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EDITORIAL

AMERICAN

66

LITERATURE

NOVELS.-We cannot chronicle any remarkable appearances in the world of romance. GRACE GREENWOOD has collected a volume of tales, the principal and largest of which, A Forest Tragedy, gives name to the book. It is written with vigor of style, but not correctness. The authoress has a fondness for pet expressions, generally double adjectives, such as wild, passionate eyes," "rich crimson lips,"" thin, quivering nostrils," ," "fierce, dark expression," "rich, deep bloom," "rich olive shades," "hard, strong nature," which occur so frequently as to become unpleasant. Nor, as a narrative, does the story seem to us highly successful. There is a vein of tragic earnestness in it, which fastens the attention of the reader, in spite of his ever-present feeling of a want of truth in the conception. One of the first scenes, almost, is an account of a kind of woman's rights meeting among the Oneida squaws, in which these poor, docile creatures assert their own dignity, and flagellate the men in the most approved style of a Boston or a Syracuse convention. Mrs. Abby Kelly Foster, or Mrs. Lucy Stone Blackwell could not hold forth with more indignant vehemence against the other sex, than do these children of the forest against certain lawless white lovers, who did not always play them fair. They even enter into a most savage league against any of their own sex who may chance to take a fancy to a pale skin, conceived with as much ferocity as any Italian or French plot against a reigning monarch. They swear, in extreme melo-dramatic solemnity. to put to death every Indian woman whose connection with the whites is not entirely upon the square; and the subsequent incidents of the plot turn upon the doings of this primitive moral reform society. But for this want of naturalness in a main event, the story would be one of considerable power. The shorter tales of the volume are more effective and graceful.

-In Woman's Faith, and the Creole Orphans, we have two novels which profess to be tales of Southern life; but neither of them seems to us original or true. As an evidence of the carelessness of the former, for instance, we note, at the very outset,

NOTES.

AND REPRINTS.

some singular oversights. It purports to be a tale of Louisiana, and the time is laid just fifty years ago. Yet within the first twenty pages, we have a description of a gentleman's library, which is exquisitely painted in fresco, which was a very improbable thing for such a time and place; and also an account of the trial of an imputed northern abolitionist by jury, when everybody knows that fifty years since, abolition, and the excitement against it, had not come into existence; and the jury-trial was not yet adopted into the old French law, prevailing in the territory. Louisiana was not admitted as a state into the Union, until 1812, and it was some time after that, when Edward Livingston prepared the code, that the jury trial was incorporated into the legal procedure. The tale, however, is told with some skill, and possesses considerable interest. But we cannot say as much for the Creole Orphans, which is crude in style, and not profoundly interesting. In the descriptions of natural scenery there is a certain animation; but it is deficient in portraiture and plot.

-A more agreeable novel is the Lost Hunter, a tale of early Indian and settler life, narrated with some simplicity, occasional humor, and with a good purpose. Though the reading world is pretty well weary of the conventional Indian character, there is nothing offensive of that kind in the book before us, which presents the savage in a somewhat novel light.

-There is a little book called Natty, a Spirit, which we are at a loss to class. It purports to be an authentic account of a spiritual visitation from a child, who got his portrait painted, and did other wonderful things; but there is so much that is novel and romantic in the story, that we speak of it among fictitious works.

-Mrs. LIVERMORE'S Zoe we must take time to consider.

-SUMNER'S Speeches.-The position of CHARLES SUMNER in the world of American politics is as proud as it is peculiar.

In the prime of life, Mr. Sumner passed, at one step, from the practice of his profession, into the Senate of the United States. He had never concerned himself

with party intrigues; he had served no apprenticeship to the bad trade of electioneering. Learned, eloquent, and gallant, this young Boston lawyer had made himself known by the force of qualities the most unlike to those which usually achieve political distinction for their possessors, in our age and country. He was neither a tactician, nor a trimmer, but simply a man of courage, ability, and philanthropy. And so, when the first great wave of the revolutionary question which now agitates our country lifted the framework of government in Massachusetts, the people of that state recognized in Mr. Sumner just the character to which the interests of freedom, in a crisis dangerous to freedom, might be safely intrusted.

They summoned him from his retirement, and sent him to Washington, to speak there and to act there in the spirit of that brave old colony which was ever the first in resistance to tyranny. Five years have elapsed since Mr. Sumner was called to this honorable service, and his name has already become historical.

It is a good work which Messrs. Ticknor & Fields have done, in publishing the record of these five years of faithful and brilliant service. The Recent Speeches and Addresses of Mr. Sumner make a handsome volume of five hundred pages, which comprises all the more important discourses and documents put forth by him since 1851.

