118 COSMIC PHILOSOPHY. [pt. i. 



detected in the eighteenth century. The labouiB of Hartley 

 were almost entirely overshadowed by the superficial sensa- 

 tionalism of Condillac and the crude materialism of Helve'tius 

 and Holbach. The distinctly inferior character of French 

 psychological speculation since the death of Malebranche 

 appears strikingly both in these shallow systems, and in the 

 spiritualistic reaction against them which the present cen- 

 tury has seen conducted by Laromiguiere and Victor Cousin; 

 a philosophy made up of mere tawdry rhetoric, quite in- 

 nocent of observation and induction, 1 resting on passionate 

 appeals to the testimony of "le cceur ;" which finally, in our 

 own times, has (it would appear) harangued itself to death. 

 But in England and Germany things took a different course. 

 The scepticism of Hume, as the most conspicuous consequence 

 of Berkeley's profound analysis, produced a second crisis in 

 philosophy, and led Kant to re-examine the psychological 

 problem, in the hope of arriving at some positive result. We 

 have already remarked upon the inconsistency in Kant's final 

 conclusions ; demonstrating as he did, on the one hand, the 

 relativity of knowledge, yet on the other hand maintaining 

 that in necessary truths we possess a kind of knowledge not 

 ultimately referable to the registration of experiences. We 

 have now to note how Hegel has based upon this doctrine 

 of a priori knowledge an explicit and uncompromising 

 assertion of the validity of the subjective method, which 

 by reason of its very outspokenness proclaims itself as 

 the reductio ad absurdum of metaphysics. 



Starting from the postulate that deductions from & priori 

 premises furnished by pure reason have a higher validity 



1 " Quiconque entre dans l'etude de 1'esprit humain par la voie de la re- 

 flexion, marche droit au but. Quiconque ne suit d'autre methode que la 

 niethode expetimentale de Bacon et de Newton, ne court pas le risque, il est 

 vrai, de tomber dans les hypotheses extravagantes, mais se condamne k des 

 circuits immenses qui aboutissent a des resultats mediocres." — Cousin, 

 Philosophic Ecossaise, p. 307. A fair sample ot M. Cousin's appreciation 

 of scientific method. The discovery of the law of gravitation, I suppose, was 

 sne of these " resultats mediocres " 1 



