THE

PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY;

IN A

COURSE OF LECTURES,

DELIVERED AT VIENNA,

BY FREDERICK VON SCHLEGEL.

TRANSLATED FROM THE GERMAN,

WITH A MEMOIR OF THE AUTHOR,

BY JAMES BURTON ROBERTSON, ESQ.

IN TWO VOLUMES.

VOL. I.

LONDON

SAUNDERS AND OTLEY, CONDUIT STREET.

MDCCCXXXV.

B. BENSLEY, PRINTER.

MEMOIR

OF THE LITERARY LIFE

OF

FREDERICK VON SCHLEGEL.

In the following sketch of the literary life of the late Frederick Von Schlegel, it is the intention of the writer to take a rapid review of that author's principal productions, noticing the circumstances out of which they grew, and the influence they exerted on his age; giving at the same time a fuller analysis of his political and metaphysical systems:—an analysis which is useful, nay almost necessary to the elucidation of very many passages in the work, to which this memoir is prefixed. Of the inadequacy of his powers to the due execution of such a task, none can be more fully sensible than the writer himself; but he trusts that he will experience from the kindness of the reader, an indulgence proportionate to the difficulty of the undertaking.

In offering to the British public a translation of one of the last works of one among the most illustrious of German writers, the Translator is aware, that after the excellent translation which appeared in 1818 of this author's "History of Literature," and also after the admirable translation of his brother's "Lectures on Dramatic Literature," by Mr. Black, his own performance must appear in a very disadvantageous point of view. But this is a circumstance which only gives it additional claims to indulgent consideration.

The family of the Schlegels seem to have been peculiarly favoured by the Muses. Elias Schlegel, a member of this family, was a distinguished dramatic writer in his own time; and some of his plays are, I believe, acted in Germany at the present day. Adolphus Schlegel, the father of the subject of the present biography, was a minister of the Lutheran church, distinguished for his literary talents, and particularly for eloquence in the pulpit. His eldest son, Charles Augustus Schlegel, entered with the Hanoverian regiment to which he belonged into the service of our East India Company, and had begun to prosecute with success his studies in Sanscrit literature—a field of knowledge in which his brothers have since obtained so much distinction—when his youthful career was unhappily terminated by the hand of death. Augustus William Schlegel, the second son, who was destined to carry to so high a pitch the literary glory of his family, was born at Hanover in 1769—a year so propitious to the birth of genius. Frederick Schlegel was born at Hanover in 1772. Though destined for commerce, he received a highly classical education; and in his sixteenth year prevailed on his father to allow him to devote himself to the Belles Lettres. After completing his academical course at Gottingen and Leipzig, he rejoined his brother, and became associated with him in his literary labours. He has himself given us the interesting picture of his own mind at this early period. "In my first youth," says he, "from the age of seventeen and upwards, the writings of Plato, the Greek tragedians, and Winkelmann's enthusiastic works, formed the intellectual world in which I lived, and where I often strove in a youthful manner, to represent to my soul the ideas and images of ancient gods and heroes. In the year 1789, I was enabled, for the first time, to gratify my inclination in that capital so highly refined by art—Dresden; and I was as much surprised as delighted to see really before me those antique figures of gods I had so long desired to behold. Among these I often tarried for hours, especially in the incomparable collection of Mengs's casts, which were then to be found, disposed in a state of little order in the Brühl garden, where I often let myself be shut up, in order to remain without interruption. It was not the consummate beauty of form alone, which satisfied and even exceeded the expectation I had secretly formed; but it was still more the life—the animation in those Olympic marbles, which excited my astonishment; for the latter qualities I had been less able to picture to myself in my solitary musings. These first indelible impressions were in succeeding years, the firm, enduring ground-work for my study of classical antiquity."[1] Here he found the sacred fire, at which his genius lit the torch destined to blaze through his life with inextinguishable brightness.

He commenced his literary career in 1794, with a short essay on the different schools of Greek poetry. It is curious to watch in this little piece the buddings of his mind. Here we see, as it were, the germ of the first part of the great work on ancient and modern literature, which he published nearly twenty years afterwards. We are astonished to find in a youth of twenty-two an erudition so extensive—an acquaintance not only with the more celebrated poets and philosophers of ancient Greece, but also with the obscure, recondite Alexandrian poets, known to comparatively few scholars even of a maturer age. We admire, too, the clearness of analytic arrangement—the admirable method of classification, in which the author and his brother have ever so far outshone the generality of German writers. The essay displays, also, a delicacy of observation and an originality of views, which announce the great critic. It is, in short, the labour of an infant Hercules.

As this essay gives promise of a mighty critic; so two treatises, which the author wrote in the following years, 1795 and 1796—one entitled "Diotima," and which treats of the condition of the female sex in ancient Greece—the other, a parallel between Cæsar and Alexander, not published, however, till twenty-six years afterwards—both show the dawnings of his great historical genius. Rarely have the promises of youth been so amply fulfilled—rarely has the green foliage of Spring been followed by fruits so rich and abundant. It is interesting to observe the fine, organic development of Schlegel's mental powers—to trace in these early productions, the germs of those great historical works which it was reserved for his manhood and age to achieve. In the latter and most remarkable of these essays, he examines the respective merits of Cæsar and Alexander, considered as men, as generals, and as statesmen. To the Macedonian he assigns greater tenderness of feeling, a more generous and lofty disinterestedness of character—and a finer power of perception for the beauties of art. To the Roman he ascribes greater coolness and sobriety of judgment, an extraordinary degree of self-controul, a mind tenacious of its purpose, but careless as to the means by which it was accomplished, an exquisite sense of fitness and propriety in the smallest as in the greatest things, yet little susceptibility for the beautiful in art. With respect to military genius, he shows that Cæsar united to the fire and rapidity of the Macedonian, greater constancy and perseverance; yet that the temerity of Alexander was not always the effect of impetuous passion, but sometimes the result at once of situation and deliberate reflection. As regards the political capacities of these two great conquerors, he shows that Cæsar possessed an over-mastering ascendancy over the minds of men—the talent of guiding their wills, and making them subservient to his own views and interests—in short, a consummate skill in the tactics of a party-leader. Yet he thinks him destitute of the wisdom of a law-giver, or what he emphatically calls, the organic genius of state—the power to found, or renovate a constitution. To Alexander, on the contrary, he attributes the plastic genius of legislation—the will and the ability to diffuse among nations the blessings of civilization—to plant cities, and establish free, flourishing and permanent communities.

In the year 1797, Schlegel published his first important work, entitled "the Greeks and the Romans." This work was two or three years afterwards followed by another, entitled "History of Greek Poetry." These two writings in their original form are no longer to be met with—for in the new edition of the author's works, they not only have undergone various alterations and additions, but have been, as it were, melted into one work. Winkelmann's history of art was the model which Schlegel proposed to himself in this history of Greek poetry; and we must allow that the noble school which that illustrious man, as well as Lessing, Herder, and Goethe, had founded in Germany, never received a richer acquisition than in the work here spoken of. Prior to the illustrious writers I have named, Germany had produced a multitude of scholars distinguished for profound learning and critical acuteness; but their labours may be considered as only ancillary and preliminary to the works of men who, with an erudition and a perspicacity never surpassed, united a poetical sense and a philosophic discernment that could catch the spirit of antiquity, reanimate her forms, and place them in all their living freshness before our eyes.

In the first chapter of the "History of Greek Poetry," Schlegel speaks of the religious rites and mysteries of the primitive Greeks, and of the Orphic poetry to which they gave rise. Contrary to the opinion of many scholars who, though they admit the present form of the Orphic hymns to be the work of a later period, yet refer their substance to a very remote antiquity, Schlegel assigns their origin to the age of Hesiod. "Enthusiasm," he says, "is the characteristic of the Orphic poetry—repose that of the Homeric poems." His observations however on the early religion of the Greeks, form, in my humble opinion, the least satisfactory portion of this work. He next gives an interesting account of the state of society in Greece in the age of Homer, as well as in the one preceding, and shews by a long process of inductive evidence, how the Homeric poetry was the crown and perfection of a long series of Bardic poems.

He then examines, at great length, the opinions of the ancients from the earliest Greek to the latest Roman critics, on the plan, the diction and poetical merits of the Iliad and the Odyssey; interweaving in this review of ancient criticism his own remarks, which serve either to correct the errors, supply the deficiencies, or illustrate the wisdom of those ancient judges of art. After this survey of ancient criticism, he proceeds to point out some of the characteristic features of the Homeric poems. He enquires what is understood by natural poetry, or the poetry of nature; shews that it is perfectly compatible with art—that there is a wide difference between the natural and the rude—that Homer is distinguished as much for delicacy of perception, accuracy of delineation, and sagacity of judgment, as for fertility of fancy and energy of passion. The author next passes in review the Hesiodic epos, the middle epos, or the works of the Cyclic poets, and lastly, the productions of the Ionic, Æolic, and Doric schools of lyric poetry. The fragments on the lyric poetry of Greece are particularly beautiful, and comprise not only excellent criticisms on the genius of the different lyrists themselves, but also most interesting observations on the character, manners, and social institutions of the races that composed the Hellenic confederacy.

It was Schlegel's intention to have given a complete history of Greek poetry; but the execution of this task was abandoned, not from any want of perseverance, as some have imagined, but from some peculiar circumstances in the world of letters at that period. The literary scepticism of Wolf, supported with so much learning and ability, was then convulsing the German mind; and while the purity of the Homeric text, and the unity and integrity of the Homeric poems themselves were so ably contested, Schlegel deemed it a hazardous task to attempt to draw public attention to any æsthetic enquiries on the elder Greek poetry. Hence the second part of this work, which treats of the lyric poets, remained unfinished. The general qualities, which must strike all in this history of Greek poetry are, a masterly acquaintance with classical literature—a wariness and circumspection of judgment, rare in any writer, especially in one so young—a critical perspicacity, that draws its conclusions from the widest range of observation—and a poetic flexibility of fancy, that can transport itself into the remotest periods of antiquity. In a word, the author analyzes as a critic, feels as a poet, and observes like a philosopher.

But a new career now expanded before the ardent mind of Schlegel. The enterprising spirit of British scholars had but twenty years before opened a new intellectual world to European inquiry:—a world many of whose spiritual productions, disguised in one shape or another, the Western nations had for a long course of ages admired and enjoyed, ignorant as they were of the precise region from which they were brought. For the knowledge of the Sanscrit tongue and literature—an event in literary importance inferior only to the revival of Greek learning, and in a religious and philosophic point of view, pregnant, perhaps, with greater results;—mankind have been indebted to the influence of British commerce; and it is not one of the least services which that commerce has rendered to the cause of civilization. In the promotion of Sanscrit learning, the merchant princes of Britain emulated the noble zeal displayed four centuries before by the merchant princes of Florence, in the encouragement and diffusion of Hellenic literature. By dint of promises and entreaties, they extorted from the Brahmin the mystic key, which has opened to us so many wonders of the primitive world. And as a great Christian philosopher of our age[2] has observed, it is fortunate that India was not then under the dominion of the French; for during the irreligious fever which inflamed and maddened that great people, their insidious guides—those detestable sophists of the eighteenth century—would most assuredly have leagued with the Brahmins to suppress the truth, to mutilate the ancient monuments of Sanscrit lore, and thus would have for ever poisoned the sources of Indian learning. A British society was established at Calcutta—whose object it was to investigate the languages, historical antiquities, sciences, and religious and philosophical systems of Asia, and more especially of Hindostan. Sir William Jones—a name that will be revered as long as genius, learning, and Christian philosophy command the respect of mankind—was the soul of this enterprise. He brought to the investigation of Indian literature and history, a mind stored with the treasures of classical and oriental scholarship—a spirit of indefatigable activity—and a clear, methodical and capacious intellect. No man, too, so fully understood the religious bearings of these inquiries, and had so well seized the whole subject of Asiatic antiquities in its connection with the Bible. But at the period at which we have arrived, this great spirit had already taken its departure; nor in its flight had it dropped its mantle of inspiration on any of the former associates of its labours. For among the academicians of Calcutta, though there were men of undoubted talent and learning, there were none who inherited the philosophic mind of Jones. At this period, too, the fanciful temerity of a Wilford was bringing discredit on the Indian researches—a temerity which would necessarily provoke a re-action, and lead, as in some recent instances, to a prosaic narrow-mindedness, that would seek to bring down the whole system of Indian civilization to the dull level of its own vulgar conceptions.