The subjects which have occupied the attention of the senator are very various; but he has handled them in one spirit of liberality and justice. Whether pleading for the seaman or for the slave, for cheap postage or encouragement to emigration, for the promotion of peace or the establishment of liberty, Mr. Sumner, with the single exception of his vote in favour of the Collins steamers, is always to be found on one side; he is the consistent enemy of privilege, and the consistent friend of equity. Perhaps the ablest and most ingenious effort contained in the volume before us, is his lecture on the "Position and Duties of the Merchant," delivered before the Mercantile Library Association of Boston, in which, without violating the proprieties of the place and time, he made a magnificent tribute to the heroic life of Granville Sharpe serve his paramount purpose of arousing and stimulating the temper of his countrymen to a just sense of the

value of free principles, and to noble conceptions of life and its aims.

Mr. Sumner manifests two points of superiority over the average run of our statemen: firstly, in the earnestness and depth of his moral convictions; and, secondly, in the extent and rarity of his scholarship. Attached to no party, he is able to approach all questions on the side of their abstract merits, and as they are related, not to the temporary successes of certain lines of policy, but to the universal principles of ethics and law. Accordingly, he handles his topics more in the spirit of the judge, than in that of the advocate. He is more anxious to elicit the truth that may be in them, than to commend them to popularity. Yet he is not unmindful of the advantages of favorable opinion, and often rises to a high degree of persuasiveness of appeal. His statements are always clear, and his reasonings generally logical: but these excellences are not so conspicuous as the wealth of learning which he brings to the illustration of his argument. Not only does he never undertake a discussion until he has made himself master of the history of its details, but he scarcely utters a sentiment which he cannot fortify by some weighty sentence from the books of some great authority. This gives an appearance of elaboration to his efforts, which, though not always pleasing, in an artistic view, is quite rare in a nation of so much superficial and flippant oratory. It is, moreover, a compliment to his audience, compensating, in their judgment, the want of more spontaneous feeling. But it must not be inferred from this that he is destitute of impulse and glow; for his unstudied reply, to the combination of senators who once assailed his character, showed a ready command of his resources, and as much quickness as fertility. It was deeply earnest, without being passionate and personal, yet dignified.

TRAVELS.-Mr. Ewbank, whose Sketches of Brazil is before us, is not a very fluent nor elegant writer, though he is a wary observer, and a man of sense. His volume is instructive, therefore, but not charming. It narrates the particulars of a visit to Rio, in 1845, with fidelity, giving us many interesting facts as to the manners, trades, and superstitions of the people, and arguing wisely on the causes of their political and social condition; but we do not find in its

style any of the peculiar tone or color which one likes in a book about the tropics. That brilliant nature never seems to have lifted the writer into poetry, nor to have seduced out of him the cold practical habit of the man of science. Mr. JARVES, however, in the second series of his Parisian Sights and French Principles, has attempted to catch the spirit of the place he was writing about-its light, vivacious way-but not with uniform success. There are some of his chapters which breathe the air of Paris, which are gay, easy, flippant, and delightful; but the most of them, in spite of their subjects, have a good deal of our English phlegm in them. Yet they are entertaining, particularly as they are aided by numerous wood-cuts, which present the life of the great city to our naked eyes.-The Kansas of MR. GREENE is a lively sketch of the region which is now producing such a hubbub in the political world. The author, having spent a great deal of time in wild adventures among its solitudes, acquired a familiar knowledge of its soil, climate, mineral resources, etc., and presents us what he has learned, in this brief book. He writes enthusiastically of the country, as the very Arcadia of the western continent, and he predicts for it an unexampled development in wealth and people. Mr. Greene's style has all the energy and freshness of pioneer life in it, with an occasional inflation, however, which seems a reminiscence of some older and less pure inspiration.

-Our readers have already had a taste of Mrs. FERRIS'S Mormons at Home, and we need, therefore, but announce its publication. It is, on the whole, the most authentic work on the domestic life of the strange people of Utah that we have. As a woman, Mrs. Ferris was admitted to secrets which would be carefully concealed from men. The picture she draws is a gloomy one, indeed; and though she is not without her prejudices, we are forced to believe that it is faithful. A society built upon any other foundation than the marriage of one man to one woman, must degenerate into every kind of misery and corruption. Mrs. Ferris has made an absorbing narrative out of her brief experience of such a society, as it exists among the followers of Smith.

