take in the
world for him to feel the argument which he has, by considerable
effort, appropriated to be an argument which he has originated. Kant
is the most unhappy champion of his own doctrines, the most
infelicitous expounder of his own meaning, that has ever existed.
Neither has any other commentator succeeded in throwing a moonlight
radiance upon his philosophy. Yet certain I am, that, were I, or any
man, to disperse all his darkness, exactly in that proportion in which
we did so--exactly in the proportion in which we smoothed all
hindrances--exactly in that proportion would it cease to be known or
felt that there had ever been any hindrances to be smoothed. This,
however, is digression, to which I have been tempted by the
interesting nature of the grievance. In a jesting way, this grievance
is obliquely noticed in the celebrated couplet--

'Had you seen but these roads before they were made,
You'd lift up your hands and bless Marshal Wade.'

The pleasant bull here committed conceals a most melancholy truth, and
one of large extent. Innumerable are the services to truth, to
justice, or society, which never _can_ be adequately valued by those
who reap their benefits, simply because the transition from the early
and bad state to the final or improved state cannot be retraced or
kept alive before the eyes. The record perishes. The last point gained
is seen; but the starting-point, the points _from_ which it was
gained, is forgotten. And the traveller never _can_ know the true
amount of his obligations to Marshal Wade, because, though seeing the
roads which the Marshal has created, he can only guess at those which
he superseded. Now, returning to this impenetrable passage of Kant, I
will briefly inform the reader that he may read it into sense by
connecting it with a part of Kant's system, from which it is in his
own delivery entirely dislocated. Going forwards some thirty or forty
pages, he will find Kant's development of his own categories. And, by
placing in juxtaposition with that development this blind sentence, he
will find a reciprocal light arising. All philosophers, worthy of that
name, have found it necessary to allow of some great cardinal ideas
that transcended all the Lockian origination--ideas that were larger
in their compass than any possible notices of sense or any reflex
notices of the understanding; and those who have denied such ideas,
will be found invariably to have supported their denia