Schlegel saw that the moment was critical. He saw that the edifice of oriental learning, raised at the cost of so much labour by Sir William Jones, was in danger of falling to pieces—that all the mighty results which Christian philosophy had anticipated from these inquiries, would be, if not frustrated, at least indefinitely postponed—that a wild, uncritical, extravagant fancifulness on the one hand, or a dull and dogged Rationalism on the other—(equally adverse as both are to the cause of historic truth)—would soon bring these researches into inextricable confusion; in short, that the time had arrived when they should be fairly brought before the more enlarged philosophy of Germany. Filled with this idea, and animated by that pure zeal for science, which is its own best reward, Schlegel resolves to betake him to the study of the Sanscrit tongue. But for the considerations I have ventured to suggest, such a resolution on the part of such a man would be surely calculated to excite regret. We should be inclined to lament that a mind so original, already saturated with so much elegant literature and solid learning, should be thus doomed in the bloom of its existence, to consume years in the toilsome acquisition of the most difficult of all languages.

In prosecution of his undertaking, Schlegel repaired in the year 1802, to Paris, which had been long celebrated for her professors in the Eastern tongues, and where the national library presented to the oriental scholar, inexhaustible stores of wealth. Here, with the able assistance of those distinguished orientalists, M. M. de Langlès and Chézy, Schlegel made considerable progress in the study of Persian and Sanscrit literature. But while engaged in these laborious pursuits, he contrives to find time to plunge into the then almost unexplored mines of Provençal poesy—to undertake profound researches into the history of the middle age, and to deliver lectures on Metaphysics in the French language. If these lectures did not meet with all the success which might have been hoped for, this cannot surprise us, when we consider that the gross materialism which had long weighed on the Parisian mind, and from which it was then but slowly emerging, could ill accord with the lofty Platonism of the German; nor when we add to the disadvantage under which every one labours when speaking in a foreign tongue, the fact that nature had not favoured this extraordinary man with a happy delivery. From Paris, he wrote a series of articles on the early Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, and Provençal poetry. The article on Portuguese poetry is singularly beautiful, and contains, among other things, some remarks as new as they are just, on the influence of climate and locality in the formation of dialects. It comprises, too, an admirable critique on the noble poem of the Lusiad, which in allusion to the great national catastrophe that so soon followed on its publication, and by which the ancient power, energy, and glory of Portugal were for ever destroyed, he calls "the swan-like cry of a people of heroes prior to its downfall." This essay and others of the same period furnish also a proof how very soon Frederick Schlegel had framed his critical views and opinions on the various works of art. His æsthetic system seems to have been formed at a single cast—we might almost say, that from the head of this intellectual Jove, the Pallas of criticism had leaped all armed. His metaphysical theories, on the contrary, appear to have been slowly elaborated—to have undergone many modifications and improvements in the lapse of years, and never to have been moulded into a form of perfect symmetry, until the last years of his life.

During his abode in France, he addressed to a friend in Germany, a series of beautiful letters on the different schools and epochs of Christian painting. The pictorial treasures of a large part of Europe were then concentrated in the French capital; and Schlegel, availing himself of this golden opportunity, gave an account of the various master-pieces of modern art, contained in the public and private collections of Paris; interweaving in these notices, general views on the nature, object, and limits of Christian painting. These letters the author has since revised and enlarged; and they now form one of the most delightful volumes in the general collection of his works.

The three arts, sculpture, music, and painting, correspond, according to the author, to the three parts of human consciousness, the body—the soul—and the mind. Sculpture, the most material of the fine arts, best represents the beauty of form, and the properties of sense: Music explores and gives utterance to the deepest feelings of the human soul: but it is reserved for the most spiritual of the arts—Painting, to express all the mysteries of intelligence—all the divine symbolism in nature and in man. He shows that the three arts have objects very distinct, and which must by no means be confounded. But the respective limits of these arts have not always been duly observed. Hence, confining his observation to painting, there are some artists, whom he calls sculpture-painters, like the great Angelo—others again musical painters, like Correggio and Murillo.

The various schools of art—the elder Italian—the later Italian—the Spanish—the old German—and the Flemish, pass successively under review. The distinctive qualities of the mighty masters in each school—the fantastic and truly Dantesque wildness of Giotto—the soft outline of Perugino—the depth of feeling that characterises Leonardo da Vinci—the ideal beauty—the various, the infinite charm of Raphael—the gigantic conception of Angelo—the glowing reality of Titian—the harmonious elegance of Correggio—the bold vigour of Julio Romano—the noble effort of the Caraccis to revive in a declining age the style of the great masters—the true Spanish earnestness and concentrated energy of Murillo—the deep-toned piety of Velasquez—the profound and comprehensive understanding which distinguishes his own Dürer, whom he calls the Shakspeare of painting—the distinctive qualities of these great masters, (to name but a few of the more eminent) are analysed with incomparable skill, and set forth with charming diction. I regret that the limits of this introductory memoir will not allow me to give an analysis of these enchanting letters; but I cannot forbear observing in conclusion, that at the present moment, when there seems to be an earnest wish on all sides to revive the higher art among ourselves, whoever would undertake a translation of these letters, would, I think, confer a service on the public generally, and on our artists in particular. To the friends and followers of art, such a work is the more necessary, as the illustrious author has in a manner taken up the subject where Winkelmann had left off. These letters are followed by others equally admirable on Gothic architecture, where the characteristic qualities of the different epochs in the civil and ecclesiastical architecture of the middle age are set forth with the same masterly powers of fancy and discrimination. This sublime art seemed to respond best to Schlegel's inmost feelings.

But I am now approaching a passage in the life of Schlegel, which will be viewed in a different light according to the different feelings and convictions of my readers. By some his conduct will be considered a blameable apostacy from the faith of his fathers—by others, a generous sacrifice of early prejudices on the altar of truth. To disguise my own approbation of his conduct, would be to do violence to my feelings, and wrong to my principles; but to enter into a justification of his motives, would be to engage in a polemical discussion, most unseemly in an introduction to a work which is perfectly foreign to inquiries of that nature. I shall therefore confine myself to a brief statement of facts: noticing at the same time, the intellectual condition of the two great religious parties of Germany, immediately prior and subsequent to Schlegel's change of religion.

It was on his return from France in the year 1805, and in the ancient city of Cologne, that the subject of this memoir was received into the bosom of the Catholic church. There—in that venerable city, which was so often honoured by the abode of the great founder of Christendom—Charlemagne—which abounds with so many monuments of the arts, the learning, the opulence and political greatness of the middle age—where the great Christian Aristotle of the thirteenth century—Aquinas—had passed the first years of his academic course—there, in that venerable minster, too, one of the proudest monuments of Gothic architecture—was solemnized in the person of this illustrious man, the alliance between the ancient faith and modern science of Germany—an alliance that has been productive of such important consequences, and is yet pregnant with mightier results.

The purity of the motives which directed Schlegel in this, the most important act of his life, few would be ignorant or shameless enough to impeach. His station—his character—his virtues—all suffice to repel the very suspicion of unworthy motives; and the least reflection will shew, that while in a country circumstanced like Germany, his change of religion could not procure for him greater honours and emoluments than under any circumstances, his genius would be certain to command; that change would too surely expose him to obloquy, misrepresentation, and calumny—and what to a heart so sensitive as his, must have been still more painful—the alienation, perhaps, of esteemed friends. Had he remained a Protestant, he would instead of engaging in the service of Austria, have in all probability taken to that of Prussia, and there doubtless have received the same honours and distinctions which have been so deservedly bestowed on his illustrious brother. We may suppose, also, that a man of his mind and character, would not on slight and frivolous grounds, have taken a step so important; nor in a matter so momentous, have come to a decision, without a full and anxious investigation. In fact, his theological learning was extensive—he was well-read in the ancient fathers—the schoolmen of the middle age, and the more eminent modern divines; and though I am not aware that he has devoted any special treatise to theology, yet the remarks scattered through his works, whether on Biblical exegesis, or dogmatic divinity, are so pregnant, original and profound, that we plainly see it was in his power to have given to the world a "systema theologicum," no less masterly than that of his great predecessor—Leibnitz. The works of the early Greek fathers, indeed, he appears to have made a special object of scientific research, well knowing what golden grains of philosophy may be picked up in that sacred stream. The conversion of Schlegel was hailed with enthusiasm by the Catholics of Germany. This event occurred indeed, at a moment equally opportune to himself and to the Catholic body. To himself—for though his noble mind would never have run a-ground amid the miserable shallows of Rationalism, yet had it not then taken refuge in the secure haven of Catholicism, it might have been sucked down in the rapid eddies of Pantheism. To the Catholic body in Germany, this event was no less opportune; and for the reasons that shall now be stated.

Germany, which in the middle age had produced so many distinguished poets, artists, and philosophers, was, at the Reformation, shorn of much of her intellectual strength. In the disastrous thirty years' war, which that event brought about, she saw her universities robbed of their most distinguished ornaments, and the lights, which ought to have adorned her at home, shedding their lustre on foreign lands. The general languor and exhaustion of the German mind, consequent on that fearful and convulsive struggle, was apparent enough in the literature of the age, which ensued after the treaty of Westphalia. To these causes, which produced this general declension of German intellect, must be added one which specially applies to the Catholic portion of Germany.

Every great abuse of human reason, by a natural revulsion of feeling, inspires a certain dread and distrust of its powers. This has been more than once exemplified in the history of the church. So, at this momentous period, some of the German Catholic powers sought in obscurantism, a refuge and security against religious and political innovations, and denied to science that encouragement which she had a right to look for at their hands:—a policy as infatuated as it is culpable, for, while ignorance draws down contempt and disgrace on religion, it begets in its turn, as a melancholy experience has proved, those very errors and that very unbelief, against which it was designed as a protection.

Had the court of Austria acceded to the proposal of Leibnitz for establishing at Vienna that academy of sciences which he afterwards succeeded in founding at Berlin, the glory of that great resuscitation of the German mind, which occurred in the middle of the eighteenth century, would have then probably redounded to Catholic, rather than to Protestant, Germany. But the German Catholics, though they started later in the career of intellectual improvement, have at length reached, and even outstripped, their Protestant brethren in the race.