PHILOSOPHY.-Commend us to the Germans when any point or question of philo

sophy is to be treated; for they take to the matter as a duck docs to the water. They are native and to that manner born, and discourse of it with an ease, a comprehension, and a learning, which must ever be the despair of other more practical nations. We have a specimen of their excellence in this way, in Schwegler's History of Philosophy, just translated by JULIUS H. SEELYE, which, though a mere epitome of the subject, is, as far as it goes, so lucid in its arrangement, so accurate in its distinctions, and so pervaded with thought, that it seems to leave little more to be said, except in the way of detail. Schwegler is of the school of Hegel, whose historical method he borrows to some extent; but he is not a blind follower of his illus trious master. Even in the application of this method itself, he makes wide departures from Hegel, justifying his course by sound reasons. Hegel, who cultivated the absolute so assiduously, was apt to be somewhat absolute in his methods-more so than actual history sustained, and has to be qualified by his most reverent disciple.

Great as are the merits of this history, however, in the positive parts, we think it defective in one fundamental respect; and that is, in the narrowness, or rather rigidity with which it confines the history of philosophical systems to those which proceed entirely upon philosophical grounds. Of course it excludes all the oriental systems, because they are mainly mythological or cosmogonical-beginning philosophy with Thales of Greece; and it excludes, also, the whole scholastic period, because it was chiefly religious, thus leaving out the very roots of the modern speculative development. Now, a history of philosophy, it seems to us, ought to be a connected view of all those modes of interpreting the problem of the universe-its origin, construction, and end-which have obtained among men, and which, whether they come to us through the imagination, or the mythologies, or through the reason, as the grander schemes of thought, are alike to be considered. No doubt the Asiatic systems are mostly mythic, but they are not exclusively so; they contain large elements of pure speculation; and, as they represent the life-theories of millions of human beings. some of them highly cultivated, they cannot be ignored. So far from being exclusively mythical, indeed, are the oriental

doctrines, that it is easy to find in them anticipations of all the Grecian schools. The Ionic, Eleatic, and other sects of the peninsula, not excepting the Platonic, had their precursors in Persia and India, and the resemblances between their respective theories are often so striking, that an ingenious student, by a little expenditure of learning, might make out a clear case of plagiarism against the Greeks. In fact, the recent French eclectics show that all the general results of philosophy, according to their classification, namely, idealism, materialism, skepticism, and mysticism, were reached by the oriental mind. Be this as it may, it is quite evident that Asia was the cradle of human thought, to which a great part of human culture, as well as of human language, is to be traced, and no history of philosophy is complete which omits so considerable and important a field. lastic speculation, which, though seldom departing from the domain of positive religion, is yet an essential moment in the great movements of thought, and cannot be overlooked. It had its independent validity, its various schools, its epochs, and its influences upon the church, and upon society; and, when Heumann, for instance, defines it as philosophiam in servitutem theologia papeæ redactam, or philosophy prostituted to the service of the pope, he exaggerates the extent of its obsequiousness. It was not wholly servile. Like the arts, the sciences, the governments, in short, the entire public life of the middle ages, it was bound up with the prevailing religious dogmas; and yet, springing, as all philosophy must, from the desire of knowledge, it enjoyed a certain degree of freedom and independence, and, in the end, led to that general protest against ecclesiastical domination which marks our modern era. The seeds of the Reformation, indeed, lay in the doctrines of some of the scholastics, such as Abelard, Hugo of St. Victor, Albertus Magnus, Roger Bacon, and William of Occam; and there is such a vital tie running through the whole of human speculation, that no great era of it can be left out without detriment. Besides, why was oriental philosophy so mythological, and why was scholasticism so religious? These are questions which philosophy itself has to answer; and it cannot, therefore, in its own history, shut out the

And the same is true of the scho

materials of one of its own most important problems.

This translation of Schwegler's work is made with great fidelity, and would be idiomatic but for one or two stiff renderings, such as "clearing-up" for Aufklärung, of which elucidation, explanation, solution, though less literal, are all better correspondents; and "content," in the sense of subject-matter, the theme, the purport, the topic. We have, in English, the plural noun "contents," which means the thing held or included within certain limits; but we have no singular, "content," except that which expresses a satisfaction or acquiescence of mind. Such phrases, therefore, as the chief content of the Cartesian system is," etc., "the form identical with the content," "the inner content of its principle," repeated frequently, as they are, become offensive. We presume the German word, in most of these cases, is Inhalt, to which our familiar English words subject, substance, or matter, we have found precise enough to be good equivalents. We see no reason, in translating German thought, for transferring its phraseology. In some instances, this may be necessary; but in general our vocabulary furnishes all needful expressions.

