the shape of illustration, of lighter and more amusing matter; he
has taken no pains to bestow upon it any other interest than what
searching thought and lucid views, aptly expressed, ought of
themselves to create. His subject, indeed--the laws by which human
belief and the inquisition of truth are to be governed and
directed--is both of that extensive and fundamental character, that it
would be treated with success only by one who knew how to resist the
temptations to digress, as well as how to apply himself with vigour to
the solution of the various questions that must rise before him.

"This book," the author says in his preface, "makes no
pretence of giving to the world a new theory of our
intellectual operations. Its claim to attention, if it
possess any, is grounded on the fact, that it is an
attempt not to supersede, but to embody and systematize,
the best ideas which have been either promulgated on its
subject by speculative writers, or conformed to by
accurate thinkers in their scientific enquiries.

"To cement together the detached fragments of a subject,
never yet treated as a whole; to harmonize the true
portions of discordant theories, by supplying the links
of thought necessary to connect them, and by
disentangling them from the errors with which they are
always more or less interwoven--must necessarily require
a considerable amount of original speculation. To other
originality than this, the present work lays no claim.
In the existing state of the cultivation of the
sciences, there would be a very strong presumption
against any one who should imagine that he had effected
a revolution in the theory of the investigation of
truth, or added any fundamentally new process to the
practice of it. The improvement which remains to be
effected in the methods of philosophizing, [and the
author believes that they have much need of
improvement,] can only consist in performing, more
systematically and accurately, operations with which, at
least in their elementary form, the human intellect, in
some one or other of its employments, is already
familiar."

Such is the manly and modest estimate which the author makes of his
own labours, and the work fully bears out the character here given of
it. No one capable of receiving pleasure from the disentanglement of
intricacies, or the clear exposition of an