Three or four years before Schlegel embraced the Catholic faith, the signal for a return to the ancient church was given by the illustrious Count Stolberg. The religious impulse, which this great man imparted to German literature, was simultaneous with that Christian regeneration of philosophy, commenced in France by the Viscount de Bonald. And these two illustrious men, in the noble career which five and thirty years' ago they opened in their respective countries, have been followed by a series of gigantic intellects, who have restored the empire of faith, regenerated art and science, and renovated, if I may so speak, the human mind itself.[3]

Forty years' ago, the Catholics of Germany, as I said, were in a state of the most humiliating intellectual inferiority to their Protestant brethren—they could point to few writers of eminence in their own body—Protestantism was the lord of the ascendant in every department of German letters:—and yet so well have the Catholics employed the intervening time, they now furnish the most valuable portion of a literature, in many respects the most valuable in Europe. In every branch of knowledge, they can now shew writers of the highest order. To name but a few of the most distinguished, they have produced the two greatest Biblical critics of the age—Hug and Scholz—profound Biblical exegetists, like Alber, Ackermann, and, recently, Molitor, who has created a new era not only in Biblical literature, but in the Philosophy of History—divines, like Wiest, Dobmayer, Schwarz, Zimmer, Brenner, Liebermann, and Moehler, distinguished as they are for various and extensive learning, and understandings as comprehensive as they are acute—an ecclesiastical historian pre-eminent for genius, erudition, and celestial suavity, like Count Stolberg—philosophic archaiologists, like Hammer and Schlosser—admirable publicists, like Gentz, Adam Müller, and the Swiss Haller—and two philosophers, possessed of vast acquirements and colossal intellects, like Goerres, and the subject of this memoir. In Germany and elsewhere, Catholic genius seems only to have slumbered during the eighteenth century, in order to astonish the world by a new and extraordinary display of strength. It is undoubtedly true that several of the above-named individuals originally belonged to the Protestant church—and that that church should have given birth to men of such exalted genius, refined sensibility, and moral worth, is a circumstance which furnishes our Protestant brethren with additional claims to our love and respect. We hail these first proselytes as the pledges of a more general, and surely not a very distant, re-union.

The vigorous graft of talent, which the Catholic thus received from the Protestant community, was imparted to a stock, where the powers of vegetation, long dormant, began now to revive with renovated strength. The old Catholics zealously co-operated with the new in the regeneration of all the sciences—and the effects of their joint labours have been apparent, not only in the transcendent excellence of individual productions, but in the new life and energy infused into the learned corporations—the universities as well as the institutes of science. The mixed universities, like those of Bonn, Freyburg, and others, are in a great degree supported by Catholic talent; and the great Catholic University of Munich, which the present excellent King of Bavaria founded in 1826, already by the celebrity of its professors, the number of its scholars, and the admirable direction of the studies, bids fair to rival the most celebrated Universities in Germany.[4]

Gratifying as it must have been to Schlegel to see by how many distinguished spirits his example had been followed, and to witness the rapid literary improvement of that community in Germany to which he had now united himself, he could not expect to escape those crosses and contradictions which are, in this world, the heritage of the just. The rancorous invectives which the fanatic Rationalist—Voss, had never ceased to pour out on his own early friend and benefactor—the heavenly-minded Stolberg, excited the contempt and disgust of every well-constituted mind in the Protestant community. This Cerberus of Rationalism opened his deep-mouthed cry on Schlegel also, as he set his foot on the threshold of the Catholic church. In this instance, the religious bigotry of Voss was inflamed and exasperated by literary jealousy. By his criticisms, and masterly translation of Homer and other Greek poets, this highly gifted man had not only rendered imperishable service to German literature, but had contributed to infuse a new life into the study of classical antiquity. Jealous, therefore of his Greeks, whom he worshipped with a sort of exclusive idolatry, he looked with distrust and aversion on every attempt to introduce the orientals to the literary notice of the Germans. He ran down Asiatic literature of every age and nation with the most indiscriminate and unsparing violence—denounced the intentions of its admirers as evil and sinister; and, in allusion to the noble use which Stolberg, Schlegel, and others had made of their oriental learning in support of Christianity, petulantly exclaimed on one occasion, "The Brahmins have leagued with the Jesuits, in order to subvert the Protestant, or (as we should translate that word in this country) the Rationalist religion."

It was in 1808, after several years spent in the study of Sanscrit literature, Schlegel published the result of his researches and meditations in the celebrated work entitled the "Language and Wisdom of the Indians." This work, the first part of which is occupied with a comparative examination of the etymology and grammatical structure of the Sanscrit, Persian, Greek, Roman, and German languages, the second whereof traces the filiation and connection of the different religious and philosophical systems that have prevailed in the ancient oriental world, and the last of which consists of metrical versions from the sacred and didactic poems of the Hindoos—this work, I say, might not be inaptly termed a grammar, syntax, and prosody of philosophy.

With respect to etymology, Schlegel points out the number of Sanscrit words identical in sound and signification with words in the Persian, or the Greek, or the Latin, or the German, or sometimes even in all those languages put together. He excludes words which are imitations of natural sounds, and which therefore might have been adopted simultaneously by nations unknown to each other; and selects those words only which are of the most simple and primitive signification, such as relate to those intellectual and physical objects most closely allied to man; as also auxiliary verbs, pronouns, nouns of number, and prepositions:—words which are less exposed than any to those casual and partial changes which conquest, commerce, and religion, introduce into language. With respect to grammatical structure, the author shows that the mode of declining nouns, and conjugating verbs, of forming the degrees of comparison in adjectives, of marking the gender and number of substantives, of changing or modifying the signification of words by prefixed particles, is common to the Sanscrit, and the other derivative languages above-mentioned. It is from this strong external and internal resemblance, these languages have received the appellation of the Indo-Germanic. The prior antiquity of the Sanscrit the author infers from the greater length and fulness of its words, and the richness and refinement of its grammatical forms; for, to use his own expression, "words, like coin, are clipped by use, and the languages, where abbreviation prevails, are ever the most recent."

The prescient genius of Leibnitz had foretold a century and a half ago, that the study of languages would be found one day to throw a great light on history. No one better realized this prediction than Schlegel. In the first part of this work, he has proved, by his own example, that language is not a mere instrument of knowledge, but a science in itself; and when I consider the noble use he has made of his Sanscrit learning; when I contemplate all the great and brilliant results of his oriental researches, I must recal the sort of regret I expressed a few pages above. While in the course of the last fifty years, a number of distinguished naturalists have carried the torch of science into the dark caverns of the earth, traced by its light the physical revolutions of our globe, and discovered the remains of an extinct world of nature; many illustrious philologists have at the same time explored the inmost recesses of language, and, by their profound researches, brought to light the fossil remains of early history, discovered the migrations of nations and the changes of empire, and regained the lost traces of portions of our species. This remarkable parallelism in the moral and physical inquiries of the age will be considered fortuitous by those only, who have not watched the luminous course of that loving Providence, whose hand is equally visible in the progress of science, as in every other department of human activity.

But on no branch of historical knowledge have the recent philological researches thrown more light than on mythology—a science which the present age may be said to have created. While illustrious defenders of the Christian religion—a Count Stolberg[5] in Germany, and still more, an abbé de la Mennais[6] in France, treading in the footsteps of the ancient fathers, and of the abler modern apologists, like Grotius, Huet and others, have victoriously proved the existence of a primeval revelation, the diffusion and perpetuity of its doctrines among all the nations of the world, civilized and barbarous—the compatibility of a belief in the unity of the God-head with the crime of idolatry, ranked by the apostle, "among the works of the flesh,"—the local nature and object of the Mosaic law, destined by the Almighty for the special use of a people charged with maintaining, in its purity, that worship of Jehovah mostly abandoned or neglected by the nations, who "though they knew God, did not glorify him as God"—and favoured also with the promises of "the good things to come," intrusted with the prophetic records of the life and ministry of that Messiah, of whose future coming the Gentiles had only a vague and obscure anticipation:—while these illustrious defenders of religion, I say, were proving the agreement of all the Heathen nations in the great dogmas of the primitive revelation; another class of inquirers (and among these was Schlegel) laboured to shew the points of divergence in the different systems of Heathenism, studied the peculiar genius of each, and traced the influence which climate, circumstance, and national character have exerted over all. The object of the former was to point out the general threads of primeval truth in the fabric of Paganism—that of the latter to trace the later and fanciful intertexture of superstition. For in that fantastic web, which we call mythology, truth and fiction, poetry and history, physics and philosophy, are all curiously interwoven. Hence the arduous nature of these researches—hence the difficulties and perils which await the investigator at almost every step.

Of the second part of this work on India, which treats of the religious and philosophical systems of the early Asiatic nations, it is the less necessary here to speak, as the reader will find the subject amply discussed in the course of the following sheets. It may be proper, however, to observe that the different philosophic errors mentioned by Schlegel, as prevalent in the ancient Asiatic world, may all be resolved to two systems—Dualism and Pantheism—the two earliest heresies in the history of religion—the two gulfs, into which dark, but presumptuous, reason fell, when, rejecting the light of revelation, she attempted to explain those unfathomable mysteries—the origin of evil on the one hand, and the co-existence of the finite and the infinite on the other.

On the whole, the "Wisdom of the Indians" is an admirable little book, whether we consider the profound and extensive philological knowledge it displays—the rich variety of historical perceptions it discloses—the clearness of its arrangement, and the elegant simplicity of the style. In the seven and twenty years which have elapsed since this production saw the light, the subjects discussed in it have undergone ample investigation—many of its observations have passed into the current coin of the learned world—truths which it vaguely surmised, have since been fully established—and the knowledge of Indian literature and philosophy has been vastly extended; yet this is one of those works which will be always read with a lively interest. It is thus that, in despite of the progress of classical philology, the writings of the great critical restorers of ancient literature have, after the lapse of three centuries, retained their place in public estimation. It is pleasing to watch the stream of learning in its various meanderings—to trace it as it winds through a broader, but not always a deeper, channel, sullied and disturbed not unfrequently by accidental pollutions—it is pleasing to trace it to its source, where, from underneath the rock, it wells out in all its limpid purity. Prior to the publication of this work, the Semitic languages of the East were alone, I believe, cultivated with much ardour in Germany; its appearance had the effect of directing the national energies towards an intellectual region, where they were destined to meet with the most brilliant success; and, if Germany may now boast with reason of her illustrious professors of Sanscrit; if France, under the Restoration made such rapid progress in oriental literature; if England, roused from her inglorious apathy, has at last founded an Asiatic society in London, and more recently, the Boden professorship at Oxford—these events are, in a great degree, attributable to the enthusiasm which this little book excited.

In the year 1810, Schlegel delivered, at Vienna, a course of lectures on "Modern History." This book, which was in two volumes, 8vo., has long been out of print; and the volumes destined to contain it in the general collection of the author's works, have not yet been published. Hence no account of it can be here given—a circumstance which I the more regret, as, in the opinion of some, it is Schlegel's masterpiece. It embodied in a systematic form the views and opinions contained in a variety of the author's earlier historical essays, which are also out of print, and have not yet been re-published. In it, I know, are to be found the detailed proofs and evidences of many positions advanced in the second volume of the work, to which this Memoir is prefixed.

