148 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences^ Arts^ and Letters. 



unfold before us, would, like bright dreams or punctured bubbles, 

 vanish from the earth. All forms of matter, and all the faculties 

 of the mind, must be supposed to be governed by harmonious 

 laws, and enter, as co-ordinate elements, into the plan of the uni- 

 verse ; else we impeach either the power, wisdom, or goodness of 

 God. 



Jacobi's philosophical creed developed at a time when the pre- 

 vailing philosophy was Kant's, with all the admiration that be- 

 longed to its freshest triumphs. No other theme was so prominent 

 as that to which, a century earlier, Locke had drawn very general 

 attention — the question of the powers and limitations of the 

 human understanding. After making experience the basis of all 

 our knowledge, Locke was so unfortunate in his explanation of 

 the origin of our ideas that Cousin easily convicted him of laying 

 an excellent foundation for that sensationalism for which Hobbes 

 and Condillac acknowledged their indebtedness to him, however 

 distasteful such thanks might be. 



It may not seem unnatural that Hobbes should derive from 

 Locke's representative theory of perception his subtile corporeal 

 spirit to replace the second member of Descartes' dualism, but it 

 is far more startling to find Bishop Berkeley, with " every virtue 

 under heaven," establishing upon the same basis a thorough going 

 idealism, and successfully maintaining his ground against the 

 whole sensational school. To exhaust the strange possibilities of 

 the case, Hume, again, accepting both Locke and Berkeley, ad- 

 vanced one fatal but inevitable step further, and, consigning mind 

 to the same fate that matter had suffered at the hands of Berkeley, 

 established a skeptical nihilism, which no subsequent philosopher 

 has been able to refute without revising the whole foundation of 

 the system upon which it rested. This task called for the genius 

 of a Kant. He was able to reconstruct the principles of knowl- 

 edge upon the ruins to which Locke's system had been reduced by 

 the twofold reduciio ad absurdum of Berkeley and Hume. In 

 doing so, however, though he gained the foremost place among 

 the metaphysicians of his age, he committed an error hardly in- 

 ferior to Locke's, and quite as difficult to throw off. Locke per- 

 ceived only images of things, that, so far as he could show, might 



