tuitive; for the end of Understanding is not to prove, and find reasons, but to know and believe. Of logic, and its limits, and uses and abuses, there were much to be said and examined; one fact, however, which chiefly concerns us here, has long been familiar; that the man of logic and the man of insight, the Reasoner and the Discoverer, or even Knower, are quite separable, -indeed, for the most part, quite separate characters. In practical matters, for example, has it not become almost proverbial that the man of logic cannot prosper? This is he whom business people call Systematic, and Theorizer, and Wordmonger; his vital intellectual force lies dormant or extinct, his whole force is mechanical, conscious; of such a one it is foreseen that, when once confronted with the infinite complexities of the real world, his little compact theorem of the world will be found wanting; that unless he can throw it overboard, and become a new creature, he will necessarily founder. Nay, in mere Speculation itself, the most ineffectual of all characters, generally speaking, is your dialectic man-at-arms; were he armed cap-a-pie in syllogistic mail of proof, and perfect master of logic-fence, how little does it avail him! Consider the old Schoolmen, and their pilgrimage towards Truth: the faithfullest endeavor, incessant, unwearied motion, often great natural vigor, only no progress; nothing but antic feats of one limb poised against the other; there they balanced, somerseted, and made postures; at best gyrated swiftly, with some pleasure, like Spinning Dervishes, and ended where they began. So is it, so will it always be, with all Systemmakers and builders of logical card-castles; of which class a certain remnant must, in every age, as they do in our own, survive and build."Es says, iii. 280.

In reply to all this, it will be at once admitted that logic is a mere implement-the mere tool by which a man works. It will be admitted, also, that the use of this implement belongs mainly to one faculty of the mind, and that the man who is a man of one faculty will be sure to be a man of small achievement. But it does not follow because the mere logician is likely to be somewhat of a pedant, that the man who is a logician and something more, will so be. No, nor does it follow because men of genius often reason logically without the smallest aid from the technical forms of logic, that logic itself is not a science, and one admitting of being reduced to form with great advantage, in common with all other sciences. But the course generally pursued by the school of polemics with which Mr. Carlyle must be classed is, to confound logic, as a mere implement, with the logical faculty; and to describe that faculty itself as aiming at achievements admitted to be beyond its province; and this done, the passers-by are called upon to join

in a loud laugh at the overthrow of the paper constructions with which logicians can allow themselves to be beguiled. But, in fact, to laugh at the logical doings of the understanding, because they are defective if taken alone, is about as rational as that Mr. Carlyle should call upon the good people at Chelsea to laugh at his one leg, because it does not enable him to walk without assistance from the other. All the merriment of the above extract resolves itself into a fit of mirth over a supposition so truly ridiculous as that the action of the mind to be healthy and complete must embrace the exercise of more than a single faculty! a single faculty! The logical faculty is one, the intuitive faculty is another, and no man ever realized a sound mental progress without the joint aid of both. The natural issue of the logical faculty, without the aid of the intuitional, is skepticism; the natural issue of the intuitional faculty, without the aid of the logical, is mysticism.

It is true, the intuitional faculty can see further than the logical, but it is only by getting upon its shoulders. Insight, without help from the understanding, would be like physical sight without memory-it would be left to act upon blank ignorance, and could produce no effect beyond the glare of a vacant wonder. In fact, it is the understanding-in other words, experience, that gives sight to intuition, and which, if the man is not to become a dreamy maniac, must do much, even to the last, towards regulating its exercise. We are quite aware that some of the loftiest achievements of genius and religion have been realized as by a glance, or in a manner which has left the mind wholly unconscious at the time as to any act of reasoning. In this manner, the intellect of a Cromwell and a Napoleon, of a Shakspeare and a Burns, often performed their operations. Still the thing done was the doing of the intellect and was done for a reason. The action of the understanding in such cases, dull as that power is supposed to be, may have been subtle and instantaneous as the lightning; and not a whit the less real because there was no reflex act of the mind present at the moment to take cognizance of it.

We know that in expressing himself as he has done on this subject, Mr. Carlyle may plead the authority of Jacobi, Schelling, Schleiermacher, and many more; but we have long ceased to think that everything which happens to come to us clothed in German text must be full of the wise and wonderful.

The effect of long converse with German

writers, on a mind too much disposed of itself towards a certain tone of mysticism, has been to give a considerable tincture of this sort to Mr. Carlyle's speculations. Not that he is of the soft, passive, almost helpless temperament to which mysticism is so congenial. On the contrary, there is a selfsustained bravery-an "up and at 'em" spirit in him, which, at first sight, looks like anything rather than the stuff from.which you might hope to form a good mystic. But this very energy, this passion to be doing, is itself little favorable to patience of thought, and when allied with an active imagination, may often end in something not remarkable for its wisdom. It is a fact, accordingly, that the most ardent natures, even when possessed of the loftiest intellect, have not unfrequently taken with them remnants of prejudices, superstitions, mysticisms, hardly to be looked for in such fellowship. The culture of men of great force has been often thus unequal, and the strength which makes them what they are, acts, in such cases, as a light to render the weakness that still lingers in them only the more conspicuous. The invective and sarcasm so often directed by Mr. Carlyle against logic and logicians, do much to betray, to all men of sense, the weak side of his own genius. Every man of this sort, on reading such a passage as we have last quoted, will be ready to say "This is all amusing enough, but be sure of it, my good friend, a little more of the breadth and compactness which the logician so much values, would be to yourself a very profitable acquisition." The same inference is deducible from the cloudy and rambling style in which our author throws off his thoughts. Clearness and relativeness of ideas the mystic covets not. The more his thoughts resemble wandering stars-beautiful, but dim and relationless-the better. It belongs equally to oracles and to mystics to express themselves in sententious terms, with a meaning carefully loose, and often in a manner to leave the question more in darkness than they found it. We must leave our readers to say if this be not very much the character of Mr. Carlyle's writings, especially in relation to those more profound matters of speculation, towards which, by the bent of his genius, he is so much disposed. Even his metaphysics are pictures, but they are all of the Salvator Rosa school, wild and dark, every where more suggestive than complete.