We should, however, form a very inadequate estimate of the services this great writer has rendered to literature, and of the influence he has exerted on his age, were we to confine our attention solely to his larger works. Throughout his whole life, he was an assiduous contributor to periodical literature—a species of writing which, in the present age, has been cultivated with signal success in England, France and Germany. At the commencement of the present century, he edited in conjunction with Tieck, Novalis and his brother, a literary journal, entitled the Athenæum; and afterwards successively conducted political and philosophical journals, such as the "Europa,"—the "German Museum,"—and lastly the "Concordia;" giving latterly, also, his zealous support to the Vienna Quarterly Review. Some of his earlier critiques have already been noticed. Among the shorter literary essays, which appeared in the twelve years that elapsed from 1800 to 1812, I may notice the one entitled "the Epochs of Literature," 1800; and which may be considered the first rude outline of those immortal lectures on the "History of Literature," which he delivered in 1812. Often as he has occasion to treat the same subject, yet such is the inexhaustible wealth of his intellect, he seldom tires by repetition. Thus his minutest fragments, like the sketches of Raphael, are full of interest and variety. Another essay of the same year, "on the different style in Goethe's earlier and later works," shews with what a discriminating eye the young critic had already scanned all the heights and the depths of this wonderful poet. Of this great writer, the moral direction of some of whose writings he reprobated in the strongest degree, he did not hesitate to say that, like Dante in the middle age, he was the founder of a new order of poetry—that he had been the first to restore the art to the elevation from which, since the commencement of the seventeenth century, it had sunk—that he united the amenity of Homer—the ideal beauty of Sophocles—and the wit of Aristophanes. The opinion which in youth he had formed of the great national poet of Germany, his maturer experience fully confirmed. Eight years afterwards he published a long and elaborate critique on Goethe's lays, songs, elegies, and miscellaneous poems. Pre-eminently great as Goethe is in every branch of poetry, in songs he is allowed to stand perfectly unrivalled. "From the shores of the Baltic to the frontiers of Alsace," says the Baron d'Eckstein, "the lyric poetry of Goethe lives in the hearts and on the lips of an enthusiastic people." In this reviewal we find, among other things, a learned and ingenious dissertation on the various species of lyric poetry—the lay, the romance, the ballad, and the occasional poem; on the nature, object, and limits of each—their points of resemblance, and points of difference, together with observations on the fitness of certain metres for certain kinds of poetry.

From his youth upwards, Schlegel was in the habit of seeking, in the delightful worship of the muse, a solace and relaxation from his severer and more laborious pursuits. Without making pretensions to anything of a very high order his poetry is remarkable for a chaste, classical diction, great harmony and flexibility of versification, a sweet elegance of fancy, and, at times, depth and tenderness of feeling. Friendship, patriotism and piety are the noble themes to which he consecrates his strains. What spirit and fire in his lines on Mohammed's flight from Mecca! What a noble burst of nationality in his address to the Rhine! How touching the verses to the memory of his much-loved friend, Novalis—that sweet flower of poesy and philosophy, cut off in its early bloom! In the lines to Corinna, what lofty consolations are administered to that illustrious woman, under the persecutions she had to sustain from the Imperial despotism of France! And in the sonnet entitled "Peace," 1806, what lessons of exalted wisdom are given to the men of our time!

The longer poem, entitled "Hercules Musagetes," is among the most admired of the author's pieces. His original poems equal in number, though not in excellence, those of his brother; for it would be absurd to expect that this universal genius should shine equally in every department of letters. The flexible, graceful, harmonious genius of Augustus William Schlegel has at different periods enriched his own tongue with the noblest literary treasures of ancient and modern Italy, of Portugal, Spain and England; and his immortal translations, which have superior merit to any original poems, but those of the highest order, are admitted by competent judges to have done more than the works of any writer, except Goethe, for improving the rhythm and poetical diction of his country. The great poetical powers which his short original pieces, as well as his translations, display, make it a matter of regret that he should have so much confined himself to translation, and never ventured on the composition of a great poem.

Both these incomparable brothers are minds eminently poetical, and eminently philosophical. In one the poetic element prevails—in the other, the philosophical element, and, by a great deal, predominates. In their early productions we can scarcely discriminate the features of these apparently intellectual twins: but, as their genius ripens to manhood, the one becomes an etherial Apollo, full of grace, energy, and majesty—the other an intellectual Hercules, of the most gigantic strength and colossal stature.

In was in the Spring of 1812 that Schlegel delivered, before a numerous and distinguished audience at Vienna, his lectures on ancient and modern literature. Of this work, which a German critic has characterised "as a great national possession of the Germans," and which has been translated into several European languages, and is so well known to the English reader by the excellent translation which appeared in 1818, it is unnecessary to speak at much length. Here were concentrated in one focus all those radii of criticism that this powerful mind had so long emitted. Here, at the bidding of a potent magician, the lords of intellect—the mighty princes of literature of all times—

"The dead, yet sceptred, sovereigns, who still rule
Our spirits from their urns"—

pass before our eyes in stately procession—each with his distinct physiognomy—his native port—and all clothed with a fresh immortality. Literature is considered not merely in reference to art—but in relation to the influence it has exerted on the destinies of mankind, and to the various modifications which the religion, the government, the laws, the manners, and habits of different nations have caused it to undergo. The first quality that must strike us in this work is the admirable arrangement which has formed so many and such various materials into one harmonious whole. By what an easy and natural transition does the author pass from the Greek to the Roman literature! With what admirable skill he passes, in the age of Hadrian, from the old Roman to the oriental literature, and from the latter back again to the Christian literature of the middle age! How skilfully he has interwoven, in this sketch of oriental letters, the notices of the ancients and the researches of the moderns on the East! The next characteristic of this work is gigantic learning. To that intimate familiarity with the poets, historians, orators and philosophers of classical antiquity which his earlier writings had displayed—to the profound knowledge of oriental, and especially Sanscrit, literature evinced in the above-noticed work of India; we now see added a knowledge of the long buried treasures of the old German and Provençal poetry of the middle age—the scholastic philosophy—the principal modern European literatures in their several periods of bloom, maturity and decay. What a strong light, also, is thrown on some dark passages in the history of philosophy! Where shall we find a more curious, graphic, and interesting account of the mystics of the middle age, and of the German and Italian Platonists of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries! Every page bears the stamp of long and diligent inquiry, and original investigation. The minute traits—the accurate drawing—the freshness and vividness of colouring—the truth and life-like reality in this whole picture of literature, prove that the artist drew from the original, and not a copy. No better proof can be adduced of the accuracy, as well as extent of learning which distinguished this illustrious man and his brother, than the fact that their different works on classical, oriental and modern literature have received the approbation of such scholars, as made those several branches of knowledge the special objects of their study and inquiry. Thus their labours on Greek and Roman poetry met with the high sanction of a Heyne, a Wolf, and other distinguished Hellenists—their works on Sanscrit literature have been commended by a Guignault—a Remusat—a Chezy, and our own academicians of Calcutta; and their critiques on Shakspeare and the early English poets have been approved by the national critics, and especially by one who had devoted many years to the study of our elder poetry—I mean that able critic and accomplished scholar—the late Mr. Gifford.

The other and more important characteristics of this work are delicacy of taste, solidity of judgment, vigour and boldness of fancy, and depth and comprehensiveness of understanding. Here we see united, though in a more eminent degree, the acuteness, sagacity, and erudition of Lessing—the high artist-like enthusiasm of Winkelmann—and that exquisite sense of the beautiful, that vigorous, flexible and excursive fancy which made the genius of Herder at home in every region of art, and in every clime of poesy. The intellectual productions of every age and country—the primitive oriental world—classical antiquity—the middle age—and modern times, pass under review, and receive the same impartial attention—the same just appreciation—the same masterly characterization. In a work so full of beauties, it is difficult to make selections—but, were I called upon to point out specimens of succinct criticism, which, for justness and delicacy of discrimination—a poetic soaring of conception—and depth of observation, are unsurpassed, perhaps, in the whole range of literature, I should name the several critiques on Homer—Lucretius—Dante—Calderon—and Cervantes. The part least well done is that which treats of the literature of the last two centuries; but, from the vast multiplicity of details, it was impossible for the author, within his narrow limits, to do full justice to this part of his subject. He has not paid due homage to several of the great writers that adorned the reign of Louis XIV. He drops but one word on Pascal, and passes Mallébranche over in silence; though if ever there were writers deserving the notice of the historian of literature and philosophy, it was surely those two eminent men. In general, Schlegel was too fond of crowding his figures within a narrow canvass—hence many of them could not be placed in a suitable light or position; and several of his heads appear but half-sketched. This is not a mere book of criticism—it is a philosophical work in the widest sense of the word—the genius of the author is ever soaring above his subject—ever springing from the lower world of art, to those high and aerial regions of philosophy still more native to his spirit. To him the beautiful was only the symbol of the divine—hence the tone of earnestness and solemnity which he carries even into æsthetic dissertations. The style too, of this "history of literature" leaves little to be desired. To the lightness, clearness, and elegance of diction which had distinguished Schlegel's earlier productions, was here united a greater richness and copiousness of expression, and a more harmonious fulness and roundness of period. From this time, however, (if an Englishman may presume to offer an opinion on such a subject,) a decline may, I think, be observed in his style. His mind, indeed, seemed to gain strength and expansion with the advance of years—the horizon of his views was perpetually enlarged—and in vastness of conception, and profundity of observation, his last philosophical works outshine even those of his early manhood. Yet to whatever cause we are to attribute the fact—whether it be that his last works had not received from his hands the same careful revisal—or whether some men as they advance in life, become as negligent in their style as in their dress—or whether he at last gave in to the bad practice so prevalent in Germany, of disregarding the lighter graces of diction—certain it is, that his later writings, much as they may have gained in excellence of matter, and presenting, as they do, passages perhaps of superior power and splendour, are on the whole no longer characterised by the same uniform terseness and perspicuity of language.

With the "History of ancient and modern literature," Schlegel closed his critical career. He never afterwards mounted the tribunal of criticism, except on one occasion, when he awarded in favour of the early poetical effusions of M. de la Martine, a solemn sentence of approbation.[7] He now devoted himself with exclusive ardour to the graver concerns of politics and philosophy. Nor can we regret this resolution on his part, when we reflect that as far as regards literature, he had done all that was necessary—that he had now only to leave to time to work out his æsthetic principles in the German mind—and that should further elucidation on these topics be required, the distinguished Tieck, and his illustrious brother were at hand to furnish the requisite aid. But in metaphysics and political philosophy, what German could supply his place?

In the four eventful years which elapsed from 1808 to 1812, occupations as new to Schlegel as they were important and various in themselves, filled up the active life of this extraordinary man. In the Austrian campaign of 1809, he was employed as secretary to the Archduke Charles; and it is said that his eloquent proclamations had considerable effect in kindling the patriotism of the Austrian people. It was about the same time, he founded a daily paper, called "the Austrian Observer," which has since become the official organ of the Austrian government. The establishment of this journal—the situation which Schlegel had previously held at the head-quarters of the Archduke Charles—the diplomatic missions in which after the peace of 1814, he was employed by Prince Metternich who, be it said to the glory of that illustrious statesman, ever honoured him with his friendship and patronage—and finally the pension, letters of nobility, and office of Aulic Councillor, which the emperor was pleased to confer on him, may induce some of my readers to suppose that his political views were identified with those of the government, in whose service he was occasionally engaged; and that he was an unqualified admirer of the whole foreign and domestic policy of Austria. No conception can be more erroneous. As Secretary to the Archduke Charles, he knew he lent his support to a government which had shown itself the most honest, vigilant, and powerful friend of German independence—he knew he fought the battle of his country against an unholy and execrable tyranny, which, whatever shape it might assume—whether that of a lawless democracy or a ruthless despotism—was alike inimical to Christianity—alike fatal to the peace, the happiness, and the liberties of every country it subdued. In the next place, it is not usual even in the representative system, still less under a government constituted like that of Austria, to exact a perfect conformity of political sentiments between diplomatic agents and the heads of administration. Again the pension, title, and dignity which Schlegel received at the hands of the Emperor of Austria, were the well-earned recompence of distinguished services, and not the badges of servility. Lastly with respect to the "Austrian Observer," his motive in establishing that journal was purely patriotic. To enkindle the warlike enthusiasm of the Austrian people—to unite the weakened, divided, and distracted states of Germany in a common league against a common foe—to procure for his country the first of all political blessings—that without which all others are valueless—national independence; such was his object in this undertaking—such the object of every sincere and reflecting patriot of Germany at that period. The leaning towards a stationary absolutism, which has marked this journal since Schlegel gave up the conduct of it, belongs to its present editors; but that tone of dignified moderation, which according to the express acknowledgment of German Liberals, it carries into the discussion of political matters—that aversion from all extreme and violent parties and measures in politics, which distinguishes this journal, betray the illustrious hand which first set it in motion.

