(7) 79 



of style of the man whom I make bold to term the 

 most acute thinker of the eighteenth "century even 

 though that century produced Kant." 



Of the doctrines themselves which are alluded to 

 here, I shall say nothing now ; but of much else that is 

 said, there is only to be expressed a hearty and even 

 gratified approval. I demur, to be sure, to the exalta- 

 tion of Hume over Kant high as I place the former. 

 Hume, with infinite fertility, surprised us, it may be 

 said, perhaps, into attention on a great variety of points 

 \vhich had hitherto passed unquestioned ; but, even on 

 these points, his success was of an interrupted, scattered 

 and inconclusive nature. He set the world adrift, but 

 he set man too, reeling and miserable, adrift with it. 

 Kant, again, with gravity and reverence, desired to refix, 

 but in purity and truth, all those relations and institu- 

 tions which alone give value to existence which alone 

 are humanity, in fact but which Hume, with levity and 

 mockery, had approached to shake. Kant built up 

 again an entire new world for us of knowledge and 

 duty, and, in a certain way, even belief; whereas Hume 

 had sought to dispossess us of every support that man 

 as man could hope to cling to. In a word, with at least 

 equal fertility, Kant was, as compared with Hume, a 

 graver, deeper, and, so to speak, a more consecutive, 

 more comprehensive spirit. Graces there were indeed, 

 or even, it may be said, subtleties, in which Hume had 

 the advantage perhaps. He ' is still in England an 

 unsurpassed master of expression this, certainly, in 

 his History, if in his Essays he somewhat baffles his 

 own self by a certain labored breadth of conscious fine 

 writing, often singularly inexact and infelicitous. Still 

 Kant, with reference to his products, must be allowed 



