, the first being titled, "Of the
thinking soul, or the central point of consciousness;" and the second, "Of
the loving soul, or the central point of moral life." The healthy-toned
reader, who has been exercised in speculations of this kind, will feel at
once that there is much that is noble in all this, and much that is true;
but not a little also, when examined in detail, of that sublime-sounding
sweep of despotic generality, (so inherent a vice of German literature,)
which delights to confound the differences, rather than to discriminate
the characters, of things; much that seems only too justly to warrant that
oracular sentence of the stern Fichte with which we set out, "_The younger
brother wants clearness_;" much that, when applied to practice, and
consistently followed out in that grand style of consistency which belongs
to a real German philosopher, becomes what we in English call Puseyism and
Popery, and what Goethe in German called a "_chewing the cud of moral and
religious absurdities_." But we have neither space nor inclination, in
this place, to make an analysis of the Schlegelian philosophy, or to set
forth how much of it is true and how much of it is false. Our intention
was merely to sketch a rapid outline, in as popular phrase as philosophy
would allow itself to be clothed in; to finish which outline without
extraneous remark, with the reader's permission, we now proceed.

If man be not, according to Aristotle's phrase, a [Greek: zoon logikon] in
his highest faculty, a _ratiocinative_, but rather an emotional and
imaginative animal; and if to start from, as to end, in mere reason, be in
human psychology a gross one-sidedness, much more in theology is such a
procedure erroneous, and altogether perverse. If not the smallest poem of
a small poet ever came to him from mere reason, but from something deeper
and more vital, much less are the strong pulsations of pure emotion, the
deep-seated convictions of religious faith in the inner man, to be spoke
of as things that mere reason can either assert or deny; and in fact we
see, when we look narrowly into the great philosophical systems that have
been projected by scheming reasoners in France and Germany, each man out
of his own brain, that they all end either in materialism and atheism on
the one hand, or in idealism and pantheism on the other. All our
philosophers have stopped short of that one living, personal, moral God,
on whose existence alone humanity can