our nature should not be accounted dishonesty or inconsistency unless we mean with such charges to convict all mankind. Not only metaphysicians, like Kant and Sir William Hamilton, admit the intrinsic oppositions running deeper than any controversies of creed into the very frame of matter and mind. Scientists and scholars encounter and declare the same contradictions by no accepted philosophy as yet reconciled. Sir Humphey Davy could not identify his religious exercises with his chemical investigations, or adore while he analyzed, or keep his oratory and laboratory under one roof. The truth of the Latin proverb which says, "To labor is to pray," depends on the sort of labor and the laborer's intent, which may be worldly, selfish, and wrong. Emerson bids us, when the ecstacy of devotion comes, to leave our denial of the divine personality, as Joseph did his coat in the harlot's hands, and flee. Dr. Hedge, like some ancient sages, has an esoteric view, all attempts to embody which in the worship of the multitude are in vain; as Socrates, that he might as far as he could commune with his Athenian countrymen, observed religious forms, above which his spirit soared. Any accusation of insincerity brought against such a man as a dualist would hold against everybody who is reflective enough to find in the universe a problem, and would be an injustice to the thinker whom I name as the most candid of men. (C Sparks," said Wayland, "is so candid, I should hate to have with him any dispute." No less ingenuous was that traditional transcendentalist, Dr. Hedge. Intellectual honesty does not consist in a forced unity, or in passing over intrinsic difficulties, as the knots in a plank are made to look even by use of a smoothing-plane, but in owning all discords we cannot reduce. So Dr. Hedge admitted his inability to adjust with the divine goodness, in which he believed, all the facts in Nature he saw. would not hold God responsible for many of the things which exist. He was an optimist, excepting what for the present he could not square with the notion that all is for the best in the best possible of worlds. He Dr. Bushnell affirmed he hung the questions he could not answer on pegs, and there are inquiries for everybody to suspend or postpone, as the explorer does his surveys in a dark day, and the astronomer his observations in a cloudy night. But in one place the transparency was as real and rare as the perspicacity, and that was Dr. Hedge's mind. The noting of such noble characteristics is the more appropriate now that in any earthly scene they can be no longer shown, and, moreover, to vindicate a man from possible partisan blame for his refusing to join any ecclesiastical or infidel sect. Dr. Hedge allowed not any wish for himself to be, in Shakspeare's phrase, "the father of his thought," or any denominational policy to bias his mind. He stood too firm to be by any gust of humor shaken, or wind of doctrine swept. His theology was too broad and catholic for any adversary to overturn, being composed of truth from every division of the church and all quarters of the world. His great heart never put in abeyance the rights, or dimmed the perceptions of his head. To illustrate our theme from another great author, lately deceased, we should call Robert Browning the pre-eminent intellect of our literary class. He wielded a virile pen, and wrote his lines, as it was said Goethe signed his name, as with his fist. With what unmatched vigor and subtile penetration he lays out his propositions and sets forth whatever for or against them can be said on either side as a lawyer for plaintiff and defendant too! No pleadings in any court could excel the ingenuity of argument and counter-statement in "Bishop Blougram's Apology" and in the "Ring and the Book." Those pieces are unparalleled products of a blended imagination and ratiocination, every page an amalgam of poetry and prose. But is the sentiment left out? Rather, as in the Socratic dialogues, it is raised to a higher pitch by the process of debate and by difference of opinion, condensed into jets of flame out of latent heat, thought and feeling everywhere completely fused. Nor are proofs wanting aside from Browning's books, that such was the nature of the man and that from all the achievements of the head his own faith resorted to his feelings and found a refuge in his heart. "I know I shall meet my dearest friends again," he declares, his affections finding a revelation of immortality in their own intensity. The sceptics he scorns. He believes with his heart. The union of manhood and womanhood in one and the same person was never more close and clear. No doubt the distinction of sex is deeper than its symbol in the human frame, the man being more inclined to argue about what the woman sees by intuition or instinctively feels. For many things, war or politics, navigation or agriculture, opening mines or clearing woods, or exploring unknown deserts and seas, she is less fit. Mr. Mills vindicated her right to vote. That is a reform against Nature, was Dr. Bushnell's reply. If to cast or claim the ballot be her duty it seems thus far impossible to bring many of her sex to perform it by dint of any soft appeal or any goad of reproach. But they hold fast to a destiny beyond this life. They delight to quote Theodore Parker who said he was conscious of it, and Joaquim Miller who, being called upon to prove his immortality, answered that he would not submit it to the trial of a police court. May not the heart be a prophet of what the head will some time teach? In this surrender and depreciation by women of what if they wanted they might have, this voluntary and almost universal relinquishment of a right or privilege so great, in this attitude of civic indifference or aversion there is something, according