkeley, all

If

these orders of sensations are only conventional signs, and the words of a language which God at each moment speaks

to us.

Berkeley had had Locke for his master; he had Hume for his disciple. Struck with the solidity of his argumentation, Hume received in some sort, from his hand and that of Locke, the seminal principle of that radical and universal skepticism which he professed in his writings; so that since then, the psychologues have had a hard time of it, carried away as they have been, on the one side, by Berkeley into a sort of mysticism very similar to the doctrine of Maya among the Hindoos, according to which, the external world not exist. ing, our life is only a long sleep, and all our thoughts are dreams which depend immediately on the Divine action; or, on the other side, by Hume into the abyss of general and absolute doubt, which embraces at once the Divinity, our own intelligence, moral truth, the physical world, — all, in one word, save our actual sensations and momentary ideas. To tell how our psychologues have sought to escape from the consequences which Berkeley and Hume obtained from Locke's doctrine, how, for instance, the Scottish school, with Reid at its head, has made its efforts to stop the leaks in Locke's vessel submerged by his own disciples, and how the German school, with Kant for leader, has only responded to the provocation of Berkeley and Hume, by attempting to save something, were it only some notions of time and space, from the universal shipwreck of human knowledge, — would be to make the history of what is called modern philosophy, although, in our judgment, the modest name of psychology would be the much more appropriate name for its researches. We undertake not to trace this history in the present article; it will find, naturally, its place elsewhere in our Dictionary; we restrict ourselves here to the exposition, in their sequence, of the views of Berkeley."

Some of our readers will, doubtless, demur to the view here presented of Locke's philosophy. We have, as we have often confessed elsewhere, a very great reverence for the author of the Essay on the Human Understanding. Of all modern psychologists, he is the one we most respect, and follow with the greatest confidence. As a man, he is worthy of all esteem; as a friend to freedom, religious and political, and as a sufferer in its cause, he deserves our gratitude. As a