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-In Mr. TAPPAN's Elements of Logic we have an American contribution to metaphysical science, which displays an intimate acquaintance with the subject, and a desire after a comprehensive as well as an original treatment of it; but we cannot congratu late our author on a complete success. His book is highly respectable, but not remarkable-betraying a great deal of reading and some thought, but no native aptitude for this kind of discussion. It is made up rather of the speculations of others, with some novelties of arrangement, than of original and independent results. It is true that the field of logic, having been industriously cultivated these three thousand years, is not a promising field for new discoveries, and we do not expect these meaning simply, by our criticism, that Professor Tappan has thrown no new light upon the old and accepted principles of logic, while that which he means as new is of doubtful validity. At the same time, there are so many defects in Mill, Whately, Thompson (Laws of Thought), Newman. etc., that any new attempt to place logic on strictly scien

tific grounds is not only justifiable but praiseworthy.

What perplexes us, and, we presume, many other outside readers of such discussions, is to find out what logic really is. Every new writer seems to take a new view of it, or, at least, to controvert the views of all his predecessors. Is it, as Whately contends, to be restricted to the analysis and determination of the reasoning process only so far as it is a verbal operation? is it, as Sir William Hamilton maintains, the science of the formal laws of thought only? or does it, as Professor Tappan now declares more largely, comprise the laws which govern and determine all the activities of the reason-reason itself being the sum of our intellectual faculties, or the total knowing substance? In the latter event, how are we to distinguish it from psychology, or the ordinary science of mind? All sciences are, of course, related, and more or less involve each other; yet each science must have its limits, its distinctive object, about which it is principally conversant, and which separates it from every other science. Now, Professor Tappan says, that psychology is the analysis of the reason, which makes us acquainted with its eternal and absolute ideas, while logic is that analysis of the reason which makes us acquainted with its laws; but what is the difference here between its laws and its ideas? An idea, we are told, is that "which determines our cognitions and our activity;" and a law is that which regulates and determines the manifestations and movements" of the mind: and we cannot see the distinction: Undoubtedly, there is a distinction; but it is not here stated. As a specimen of the confusion that reigns, let us extract a single paragraph, explanatory of the function of logic.

"Reason perceives and knows : seeks and arrives at truth. But what are the laws which regulate its perceptions? What are the methods which it pursues in seeking after truth? What are the ultimate grounds of its knowledges and beliefs? When we have answered these questions, we have logic completed."

We have, however, a great deal morefor the first question relates to psychology, the last to universal philosophy, and the second only to logic. The laws of the reason, it seems to us, like its faculties, functions, operations, processes, are the objects of mental science, and not of logic.

We are not much given to such inquiries, but what little thought we have expended upon them has led to the belief, that logic is best considered as a branch of the larger science of induction--using the term, not as Bacon does, mostly in the sense of simple generalization, but for the whole procedure of method. Its other branches are, analysis and synthesis, so that the generic science of method includes the three specific functions of logical induction, analytic induction, and synthetic induction, which exhaust, progressively and in combination, every process the mind resorts to, in the investigation and establishment of truth.

A great many other observations are suggested by this volume, particularly its use of the term reason; but we have no space for them now.

SCIENCE. The Elements of Analytical Mechanics, and the Spherical Astronomy, of Professor W. H. C. BARTLETT, of the United States Military Academy, are valuble contributions to our means of attaining a competent knowledge of those branches of science. In the former, he has deduced the laws of the movements of bodies, on the principle of virtual velocities, instead of the parallelogram of forces, which is made the basis in most English and some French treatises. Combining this with D'Alembert's principle, which is shown to be a generalization of the Newtonian law of the equality of action and reaction, he deduces six equations for the motions of all bodies, and which contain the whole subject of Mechanics. It is a method susceptible of the most simple, precise, and prolific developments. It places the most vast and fruitful principles of science within the grasp of the tyro, and enables him to commune face to face with the great masters of Mechanics, with La Grange and Luplace, with Newton and Euler, with Huygens and Bernouilli.

In the Spherical Astronomy, which treats of the magnitudes, arrangements, and motions of the heavenly bodies, we find the same simplicity and comprehensiveness of treatment, with descriptions of the structure and use of instruments no less admirable. The plates of instruments, and of the planets, are well executed, being copied mostly from the fine Astronomie Elementaire of De Launay, and in every part of the work, indeed, are traces of a clear, precise, and philosophic mind.

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