Nothing, in fact, can be more dissimilar than the policy long followed by the Austrian government, and that which Schlegel would have recommended, and did in fact recommend. What, especially since the time of the Emperor Joseph II., has characterized the general policy of this government? In respect to ecclesiastical matters, we still see (though the evil was mitigated by the piety of the late emperor), we still see that government, by a restless, encroaching spirit of jealousy, hamper the jurisdiction, and cramp the moral and intellectual energies of the clergy. In relation to the people, its sway is mild and paternal, indeed, but at the same time, intrusive, meddling and vexatious—it is, in short, a dead, mechanical absolutism, where all spontaneity of popular action has been destroyed—all equilibrium of powers overturned—and where royalty, by an irregular attraction, has disturbed, deranged, or compressed the movements of the other social bodies. With respect to science, those best acquainted with the policy of this government affirm, that its patronage is too exclusively confined to the mechanical arts and the physical sciences. In short, no where has the political materialism of the eighteenth century attained a more systematic development than in the Austrian government. Yet in that empire are to be found all the elements of a great social regeneration; and to a minister desirous of earning enduring fame, to a monarch ambitious of living for ever in the hearts of a grateful people, the noblest opportunity is presented for reviving, renovating, and bringing to perfection the free, glorious, but now alas! mutilated and half-effaced institutions of the middle age.

If such is the policy of the Austrian government in relation to the church, to liberty, and to science, it is needless to observe how entirely opposed it was to the views of Schlegel. His whole life was devoted to the cultivation and diffusion of elegant literature and liberal science; and any policy which tended to obstruct their progress, or shackle the energies of the human mind, must have been most adverse to his feelings and wishes. As a sincere friend to religious liberty, as well as a good Catholic, he must have deplored the bondage under which the church groaned; and how ardently attached he was to the cause of popular freedom, how utterly averse from any thing like absolutism in politics, the reader will soon have an opportunity of judging for himself.

But before I quit this subject, I cannot forbear noticing the very exaggerated statements sometimes put forth by ignorance or party spirit in England, respecting the state of learning in the Austrian empire. Without pretending to any personal knowledge of that country, there are however a certain number of admitted and well-attested facts, which prove that however inferior in mental cultivation Austria may be to some other states of Catholic as well as Protestant Germany, she yet holds a distinguished place in literature and science. The very general diffusion of popular education in that country—the great success with which all the arts and sciences connected with industry are cultivated—the admirable organization of its medical board—the distinguished physicians, theoretical as well as practical, whom it has produced—the great attention bestowed on strategy and the sciences subservient to it—the excellence to which the histrionic art has there attained—the universal passion for music, and the unrivalled degree of perfection the art has there reached—the acknowledged superiority of the Quarterly Review of Vienna, (the Wiener Jahrbücher)—lastly, the favour, countenance, and encouragement extended by the Austrian public to the oral lectures and published writings of the eminent literary characters, whether natives or foreigners, who for the last thirty years have thrown such a glory over their capital—all these incontrovertible facts, I say, prove this people to have reached an advanced stage of intellectual refinement. So far from finding among the Viennese that Bæotian dulness of which we sometimes hear them accused, Augustus William Schlegel (and his testimony is impartial, for he is neither a native nor resident of Austria,) confesses[10] that he discovered in them great aptness of intelligence, a keen relish for the beauties of poetry, and much of the vivacity of the Southern temperament. And the crowded audiences which flocked to the philosophical lectures Frederick Schlegel delivered on various occasions at Vienna, a metaphysician of equal celebrity might in vain look for in another European capital I could name, and which certainly considers itself very enlightened. There is no doubt that this Archduchy of Austria, which in the middle age produced some of the most celebrated Minnesingers, would with free institutions and a more generous policy on the part of the government, soon attain that intellectual station, to which its political greatness, and recent as well as ancient military glory alike bid it to aspire. If the statesmen that rule the destinies of that country were to regard the matter merely in a political point of view, they might see what moral dignity, weight and importance, the patronage of letters has given to the Protestant King of Prussia on the one hand, and to the Catholic King of Bavaria on the other.

For several years after the peace of 1814, Schlegel was one of the representatives of the Court of Vienna at the diet of Frankfort. These diplomatic functions occasioned a temporary interruption to his literary pursuits—an interruption which will be regretted by those only who have not reflected on the advantages of active life to the man of letters. The high dignity with which he was now invested—the commanding view which his station gave him of European politics—the insight he was enabled to obtain into the political state and relations of Germany—as well as the society and conversation of some of the most illustrious statesmen of the age, were all of inestimable service to the Publicist; and by making him acquainted with the excellencies as well as defects of existing governments, the obstacles which retard the progress of improvement, the ill success which sometimes attends even well-considered measures of Reform, were calculated to check the rashness of speculation, inspire sobriety of judgment, and at the same time enlarge his views of political philosophy. In the year 1818, he returned to Vienna, and resumed his literary occupations with renewed ardour. He wrote the following year in the Vienna Quarterly Review, (the Wiener Jahrbücher,) a long and elaborate reviewal of M. Rhode's work on primitive history. This reviewal, which from its length may fairly be called a treatise, contains a clear, succinct, and masterly exposition of those views on the early history of mankind, which he has on some points more fully developed in the work, of which a translation is now given. This article, which alternately delights and astonishes us by the historical learning, the philological skill, the curious geographical lore, and the bold, profound and original philosophy it displays, may be considered one of the most admirable commentaries ever written on the first eleven chapters of the book of Genesis; and in none of his shorter essays has the genius of the illustrious writer shone more pre-eminently than this.[11]

The year 1820 was marked by the simultaneous outbreak of several revolutions in different countries of Europe, and by symptoms of general discontent, distrust, and agitation in other parts. The violent, though transitory volcanic eruptions which convulsed and desolated the south of Europe, scattered sparkles and ashes on the already burning soil of France, and shook on her rocky bed even the ocean-queen. In Germany the wild revolutionary enthusiasm which pervaded a large portion of the youth—the frenzied joy with which the assassination of Kotzbue had been hailed—the wide spread of associations fatal to the peace and freedom of mankind, and the pernicious anti-social doctrines proclaimed in many writings, and even from some professorial chairs, led the different governments to measures of severe scrutiny and jealous vigilance, likely by a re-action to prove dangerous to the cause of liberty. The causes of these various social phenomena it is not my business here to point out; but I may observe in passing, that these discontents—these struggles—these revolutions had their origin partly in natural causes, partly in the errors both of governments and nations. The general disjointing of all interests—the derangement in the concerns of all classes of society produced by the transition from a state of long protracted warfare to a state of general peace—the blunders committed by the Congress of Vienna in the settlement of Europe—the blind recurrence in some European states to the thoroughly worn-out absolutism of the eighteenth century, injurious as that political system had proved to religion, to social order, and to national prosperity—in other countries, a rash imitation of the mere outward forms of the British constitution, without any true knowledge of its internal organism—above all, the deadly legacy of anti-Christian doctrines, and anti-social principles, which the last age had bequeathed to the present—such, independently of minor and more local reasons, are the principal causes, to which, I think, the impartial voice of history will ascribe the political commotions of that period. It was now evident that the great work of European Restoration had been but half-accomplished; and that the malignant Typhon of revolution was collecting his scattered members, recruiting his exhausted energies, and preparing anew to assault, oppress, and desolate the world.

Alarmed at the political aspect of Germany and Europe, Schlegel deemed the moment had arrived, when every friend of religion and social order should be found at his post. The importance of the struggle—the violence of parties—the false line of policy adopted by most governments—the errors and delusions too prevalent even among many of the defenders of legitimacy, rendered the warning voice of an enlightened mediator more necessary than ever. In conjunction with his illustrious friend, Adam Müller, and some of the Redemptorists—a most able, amiable, and exemplary body of ecclesiastics at Vienna—he established in 1820, a religious and political journal, entitled "Concordia." In a series of articles, entitled "Characteristics of the age," and which contain a most masterly sketch of the political state and prospects of the principal European countries, Schlegel has given a fuller exposition of his political principles, than in any other of his writings which have come under my notice. The extreme interest and importance of the matters discussed in these articles, and still more, the light they throw on very many passages in the following translation, have induced me to lay before the reader a rapid analysis of such parts as embody the author's political system. I shall therefore now proceed to this task, premising that in this analysis I shall occasionally interweave a remark of my own, to illustrate the author's views.—

There are five essential and eternal corporations in human society—the family—the church—the state—the guild—and the school.

I. The family is the smallest and simplest corporation—the ground-work of all the others;—and on its right constitution and moral development depend, as we shall presently see, the freedom, prosperity, and enlightenment of the state, the guild, and the school.

II. With respect to the church, its constitution under the primitive revelation was purely domestic; religious instruction and the solemnization of religious offices, being intrusted to the heads of families and tribes. In the Mosaic law, the Almighty founded a public ministry in the synagogue, which was an admirable type of the future constitution of the Christian church. Unlike the local and temporary synagogue, the Christian church is perpetual and universal—but like the synagogue, it hath a public ministry. "This church, to use Schlegel's own words, is that great and divine corporation which embraces all other social relations, protects them under its vault, crowns them with dignity, and lovingly imparts to them the power of a peculiar consecration. The church is not a mere substitute formed to supply or repair the deficiencies of the other social institutes and corporations; but is itself a free, peculiar, independent corporation, pervading all states, and in its object exalted far above them—an union and society with God, from whom it immediately derives its sustaining power."[12]

III. Between these two corporations the family—that deep, solid foundation of the social edifice below—and the church, that high, expansive and illumined vault above—stands the state. Schlegel defines the state, "a corporation armed for the maintenance of peace." "Its existence," says he, "is bound up with all the other corporations; it lives and moves in them; they are its natural organs; and as soon as the state, whether with despotic or anarchical views, attempts to impede the natural functions of these organs, to disturb or derange their peculiar sphere of action, it impairs its own vital powers, and prepares the way sooner or later for its own destruction."

IV. There are two intermediate corporations—the guild, which stands between the family and the state; and the school, which stands between the church and the state. By the guild, Schlegel understands "every species of traffic, industry and commerce, bound together in every part of the world by the common tie of money." The object of this corporation is the advancement of the material interests of the family; interests which it is the bounden duty of the state to protect and promote.

V. By the school, the author signifies the "whole intellectual culture of mankind—not merely the existing republic of letters, but all the tradition of science from the remotest ages to the present times." This corporation, I should say, has for its object the glorification of the church, the utility of the state, and the intellectual activity of the family, or rather its individual members.

But among these primary corporations, it is the state which forms the immediate object of the author's inquiries. I shall now proceed to lay before the reader the several characteristics which, according to the author, distinguish the Christian state, or the state animated with the spirit of Christianity.

§§ I. The Christian state is without slaves, and honours the sanctity of the nuptial tie.