to the view we may take of it, either senseless or sublime. Women are in a vast majority in the state, and were they not less selfish than men, could, if in place, not only rule but officer it from their own ranks. They are citizens. Yet, save in France at the Revolution with its citoyennes, the term citizenness is unknown. They are in a majority still more vast in the church if attendance on divine service be the test. Without them the temple-walls would crumble and public worship decline. For what reason do they abnegate or abdicate caucus and senate and shun the polls, while they congregate in the Sunday school and crowd the pews? Is there some cause which agitators do not guess at or suspect? If so, it must be either in that mental constitution with whose authority no written document can vie, or in a lack of education for which a long future will be required. Meantime the objects, if not the offices, of man and woman are the same. The sexes are parted in ways by which they may more happily meet. By a rational law, if not by a reasoning process, they shrink from being confounded, the man with the woman, or the woman with the man. Their harmony, not their identity, is the end. Either is the opposite sex that both may accord. Their diversely selected occupations emphasize this truth of their equivalent if not equal function and frame. Emancipated and independent, with the track cleared for her into any honorable calling now, with few exceptions the woman tends to soft-hearted professions of medicine and the ministry, not to the hard-headed ones of the lawyer, broker, and financier. She will teach rather than trade, or engages in a delicate commerce of the booth and shop, leaving large, and coarse, and noisy operations to her brother-man. Her sex counts and asserts itself in her boldest and bravest undertaking and act. If, on urgent occasion, she saves a drowning person or steers a ship, her conduct is trumpeted as an achievement and an exploit, when with a man the deed would pass as commonplace. She affects physical science, chemistry, astronomy and the arts, painting and music, and shuns the metaphysics which Emerson scored as arid and Goethe said he had enough of to last him his life and could do without any. Neither the transcendental nor the traditional element alone can, on any side of our humanity, make intelligence complete. Both must join to produce a supreme intellect, poetic or philosophic, like Coleridge, Wordsworth, Browning, Goethe, Emerson or Hedge. If women have not struggled or shone on the arena of controversy, let us cite the names of George Sand and George Eliot in sign of their possible pre-eminence in that field of letters which outstretches the region of our disputes. Human nature is not a fixed quantity or quality to be measured or put under arrest, but continually evolved, and in no terms or formulas contained. It is leviathan and cannot be bound. It is an ocean in which far more swims than we see. We but dimly realize much that it holds. With no sinker have we sounded it yet. Our chart is but of its surface, or tells its depths only in spots. Our classification is not complete. Protoplasm is not first, but implies a plastic power before itself. We cannot resolve ourselves into our constituents, more than can plants or animals be reconverted into the germs and rays and drops whence they grew. The sculptor's bust is more than the marble block. Matter must have spirit before it, behind it, or added to it, to become life. The question is not what we were made of, or how we came; but who we are, and will be. The intellect will hunt its own game. Should we discover the North pole, we should want to creep to the earth's centre through Symmes' hole. We find metals, and expect to hear sounds, in sunbeams. That boy was a prophet who, when a cannon was fired, asked if the sun spoke. Truth is old and new. What is inspired consists with what is handed down. THE AFRICAN ELEMENT IN BY PROF. N.. S. SHALER. ALTHOUGH man is the most widely distributed over the surface of the earth of any of the higher animals, enduring a wider range of climate, subsisting on a more diversified food, and withstanding a more considerable variety of privations than any other complicated being, he has accomplished this geographic extension by fitting his physical and mental peculiarities to the varied conditions of his dwelling-places. The result is that while the most cosmopolitan of creatures, he is at the same time the most provincial. In this feature man is much like his higher kindred, the domesticated mammals which he has forced to share his fate. Each of these creatures, the horned cattle, sheep, horses, swine, etc., has also fitted its forms and habits to the environment in which it has been compelled to live. The Shetland pony differs from the Arabian horse, in much the same way, though in a greater measure, as the sturdy man of the northern isles differs from the lithe son of the desert. These variations of man and beast in the various stations of the world are essentially due to the influence of the climatal conditions which surround them. Very few persons conceive the absolute dependence of every organic being on the conditions of this world. The old idea that man was cast upon the earth by the immediate act of God, as a meteorite is thrown from the heavens by what we consider the chance of a superior will, leads us vaguely to suppose that we are in a large measure independent of the nature about us. It has been the peculiar task of the last half of this century, to restore men to nature, and thereby, we believe, to bring them really nearer to the infinite care of God. Those who have attained to some conception as to the true position of humanity in the universe, perceive that hereafter, when men shall have had the |