unfettered by any such artificial plan,--but we object
to the essential nature of his system, to the _a priori_ and deductive
method by which he attempts to solve some of the highest problems of
philosophy respecting God, Nature, and Man. Here, if anywhere, is a
field of inquiry which demands for its due cultivation an enlarged
experience and a patient spirit of induction. Yet, with him, the
starting-point of philosophy is the highest object of human thought. He
begins with the idea of self-existent Being, without which, as he
imagines, nothing else can be conceived; and then, following the line of
a descending series, he attempts to deduce from it the philosophy of
the whole system of the universe![124] His Metaphysics must borrow
nothing from experience; his very Psychology must be purely deductive.
From the intuitive idea of "substance" he deduces the nature and
existence of God; from the nature of God, the necessity of a Divine
development; from the necessity of a Divine development, the existence
of a universe comprising souls and bodies; and nowhere does he
condescend to take notice of the facts of experience, except in two of
his axioms, in which he assumes that "man thinks," and that "he feels
his body to be affected in various ways." His whole philosophy resolves
itself ultimately into an intellectual intuition, whose object is
Substance or Being, with its infinite attributes of extension and
thought,--an intuition which discerns its object directly and
immediately, in the light of its own self-evidence, without the aid of
any intermediate sign, and which is as superior, in a philosophical
point of view, to the intimations of sense, as its objects are superior
to the fleeting phenomena of Nature.

Now, we submit that this method of constructing a philosophy of Nature
is radically vicious, and diametrically opposed to the only legitimate,
the only possible way of attaining to sound knowledge. He is not content
to tell us _what is_ the order of things; he aspires, forsooth, to show
what the order of things _must be_. We have no wish to disparage
Metaphysical Science; it has a natural root in human reason, and a
legitimate domain in the ample territory of human thought; but we
protest against any attempt to extend it beyond its proper boundaries,
or to apply it to subjects which belong to the province of experience
and observation. The schemes which have been recently broached in
Germany, and imitated in France, f