wholly unintelligible; and we at once grant that a bar of metal kept in the fire until it glows a bright red has no consciousness of redness, that the caloric with which it is charged has no sense of heat, and, further, that the bar itself has no feeling whatever of expansion or solidity. Redness, heat, expansion, and the idea of solidity are all impressions of sentient existence, accidents or qualities to be seen, felt, or conceived of. But it does not follow, that, because a heated bar of iron is not conscious of heat, solidity, or redness, it is not therefore a heated bar of iron; or that because the senses can testify to its existence only as the senses of the living can testify of the existence of what is non-vital and non-sentient, it has therefore no existence as a non-vital, non-sentient substance. The leap in the logic seems most extraordinary, from the fact of the non-sentient character of the heated bar to the non-exist

ence of the heated bar. And yet such virtually was the conclusion of Berkeley. "Some truths are so near and obvious to the mind," he said, "that a man need only open his eyes to see them. And such," he added, "I take this important one to be, namely, that all the choir of heaven and furniture of earth in a word, all those bodies which compose the mighty framework of the world have not any substance without a mind; that their being is to be perceived or known to be convinced of which, the reader need only reflect and try to separate in his own thoughts the being of a sensible thing from its being perceived." In this last sentence the sophism seems to lie. It confounds conceiving with existing, light with eye and the optic nerve, and caloric and solidity with feeling and the tactile sense. It would date the beginning of the sun, not from that early period during which the sun influenced the yearly motions of our planet, but from the long posterior period during which eyes began to exist. And such essentially is the philosophy of that other ingenious metaphysician of our own time to which we refer. "He" also "goes so far as to affirm," says Mr. Cairns,

in his admirable pamphlet, "that thought and existence are identical. Knowledge of existence, he says, — the apprehension of one's self and other things, is alone true existence." Yes, true rational existence; but, judged by the common-sense of mankind, it would be an eminently irrational existence that would deny the reality of existence of any other kind, that would recognize the bona fide being of an Edinburgh professor, but deny, in an argument four hundred pages long, that the university in which he lectured had any being whatever. And if, while ́such a teacher of moral philosophy, seated in its logic chair, mayhap, was lecturing in one room on the general nonentity of things, there was a professor of natural science demonstrating in another, on evidence which no ingenuous mind could resist, that, during immensely protracted periods, this old earth of ours had moved round the sun in a state so nearly approximating to the incandescent, that its diurnal motion propelled outward its matter at the meridian, so that its equatorial diameter still exceeds its polar one, in consequence, by about twenty-six miles, that for periods more than equally protracted, when it became a home of sentient existence, its highest creatures were in succession but trilobites, fishes, reptiles, birds, and mammals, and that not until comparatively of yesterday did its rational existence come into being, we could not regard such neighborhood as other than formidable to the logician to whom this brief latter day would be the only one recognized as a reality. It would be such a neighborhood as that of a disciple of Newton busied in weighing and measuring the planets or calculating the return of a comet on the parallax of a fixed star, to an old sophist engaged in showing his lads, on what he deemed excellent grounds, that if a tortoise which crept a hundred yards in an hour had got the start by a few furrows' breadth of Achilles, who ran a mile in five minutes, the fleet warrior might be engaged for ever and ever in vain attempts to come up with it.

One of two things would of necessity occur in a state. of matters so little desirable, either the pupils of the logician would become such mere triflers in argument as the Jack Lizard of Steele's essay, who, when his mother scalded her fingers, angered the honest woman by assuring her there was no such thing as heat in boiling water; or they would learn to despise both their professor and his science. It gives us sincere pleasure to find that the Edinburgh University is in no such danger. So long as the logic chair remained vacant, we purposely abstained from making any allusion to the subject, in the fear that any expression of opinion, even in a matter so impersonal as the respective merits of two schools of philosophy, might and would be misinterpreted. But we are in no such danger now; we must be permitted to express our sincere pleasure that the election of Tuesday has resulted in the selection of an asserter of the Scotch school of philosophy to teach in the leading Scotch university. Nor are we influenced by any idle preference for the mere name Scotch. We know not that so large an amount of ingenuity has yet been expended. on that common-sense school of which Reid was the founder, and Beattie, Hamilton, and Dugald Stewart the exponents, as on the antagonistic school, which at least equally distinguished Scotchmen, such as Hume and Thomas Brown, have illustrated and adorned. George Primrose, in the "Vicar of Wakefield," found that the best things remained to be said on the wrong side; and so, in the determination of astonishing the world, he set himself to dress up his three paradoxes. And, unquestionably, the paradoxes of the idealistic philosophy have been admirably dressed. But the Scotch philosophy has at least this grand advantage over the opponent school, that all its principles and deductions can be brought into harmony with those of all the other departments of science. It is not a jarring discord in the great field of mental exertion, a false bar, to be slurred over or dropped in the general concert, but a well-toned and accordant part, consistent with the har

mony of the whole. It was acknowledged by Hume, that it was only in solitude and retirement that he could yield any assent to his own philosophy. Nor was he always true to it even in solitude; for in solitude he wrote his admirable political essays, and his "History of England." And the Scotch school is simply an appeal, on philosophic grounds, from Hume the metaphysical dreamer, wrapped up in the moonshine of sceptical speculation, to Hume the practical politician and shrewd historian. And we know no man better fitted to be an exponent of this true and solid school, or whose mind partakes more of the character of that of its founder Reid, than the gentleman on whom the choice of the council has fallen. We trust he has a long career of usefulness before him; and have every reason to hope that his expositions will be found not unworthy of the chair of Hamilton, nor of a philosophy destined ultimately, we cannot doubt, to give law in the regions of mental philosophy, at a time when the ingenuities of its opponents shall have shared the fate of the paradoxes of George Primrose.

X.

THE POESY OF INTELLECT AND FANCY.

Ir has been well said of singing a song,—in reference, of course, to the extreme commonness of musical accomplishment in a low degree, and its extreme rarity in a high one, that it is what every one can do, and not one in a thousand can do well. A musical ear is, like seeing and hearing, one of the ordinary gifts of nature, just because music was designed to be one of the ordinary delights of the species; but while the class capable of being delighted is a very large one, the class capable of delighting is one of the smallest. A not large apartment could contain all the first-class singers in the world; and, mayhap, judged by men of the highest degree of taste, a closet roomy enough to contain Jenny Lind might be found sufficient to accommodate for a time its preeminent musical talent. And it is so as certainly with poetry as with music. There are a few men in every community wholly destitute of both the musical and the poetic sense, just as in every community there are a few men born blind and a few more born deaf; but, with these exceptions, all men have poetry and music in them, music enough, if their education has not been wholly neglected, to derive pleasure from music, and poetry enough to derive pleasure from poetry. And in due accordance with this fact, we find that in what man's Creator appointed from the beginning to be the commonest of all things, religion, he has made large use of both. Every church has its music, and a large portion of the divine revelation has been made in poetry. But if the great musicians who can exquisitely delight be few, the great poets are still fewer. There is but one Jenny