Christianity first mitigated, and then abolished slavery. Slavery is incompatible with the spirit of Christianity, not only on account of the maltreatment, injuries, and oppression to which it subjects men; not only on account of the dangers to which it exposes female virtue; but chiefly and especially, because the state of slavery is one inconsistent with the dignity of a being made after the likeness of God. This complete emancipation of the lower classes from the bonds of servitude pre-eminently distinguishes the modern Christian states from those of classical antiquity on the one hand, and those of the primitive oriental world on the other. In the former, domestic and predial slavery were carried to the last degree of harshness and severity—in the latter, especially in India, a totally different form of servitude existed. There the innocent descendants of those who had been guilty of certain crimes, or who had contracted unlawful marriages, were doomed to a state of irremediable oppression, debarred from all civil rights, and excluded from the very charities of life. The fate of these hapless beings was even harder than that of the slaves among the ancient Greeks and Romans. As the exclusion of a whole class from the rights of citizenship and the offices of religion is incompatible with the principles of Christian love; so the hereditary transmission of the sacerdotal dignity is inconsistent with the Christian doctrine, which inculcates the necessity of a divine call to the priesthood. Hence the incompatibility which exists between the system of castes and the Christian religion.

The author shows that the various species of vassalage are clearly distinguishable from slavery; yet that even these have yielded to the benign spirit of Christianity. The existence of slavery in the Christian colonies no wise militates against the principle here laid down: for the slave-trade has ever been condemned by all Christian nations as wicked and unjust; and slavery, the introduction of which into the colonies the church had so strenuously opposed, was afterwards tolerated by her only as a necessary evil. For, as Schlegel observes with his characteristic wisdom, "the sudden abolition of an evil that has become an inveterate habit in society, is mostly attended with danger, and frequently works another wrong of an opposite kind."[13] But this is one of those truths, which the giddy, reckless spirit of a spurious philanthropy can never be made to comprehend.

As the Christian state abhors slavery from its inconsistency with the dignity of man, so, for the same reason, it guards with jealous vigilance, the sanctity and inviolability of the nuptial tie. Polygamy degrades woman from her natural rank in society—destroys the happiness of private life—poisons the very well-springs of education—and connected as it too frequently is with a traffic in slaves, plunges the male sex into irremediable degradation.[14] This practice is supposed to have originated with the Cainites in the antediluvian world; but for high and prudential reasons, it was tolerated rather than approved under the Patriarchal dispensation and the Mosaic law. In the ancient Asiatic monarchies, especially in the period of their decline, this usage sometimes prevailed to a licentious extent; but in the modern Mahometan states, where polygamy is indulged in to the most libidinous excess, this defective constitution of the family has proved one of the greatest barriers to political and intellectual improvement.

In ancient Greece and Rome, how far superior was the legislation on marriage! How much more healthful and vigorous was the constitution of domestic society! What a fine idea do we conceive of the early Romans, when we read that though the law sanctioned divorce, yet that for the first five hundred years, no individual took advantage of such a law! In the corrupt ages of Imperial Rome, divorce, permitted and practised on the most frivolous pretexts, was productive of more baneful consequences than Polygamy in its worst form.

Polygamy is proscribed in all Christian states. In the Catholic church, marriage is raised to the dignity of a sacrament; and divorce is not permitted, even in the case of adultery. Hereby woman is invested with the highest degree of dignity, and even influence—the union and happiness of the family are best secured—and the peace and stability of the state itself acquire the strongest guarantees. It is well known that some of the ablest divines of the church of England also uphold in all cases the indissolubility of the nuptial tie; and the British legislature, by according divorce only after adultery, and by rendering the obtaining of it a matter of difficulty and expense, has wisely opposed limitations to the practice. Yet, as was truly observed some years ago in parliament, the increase in the number of applications for divorce, is one among the many signs of the decline of morality in this country.

The principal Protestant churches regard marriage as a religious ceremony; and so the general proposition of Schlegel is correct, that all Christian states recognise the sanctity of the nuptial bond. And here is one of the main causes of the superior happiness, freedom and civilisation enjoyed by Christian nations.

§§ II. Christian justice is founded on a system of equity, and the Christian state has from its constitution, an essentially pacific tendency.

Schlegel observes that the difference between strict law and equitable law is the most arduous problem in all jurisprudence. Strict law is an abstract law, deduced from certain general principles, applied without the least regard to adventitious circumstances. Equity, on the other hand, pays due regard to such circumstances, examines into the peculiar state of things, and the mutual relations of parties; and forms her decisions not according to the caprice of fancy, or the waywardness of feeling, but according to the general principles of right, applied to the variable circumstances and situations of parties.

According to the author's definition, the object of the institution of the state is the maintenance of internal and external peace. Justice is the only basis of peace; but justice is here the means, and not the end. If justice were the end for which the state was constituted, then neither external nor internal peace could ever be procured or maintained; for the state would then be compelled to wage eternal war against all who, at home or abroad, were guilty of injustice, and could never lay down its arms till that injustice were removed.

As peace is essentially the end of that great corporation called the state; it follows that the justice by which its foreign and domestic policy must be regulated, is not that strict or absolute justice spoken of above, but that temperate or conciliatory equity, which is alone applicable to the concerns of men. The maxim, "a thousand years' wrong cannot constitute an hour's right," if applied to civil jurisprudence, would introduce interminable confusion, hardship and misery in the affairs of private life, and if applied to constitutional and international law, would lead to perpetual anarchy at home, and to endless, exterminating war abroad.

The Christian religion, as it comes from God, is eminently social—hence it abhors the principle of absolute or inexorable right, whether applied to civil or public law—hence the Christian state, or the state animated with the spirit of Christianity, is in its tendency essentially pacific.

This pacific policy of the state, however, so far from excluding, necessarily implies the firm, uncompromising vindication of its rights and interests, whether at home or abroad; and the repression of evil doers within, or a just war without, is often the only means of attaining the object for which the state was constituted—to wit, the maintenance of peace. On the other hand, the revolutionary state, or the state where, in opposition to existing rights and interests, new rights and interests are violently enforced; and where, in subversion of all established institutions, new institutions, conceived according to abstract and arbitrary theories, are violently introduced; the revolutionary state, I say, is, from its nature and origin—no matter what form it may assume—necessarily driven to a course of iniquitous policy—to disorganizing tyranny within, and to fierce, relentless hostility without.

Against the pacific character of the Christian state, the bloody wars of Charlemagne with the Saxons, the Crusades of a later period, and the religious wars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries are commonly objected. In the course of the work, to which this memoir is prefixed, the reader will find these several objections victoriously answered.

§ III. The Christian state recognizes the legal existence of Corporations, and depends on their organic co-operation.

The author has before shown that the Christian religion, following the principle of conciliatory equity, recognizes, without reference to their origin, all existing rights and interests. Hence the Christian religion can coexist, and has in fact coexisted, with every form or species of government. But there are some governments which, from their spirit and constitution, are more congenial than others to Christianity; and it is in this sense we speak of the Christian state.

We have already seen that there are five essential and eternal corporations—the family—the church—the state—the guild, and the school. These great corporations have each their several and subordinate institutions or corporations, which are accidental and transitory by nature, and consequently vary with time, place, and circumstances.

The Christian state is that which best secures and preserves to those essential corporations, and all their subordinate institutions, their due sphere of action. Hence our author shows that, under certain circumstances, and in certain countries, the Republic, whether democratic or aristocratic, may answer that end as well or even better than monarchy; and that it is only because, in great empires, monarchy is best calculated to maintain the free developement and organic co-operation of corporations, that it may be called, par excellence, the Christian state. But what form of monarchy is best adapted for this end? The absolute monarchy[15] is certainly the least: there then remain only the representative system, and the constitution of the three estates, or as the Germans call that mode of government, Stände-verfassung. Schlegel proceeds to examine the respective characteristics of those two forms of government, and to show the points in which they agree, and in which they differ. The constitution of estates is the old, legitimate constitution of the European states, whether republican or monarchical; but, in too many countries, this noble institution has been undermined by despotism, or destroyed by revolution. On the other hand, the representative system is comparatively modern, and, on the continent, has, amid the great convulsions produced by the French revolution, sprung out of a defective and superficial imitation of the British constitution. It is therefore to the latter constitution the author, when he has occasion to treat of the representative system, principally directs the attention of his readers.

As to the points of resemblance between this system, and the states-constitution, both have legislative assemblies—in both, petitions and remonstrances are addressed to the throne, and in both, the grant of subsidies rests chiefly with the commons; while to the enactment of every law, the concurrence of the different branches of the legislature is essentially requisite. But, in many important points, these two forms of government totally differ. In the states-constitution, the crown is invested with more power and dignity. With more dignity, because to the crown landed estates are annexed; and the sovereign, instead of being a pensioner on the bounty of his parliament, is the first independent proprietor:—with more power, because in the representative system, the King, with the single exception of choosing an administration, can perform no act without the sanction of his ministers. Thus in this political system, according to the author's remark, the substantial power of royalty is vested in the hands of the ministry.

The next point of difference is that the representative system, particularly in England, rests too exclusively on the material basis of property; and that intelligence is there deprived of an adequate share in the national representation.[16] In the states-constitution, where the clerical and scientific classes form a separate estate, or distinct branch of the legislature, intelligence is invested with all the dignity and glory which human society can confer. The clergy, who are the representatives of revealed faith, or the fixed and immutable part of intelligence, correspond to the aristocracy, or the representatives of fixed property—while the scientific class, representing science, or the variable and progressive part of intelligence, corresponds to the Commons, the representatives of moveable property. Hence, Francis Baader has ingeniously called the clergy the Upper House of intelligence, and the scientific class, the Lower House.[17]

The last point of difference is that, while in many of the modern representative systems, municipal corporations are despised and rejected, they form the very key-stone of the states-constitution. The Revolutionists, who have had so prominent a share in the formation of these representative governments, know full well that municipal corporations form the best security of the rights of the family—the firmest ramparts of popular freedom. They are thus objects of peculiar hatred to men who, so far from wishing the commonalty to obtain stability or cohesion in their constitution, are desirous they should ever remain a loose, shifting mass of disunited atoms, ready to receive any form or impress which despotism may impose. Hence the war which at different times, and in different countries, regal or democratic tyranny has waged against these admirable institutions. In the English constitution, on the other hand, which has preserved so many elements of the old Christian monarchy, the free, municipal institutions have been carefully maintained. "The true internal strength and greatness of England, (says Schlegel) consist, as is now almost universally admitted by profound political observers, far more in the vigour and freedom of municipal corporations, better preserved in that country than elsewhere, than in her admired political constitution itself."[18] Defective as many parts of that constitution appeared to the author, yet on the whole, he highly valued the vigorously constituted, but temperate and mitigated, aristocracy of 1688. He knew that the remnants of the old Christian constitution were better preserved there than in any of the great continental monarchies:[19] that the British government possessed elements of stability as well as of freedom, to which those monarchies, in their existing degeneracy, could in vain pretend; and that the very peculiarities in the British constitution, to which he most strongly objected, had their origin in local circumstances, deep-rooted wants, and remote historical events. That extreme jealousy of regal power which that constitution betrays—that undue preponderance of property over intelligence—that political predominance of the aristocracy, which, though rendered necessary by the excessive depression of royalty and of the clergy, was certainly calculated to impede the organic development of the democracy, and thereby to expose the body politic to dangerous revulsions—in fine, that fierce collision of parties, which that constitution nurses and encourages—all reveal the fearful struggles by which it came into life. The imitation of this constitution which, by bringing back to the European nations the reminiscence of their ancient freedom, has naturally excited their enthusiastic admiration—the imitation of that constitution, I say, difficult at all times, has been rendered in some countries utterly impracticable by the studious rejection of two of the great hinges on which, for a hundred and fifty years, it has turned—I mean the predominance of the aristocracy on the one hand, and the free, municipal organization of the commonalty on the other. In many of the German states, as the author observes, the representative system works well; because the legislators have had the wisdom to connect the new with anterior institutions.