Mystics, indeed, have been, in some rare instances, mathematicians and logicians; but they have known how to restrict these

sciences to a particular class of objects, and have always bidden them tarry below, when they have felt disposed to ascend into the clouds in search of their elysium. In the manner of Mr. Carlyle, they have allied the logical and mathematical to the understanding, and to insight they have given a world of its own. The two faculties are treated as having nothing in common, and the two worlds to which they respectively have reference are viewed as the diverse of each other. This partition once admitted, it is easy to conceive how something of a La Place and a Swedenborg, of a Newton and a Jacob Böehme, may be united in the same person. In the case of Mr. Carlyle, however, there is little need of this partition. The two provinces do not so exist in him as to make it indispensable. So strong in his leaning to the side of what may be done by insight in all the higher regions of thought, that he does not, will not reason, in any continuous manner, in relation to matters of any kind. It is hardly too much to say of him, that what he may not do by a few rapid touches, he is content to leave undone that what he may not know by simply gazing at it, he is content to be without knowing. In such habits we recognize some of the most characteristic elements of mysticism, It is of the nature of mysticism that its inward tendencies should be to it as a revelation, and that its truth, derived even from that source, should be something suggested by the feeling and imagination, more than something wrought out by the understanding. We say not that Mr. Carlyle does not think-does not fix his thoughts steadily on particular truths, or particular aspects of character. Our statement is, that his meditativeness is converged on points; that these points, from being viewed in isolation, often swell into undue proportions, and come up before you too much in the phantasmagoria style, as artificial lights amidst a wide surrounding darkness. Nothing, we conceive, could be a sorer trial to his patience than an argument on a moral subject, that should be at once formal, consecutive, and of wide compass, whatever might be its excellence. Hard would it be to persuade him that the same point might not be reached by a route not a tenth part so long or so laborious; yea, hard would it be to prevent his thinking that there must be something sinister in a mode of approach so fox-like in its caution.

V. If our readers have been in agreement with us thus far in our estimate of Mr. Car

lyle's writings, they will be prepared for our next statement in relation to them-viz., that viewed in reference to instruction, the knowledge conveyed by them does not often rise above the level of Half-truths.

Of this fact, illustration has been furnished by each of the topics that have passed under our review. That faith should be described as of such moment, and that so much should be said tending to show that the nature of the things believed is of little significance; that the truth in all religions should be so well appreciated, but in such a manner as to leave scarcely anything of special value to any one religion; that a disposition to meditate on the deeper questions of being should be so far indicated, but in such mode as to end in a sort of worship of the obscure and mysterious; and that seeing the logical faculty in man cannot do everything, it should be henceforth derided as a presumptuous pedant who can do nothing all these are instances of the tendency in the mind of our author to push particular aspects of truth to an extreme, so as not only to give a part of the truth merely in place of the whole, but to present that part considerably distorted. As this peculiarity in the thinking of Mr. Carlyle is one deeply affecting his pretensions as a "teacher" of his generation, it will be proper to glance at a few further instances. One of his often-repeated lamentations is, as we have in part seen, to the effect of the old saying, "The former times were better than these." Take the following as a specimen :

grief is, that "heroic action is paralyzednothing remains unquestionable the godlike has vanished from the earth!" But is it true that the godlike was really a very conspicuous thing in those bygone times? Did they, indeed, set such pattern in civil affairs as the moderns would do well to follow?— such pattern in religion? It must be confessed that in those days the presence of the rough-and, we suppose we must say, the strong hand, was more visible than now. Men were hung, emboweled, and quartered in a style to which our deteriorated nerves are little accustomed. Scarcely a marketcross was there, in an obscure town, that could not boast of the times it had been adorned with traitor-limbs. Our prisons, too, in those truly earnest ages, bore a much nearer resemblance to the home of the infernals naturally awaiting all culprits, than anything that could find tolerance amidst the mawkish sentimentalisms of these degenerate days. The things, moreover, as said or done, which might give a man the chance of being thus provided for by the public liberality, were felicitously numerous; while the evidence which sufficed to secure conviction was the most convenient imaginable to that end. It is true the people who died of pestilence, from filth, discomfort, and bad ventilation, were as twenty to one compared with the surplusage of that sort so dispensed with at present; but then, the comfort was, men were not bored with the endless quackeries familiar to us under the name of Factory bills, Poor-law bills, Health-of-towns bills, Aldermanic soup-kitchens, and Charitymongering of all sorts.

6

To this effect is the language of our author nearly every where, when comparison is to be made between "past and present." His

Present, p. 90. Yes, good reader, mark that! no Cant-nothing of that in all those "cantos," "cantings," or "chauntings," as the word now is, which were then so much like the beginning and the end of everything religious. No "Doubt" either, religion a great "Unquestionability!" Happy times, when to be great in the virtue of believing was not to believe in the face of doubt, but because to do other than believe was not