ment which is essential to the very case of the transcendentalist. For it is his allegation that there is such a truth as cannot be conveyed except in language which must appear an inane jargon to all who resolve existence into a nothing but—yet it would be absurd to deny that Hobbes, Locke, and Berkely, Hume, Hartley, Brown, and one in acuteness, clearness, and coherence, equal to any of these, the late James Mill, have given not only very ingenious, but quite adequate expositions of many phenomena of consciousness, while admitting only the scantiest premises and data. Laying down their volumes, and especially the Analysis of the Human Mind, by the last and most consistent of these writers, it is hard not to feel for a time, as if after all men might be a mere bundle of these dry sticks thus neatly fitted and tied together. But at last, to any one who has habitually breathed a more devout air, and lived in the belief that there is something above, which we never can do more than look up to, the old faith of sages, and poets, and saintly hearts, nay, that of the great multitude of civilized men, however blundered and distorted by them, returns with power. We thus find in the conviction that there is an Absolute Truth and good, however diversely manifested to different lands and generations, a depth and strength, a sufficiency for the demands of the reason, which no small psychological theory can explain, and which, therefore, none should be allowed to explain away. Must we then say that truth is inconsistent with itself, and that the analysis of phenomena by Hartley or Mill, though irrefutable, must be set aside, because it is discordant from the belief in a supersensual and eternal Idea? Assuredly not. But we may admit by far the greater part of what is positive in their teaching, and yet hold, that they do but explain the process by which sensations, images, and associations, build up the mass of common thoughts and feelings, which, nevertheless, must rest at last on a deeper and more permanent foundation.
14.
Man's actual knowledge may easily be measured. His ignorance is for him unfathomable; he is ignorant of the extent of his ignorance. But, on the other hand, his knowledge, were it but the conscious certainty of the difference between odd and even numbers, or of the idea of a circle, proves that existence is essentially knowable by him, and that he has the capacity for knowing it altogether. Our ignorance is immense, but not entire. All actually share in it, but it is not constitutive, universal, characteristic of the race. Knowledge is all these. It with all its infinity surrounds us, calls us, belongs to us, is ideally ours. Not only the child, the peasant, the sage are ignorant. So also are the insentient stone, the unmoving plant, the unreflecting animal. Man like these is ignorant; but it is his crowning distinction that he knows himself to be so, as having in his knowledge a standard which proves him ignorant.
15.
Contented ignorance of that which we may know has a no less deplorable likeness to the condition of brutes, than the most obvious brutalities to which we degrade our nature.
16.
Often has it been said, far oftener indistinctly felt, that nothing is more really inconsistent with the spirit of true morality than the affected parade of buckram severity. Thus, the corrupt exaggeration of prudes fastens as a stain on the soul the tint which might otherwise have been but a play of shadow. In such a tone of mind, and how much of it is there in England, especially in England's moral self-complacence, it is plain that the want of inward life betrays itself by the prurient excess of life on the surface. A careless unconscious ease of soul as to trifles, arises naturally from the habitual presence of that spirit of free purity and generosity which alone can render any human life really moral, under the paint. That is only a fit and meritable contrast to the stiff-and bitter pedantry of duty which is presented in the emphatic licences and naked orgies of genial blackguardism, such as has not wanted eulogists among us. In the former case, the dirt is frozen into lumps, and may be handled with less defilement. In the other, it is liquid, rank, and steaming, and gives one at least the hope that it may flow down its proper channels into some congenial abyss. But all is dirt alike, and the less that any one meddles with it, save those to whom such work belongs, the better for himself and for