On the whole, what has been said of the Gothic architecture, may be applied to the old Christian monarchy—it was never brought to perfection. That lofty ideal of government, which Christianity had traced to the nations of the middle age—that admirable constitution, which was a partial reflection of the constitution of the church itself, and wherein were blended and united the principles of love and intelligence, stability and activity—in other words, where a paternal royalty, an enlightened priesthood, a mild aristocracy, a loyal, yet free-spirited, commonalty controlled, aided, balanced, and defended each other—that lofty ideal has never been—probably never will be—fully realized. Yet there are many reasons to suppose that a momentous, and not very distant, futurity will be charged with realizing, as far as human infirmity will permit, this ideal conception of the Christian state.

Such is an outline of the principal features in Schlegel's political system—a system which I have endeavoured, as far as my feeble powers permitted, to explain, illustrate, and enforce.

But while in the East of Germany, this great luminary and his satellite were shedding their mild radiance of political wisdom, a star of the first magnitude rose above the Western horizon of Germany, and filled the surrounding heaven with the splendour of its light. The illustrious Goerres, already celebrated for his profound researches in archæology, and many admirable political writings, published in 1819 his work, entitled "Germany and the Revolution," which produced so extraordinary a sensation, and was at the time so ably translated by Mr. Black. This work was followed in 1821 by that writer's still more wonderful production, entitled "Europe and the Revolution," a production which in the soundness of its doctrines—the generosity of its sentiments—the depth and comprehensiveness of its views—and the copiousness and variety of historical illustration brought forward in their support—surpasses perhaps all the mighty works in defence of social order and liberty which the momentous events of the last fifty years have called forth in different parts of Europe. With a few slight shades of difference, the political views of Goerres mainly accord with those of Schlegel; but, living under the free government of Bavaria, the former is able boldly to proclaim truths which the latter at Vienna was able only to hint. Goerres unites the strong, practical sense of Gentz—the masterly learning and profound and comprehensive understanding of F. Schlegel—to great boldness of character, and a style of peculiar force and condensation. While the political glance of Schlegel was mostly directed towards the past—that of Gentz to the present hour—the eye of Goerres is turned more particularly to the future. Had the counsels of this illustrious man been more generally followed, the perilous crisis, in which for the last five years Germany has been involved, would have been happily averted, or at least better provided against. Himself and Schlegel may be considered as the supreme oracles of that illustrious school of liberal Conservatives, founded by our great Burke, and which numbers besides the eminent Germans, whose names have already been mentioned, a Baron de Haller in Switzerland—a Viscount de Bonald in France[20]—a Count Henri de Merode in Belgium—and a Count Maistre in Piedmont: men whose writings contain, in a greater or less degree, the seeds of the future political regeneration of Europe.

While engaged in the editorship of the Concordia, Schlegel gave a new edition of his works with considerable improvements and augmentations. Actively as his time had been employed, a long period had now elapsed since he had given any great production to the world; and he was now preparing those immortal works, which were to shed so bright an effulgence round the close of his life. In the rapid review which has been here taken of his critical, philological and historical writings, nothing has been said of his philosophical pursuits; and yet philosophy was his darling study—philosophy, which the ancients called "the science of divine and human things," was alone capable of filling the vast capacity of Schlegel's mind. At the age of nineteen, he had already read all the works of Plato in their original tongue; and six-and-thirty years afterwards, he expressed a vivid recollection of the delight and enthusiasm which the perusal had excited in his youthful mind. In 1800, he commenced his philosophical career at the University of Jena before an admiring audience; we have already seen him at Paris, amid his philological labours, devoting a portion of his time to the cultivation of philosophy; and, amid all the struggles and occupations of his subsequent life, he would ever and anon snatch some moment to pay his homage to this celestial maid—this mistress of his heart—this object of his earliest enthusiasm and latest worship.

A very distinguished friend and disciple of Schlegel's, the Baron d'Eckstein asserts that, towards the close of the last century, a confederacy was formed among some men of the most superior minds for the regeneration of natural science—for the revival of the lofty physics of remote antiquity, when nature was regarded only as the splendid and almost transparent veil of the spiritual world. The members of this intellectual association were Schelling, the two Schlegels, the poet Tirek, Novalis, and the celebrated geographer Ritter. This confederacy was dissolved, when the pantheistical tendency of Schelling's philosophy became more apparent; and Frederick Schlegel, in particular, became afterwards the most strenuous and formidable opponent of a philosophic system which appeared to him, and rightly enough, only a more subtle and refined Spinozism. On the true nature of this philosophy, however, opinion was much divided; many religious men among the Protestants ranged themselves under its banners; even some of the Orthodox entered into terms of accommodation with it; and the great Catholic theologian, Zimmer, thought that, by means of this system, he could obtain a clearer conception of the great Christian mystery of the Trinity. Enormous as may be the errors contained in this philosophy, yet, as few philosophic systems are entirely erroneous, the philosophy of Schelling, which appears to have undergone a purification in its course, has been attended with some beneficial results. It has led to a more profound and spiritual knowledge of nature—it has been, to many, a point of transition from the materialism and rationalism of the eighteenth century to the Christian Religion—and, indeed, this effect it has had on its illustrious founder himself, who has for some years returned to the bosom of Christianity, and who probably will be remembered by posterity more for his recent labours as a profound Christian naturalist, than for the pantheistic reveries of his youth.[21]

Schlegel's earlier philosophical, as well as historical, works are no longer to be met with, and have not yet been re-published. In the Concordia for 1820, we find an outline of those lectures on the Philosophy of life, which the author delivered at Vienna, in the year 1827. This work immediately preceded the one to which this memoir is prefixed; and, as it embodies those general philosophical principles, of which in the latter an application is made to history, a rapid analysis of its doctrines, particularly in the psychological and ontological parts, will be useful, nay, almost necessary, to the elucidation of many passages in the following translation. But how can I attempt the analysis of a work where the arrangement of a formal, didactic discussion is studiously avoided—where the author pours forth his thoughts with all the freedom of conversation—high, spiritual conversation—- where such is the exuberant fulness of his ideas, such the shadowy subtilty of his perceptions, that even the German language, copious and philosophical as it is, seems at times inadequate to their expression. Long as Germany had been habituated to the genius of Schlegel, she herself seems to have been startled by the appearance of a work where the boldest, the most unlooked for, the sublimest vistas of philosophy were opened to her astonished view.

Bespeaking then the indulgence of the reader, I will now proceed to lay before him an outline of some of the principal ideas on psychology and ontology, contained in the Philosophy of Life.

The consciousness of man is composed of mind, soul, and body. The soul is the centre of consciousness. The consciousness of man may be best understood by comparing it with that of other created beings. The existence of brutes is extremely simple—they have only a body—they have no mind—they have, properly speaking, no soul—at least, their soul is completely mingled with their corporeal frame; so that on the destruction of the latter, it reverts to the elements, or is absorbed in the general vital energy of nature (Natur-seele). In the scale of existence superior to man, the angelic spirits are represented in Holy Writ, and in the Traditions of all nations, as pure, intellectual beings, devoid of a gross corporeal frame. But have they no body whatsoever? Schlegel ascribes to them what he calls in his beautiful language, "an etherial body of light." This opinion, it must be confessed, has comparatively few supporters in the modern schools of theology, whether in the Catholic or Protestant churches; but it was maintained by many of the ancient Fathers, and, in modern times, it has met with the high sanction of the great Leibnitz. Schlegel assigns no reason for his opinion; but I have means of knowing that another great Christian philosopher of the age has, in his unpublished system of metaphysics, adduced very cogent arguments in support of this theory. With the exception of this subtle, etherial, luminous body, the celestial Spirits, according to the author, are nothing but intelligence or mind. They have, strictly speaking, no soul; for the distinctive faculties of the soul (as will be presently shown) are reason and imagination; and these faculties cannot be ascribed to beings in whom an intuitive understanding needs not the slow deductions, and analytic process of reason; nor wants a medium of communication with the world of sense, like imagination. Hence the lines of the great German poet fully represent the difference, as well as the resemblance, in the intellectual action of man and the angelic spirits:

"Science, O man, thou shar'st with higher spirits;
But Art thou hast alone."

Hence the nature of brutes is simple—that of angels two-fold—that of men three-fold.

The third part of human consciousness, the body—its organic laws, powers, and properties, the philosopher must leave to the naturalist. It is only when it has reference to the higher parts of consciousness that its properties can be made the matter of his investigation. The soul and the mind form the fit and peculiar subject of his enquiries. To the mind belong the faculties of will and understanding—to the soul, those of reason and imagination. Schlegel observes it is remarkable that the three different species of mental alienation correspond to the three parts of human consciousness. Thus monomania springs from some error deeply rooted in the mind—frenzy is the disorder of a soul that has broken loose from all the restraints of reason; and idiotcy arises from some organic defect in the brain. The last is the effect of physical, the two former the consequence of moral, and frequently accidental, causes. The author lays it down as a general principle, subject, however, to many modifications and exceptions, that in man mind or thought predominates—in woman soul or feeling prevails. Hence in marriage, which is a sacred union of souls, the deficiencies in the psychology of either sex are happily and mutually supplied. On this subject, Schlegel has some of the most touching and beautiful reflections, which a loving heart and a noble fancy have ever inspired.

Imagination (Einbildungs-kraft) is the inventive faculty—Reason (Vernunft) the regulative—Understanding (Verstand) the penetrative, or in a higher degree the intuitive—and the Will (Wille) the moral, faculty. To these primary faculties, or as the author styles them, these main boughs of human consciousness, four secondary faculties are subservient—the memory—the conscience—the passions or natural impulses, and the outward senses. The memory is the intermediate faculty between the understanding and the reason—the conscience the intermediate faculty between the reason and the will—the passions or natural impulses the intermediate faculty between the will and the imagination—and the outward senses form the connecting link between the imagination and the body.

Reason is the regulative faculty implanted in the soul. In real life, it corresponds to what we commonly call judgment, and is that faculty by which the transactions of men are regulated, and the resolutions of the will are brought to maturity, whether in sacred or secular concerns. In science, Reason is the dialectical or analytic faculty, by which the discoveries of Imagination and the perceptions of the Understanding receive a definite form—the faculty of analysis, arrangement, and combination. Reason in itself is not inventive—it makes no discoveries—it is rather a negative than a positive faculty—but it is the indispensable arbitress, to whose decision Understanding and Imagination must submit their various productions.

Imagination, on the other hand, is the inventive faculty in art, poetry and even science. No great discovery, says the author, can be made even in the mathematics, without imagination. This assertion may strike us as strange; but we must remember that Leibnitz declared he was led to his great mathematical discoveries by the aid of metaphysics; and that imagination necessarily enters into the composition of a great metaphysical genius, few will be disposed to question. Here, however, if I may be allowed to offer an opinion, Schlegel does not appear to me to have traced, with sufficient distinctness, the boundaries between imagination and understanding.

Understanding is the faculty of apprehension—it penetrates into the inward essence of things, and discerns the manifestations of the divine or human mind in their several revelations and communications.—Thus the naturalist, whose eye searches into the inward life of nature—the statesman, who can fathom the most deep-laid plans of a hostile policy—the theologian, who can discover the most hidden sense of Scripture, may be said to possess in an eminent degree, the faculty of understanding.

Will is the other faculty implanted in the mind of man—the faculty on whose good or evil direction that of all the other faculties of mind and soul essentially depends. Independently of the moral direction of the will, its innate strength or weakness, its steadiness or vacillation, proportionably augment or diminish the power of all the other faculties. How far moderate abilities, when directed by a firm, tenacious, perseverant will can avail—to what a degree of success they may sometimes lead, daily experience may serve to convince us.

Originally all these faculties, will and understanding, reason and imagination, were harmoniously blended and united in the human consciousness; but since, at the fall of man, a dark spirit interposed its shadow betwixt him and the Sun of Righteousness, disorder and confusion have entered into his mind and soul, and troubled their several faculties. Thus the understanding often points out a course which the will refuses to follow; and the will, on the other hand, is often disposed to pursue the good and right path, were the blind or narrow understanding competent to direct it. Not only are will and understanding in frequent collision with one another, but each is at variance with itself. What the will resolves to-day it shrinks from to-morrow! How often does the understanding view the same subject in a different light at different times! How much do time, circumstance, and humour, place the same truth in a clearer or obscurer aspect! The same opposition is observable betwixt reason and imagination. Where fancy is the strongest in the house, how often doth she spurn the warnings of her more homely and unpretending sister—reason. Again, where reason has the ascendancy, what groundless aversion, and paltry jealousy does she not frequently evince at the superior nature of her brilliant sister! Or, to drop this figurative language, how often do we behold a man of lofty imagination very deficient in practical sense; and again, in your man of strong sense, how frequently dull and pedestrian is the fancy! In real life what a deplorable schism exists between poets and artists on the one hand, and men of business on the other! What mutual contempt and aversion do they not frequently exhibit! Well, this schism is nothing else than the external realization of the inward conflict between reason and imagination.

With respect to the four secondary faculties—memory—conscience—the natural impulses—and the outward senses—faculties, which, as the author says, cannot from their importance be termed subordinate, but should rather be called subsidiary or assigned;—Schlegel shews that, as regards the first, the decay of the memory precedes the decline of the reason, and its sudden and entire loss brings about the extinction of the latter faculty. In the same way the deadness of the conscience argues the utmost depravity of the will. The conscience is the memory of the will, as the memory is the conscience of the understanding.

"The natural impulses," says Schlegel, "where they appear exalted to passion, are to be regarded as nothing else but the motions of a will, that has been overpowered by the false illusions of imagination. The middle position of the impulses betwixt the will and the imagination, as well as the abused co-operation of those two faculties in any passion or sensual gratification, become habitual, is apparent particularly in those inclinations which man has in common with the brute, and where the viciousness lies only in their excess or violence."[22] "Aspiration after infinity is natural to man, and belongs essentially to his being. Whatever is defective or disorderly in his impulses, consists only in their unbounded gratification—in the perversion of that aspiration after infinity towards perishable, sensual, material, and often most unworthy, objects; for that aspiration, natural as it is to man, where it is pure and genuine, can be gratified by no sensual indulgence and no earthly possession."[23] In the brute, the gratification of the natural appetites is regular, uniform, subject to no vicissitudes or excesses, and entails no injury on his nature, because undisturbed and unvitiated by the false illusions of imagination.

Lastly, with regard to the outward senses, there are, philosophically speaking, but three, sight, hearing, and touch—for under the last, taste and smell are included; and it is remarkable how these severally correspond to the three parts of human consciousness. The sight is pre-eminently the sense of the mind—hearing the sense of the soul—while the touch is peculiarly the sense of the body; the sense given to the body for its special protection and preservation. The loss of the first two senses the body can survive—but it perishes with the utter extinction of the last. Those expressions in common parlance, a good artist-like eye—a fine musical ear—prove the close connexion which mankind has always felt to exist between the outer senses and the higher faculties of man.

"Had the soul," says the author, "not been originally darkened and troubled—had it remained in a clear, luminous repose in its God—then the human consciousness would have been of a far more simple nature than at present; for it would have consisted only of understanding, soul, and will. Reason and imagination, which are now in such frequent collision with the will and understanding, as well as with each other, would then have been absorbed in those higher faculties. Even the conscience would not then have been a special act, or special function of the judgment—but a tender feeling—a gentle, almost unconscious pulsation of the soul. The senses and the memory, those ministrant faculties which, in the present dissonance of the human consciousness, form so many distinct powers of the soul, would, in its state of harmony, have been mere bodily organs."[24]

So much for the author's psychology—let us now proceed to the ontological part of the work.

To the Supreme Being, will and understanding belong in a supreme degree; in him they exist in the most perfect harmony—will is understanding, and understanding will. But with no propriety can the faculty of reason be ascribed to the Deity; and it is remarkable, says the author, that nowhere in Holy Writ, nor in the sacred traditions of the primitive nations, nor in the writings of the great philosophers of antiquity, is the term reason ever used in reference to Almighty God. It is only among a few of the later, degenerate, and rationalist sects of philosophy, the Stoics for example, that the expression Divine Reason is ever met with. If such an expression is incorrect or unsound, with still less fitness and decorum can the faculty of imagination be assigned to the God-head—the very term would shock the understandings, and revolt the inmost feelings, of all men.

The Deity reveals himself unto men in four different ways—in Scripture, (including of course its running and necessary commentary, ecclesiastical Tradition);—in Nature—in Conscience, and in History.

"Holy Writ," says the author, "as it is delivered to us, and as it was begun and founded three-and-thirty centuries ago, does not exclude the elder sacred traditions of the preceding two thousand four hundred years; or the revelation, which was the common heritage of the whole human race. On the contrary, it contains very explicit allusions to the fact that such a revelation was imparted to the first man, as well as to that patriarch who, after the destruction of the primeval world of giants, was the second progenitor of mankind. As the sacred knowledge, derived from this revelation, flowed on every side, and in copious streams over the succeeding generations of men, the ancient and holy traditions were soon disfigured, and covered over with fictions and fables; where, amid a multitude of remarkable vestiges and glorious traits of true religion, immoral mysteries and Bacchanalian rites were often intermixed, and truth itself, as in a second chaos, buried under a mass of contradictory symbols. Thence arose that Babylonish confusion of languages, sagas, and symbols, which is universally found among the ancient, and even the primitive nations. In the great work of the restoration of true religion, which accordingly we must regard as a second revelation, or rather as a second stage of revelation, a rigid proscription of those heathen fictions, and of all the immorality connected with them, was the first and most essential requisite. But in that gospel of creation, which forms the introduction to the whole Bible, that elder revelation, accorded to the first man and to the second progenitor, is expressly laid down as the ground-work; and in this introduction, we shall find the clue to the history and religion of the primitive world—nay, it is the true Genesis of all historical science."[25]

Now with respect to the secondary or more indirect modes, by which the Deity communicates himself to men, the author observes that "Nature, too, is a book written on both sides, within and without, in which the finger of God is clearly visible:—a species of Holy Writ, in a bodily form—a glorious panegyric, as it were, on God's omnipotence, expressed in the most vivid symbols. Together with these two great witnesses of the glory of the Creator, scripture, and nature—the voice of conscience is an inward revelation of God—the first index of those other two greater and more general sources of revealed truths; while History, by laying before our eyes the march of Divine Providence—a Providence whose loving agency is apparent as well in the lives of individuals as in the social career of nations—History, I say, constitutes the fourth revelation of God."[26]

We have next to consider the conduct of Divine Providence in the education of the human race. How do we educate the boy? We first endeavour to awaken his sense—then we cultivate his soul, or his moral faculties; while at the same time, we aid the gradual unfolding of his understanding. It is so with the divine education of mankind. In the primitive revelation, indeed, the first man received the highest intellectual illumination; an illumination which, though at his fall it was obscured by sin, still shines with a shorn splendour through all the history and traditions of the primeval world. When, however, by the abuse he had made of his great intellectual powers, man was successively deprived of all those high gifts with which he had been originally endowed; when by the errors of idolatry, he had lapsed into a state of intellectual infancy; then it was necessary that his sense should first be awakened to divine things; and this was accomplished in the Mosaic revelation. But this revelation was only preparatory to another, destined to renovate the soul of humanity, and gradually illumine its intelligence. This regeneration of the moral faculties of man was achieved immediately and directly by Christianity; for, without this moral regeneration, any sudden illumination of the intellect would have been hurtful rather than beneficial to mankind. Under the benign influence of Christianity, the scientific enlightenment of the human mind has been wisely progressive; but it seems reserved for the last glorious ages of the triumphant church to witness the full meridian splendour of human intelligence. Then the great scheme of creation will be fulfilled; and the intellectual light, which played around the cradle, will brighten the last age, of humanity.

Let us now proceed to consider Nature in herself, and in her relations to God, to the spiritual intelligences, and to man.

Nature was originally the beautiful, the faultless work of the Almighty's hand. But the rebel angel in his fall brought disorder and death into all material creation. Hence arose that chaos, which the breath of creative Power only could remove. Thus, according to the author, a wide interval occurs between the first and second verse of Genesis. "In the beginning," says the inspired historian, "God made heaven and earth," that is, as the Nicene Creed explains it, the visible and invisible world. "And the earth was without form, and void: and darkness was upon the face of the deep." But that void—that darkness—that chaos proceeded not from the luminous hand of an all-wise and all perfect Maker—but from the disturbing influence of that fiend whom Holy Writ hath called, with such unfathomable depth, the "murderer from the beginning." Hence Schlegel terms him in his sublime language, "the author or original of death"—(Erfinder des Todes).

On a subject of such vast importance, I presume not to offer an opinion: but I must merely content myself with the humble task of analysis. It may be proper to observe, however, that this opinion of Schlegel's would seem, from a passage in the work of the great Catholic writer—Molitor, to be consonant with the tradition of the ancient synagogue. "The Cabala," says he, "was divided into two parts—the theoretical and the practical. The former was composed of the patriarchal traditions on the holy mystery of God, and the divine persons; on the spiritual creation, and the fall of the angels; on the origin of the chaos of matter, and the renovation of the world in the six days of creation; on the creation of man, his fall, and the divine ways conducive to his restoration."[27]

"Death," says Schlegel, "came by sin into the world. As by the fall of the first man, who was not created for death, nor originally designed for death, death was transmitted to the whole human race; so by the preceding fall of him, who was the first and most glorious of all created Spirits, death came into the universe, that is, the eternal death, whose fire is inextinguishable. Hence it is said: 'Darkness was upon the face of the deep, and the earth was without form, and void'—as the mere tomb-stone of that eternal death; 'but the Spirit of God moved over the waters, and therein lay the first vital germ of the new creation.'"[28]

But if such is the origin of Nature, how is its existence perpetuated, and what will be its final destiny?

Nature, as was said above, is a book of God's revelation, written within and without. The outer part of this sacred volume attests the supreme power, wisdom, and goodness of the Creator in characters too clear and luminous to be unperceived or misread by the dullest or the most vitiated eye. The inner pages of this book comprise a still more glorious revelation of God—but their language is more mysterious, and much which they contain seems to have been wisely withheld, or rather withdrawn from the knowledge of mankind. It was this acquaintance with the internal secrets of Nature, derived partly from revelation, and partly from intuition, which gave the men of the primitive, and especially the antediluvian, world such a vast superiority over all the succeeding generations of mankind. But it was the abuse of that knowledge, also, which brought about in the primeval world a Satanic delusion, and a gigantic moral and intellectual corruption, of which we can now scarcely form the remotest idea. But this key to the inward science of Nature, which was taken away from a corrupt world, that had so grossly abused it, seems now about to be restored to man, renovated as his soul and intelligence have been by a long Christian education. The physical researches of the last fifty years, especially in Germany, lead the enquirer more and more to the knowledge of this important truth, stamped on all the pages of ancient tradition, and never effaced from the recollection of mankind, to wit, the action of spiritual intelligences on the material world. The nature of this action is briefly adverted to in the following passage (among many others to the same purport), in the Philosophy of Life. "It is especially of importance," says the author, "for the understanding of the general system of Nature, to observe how the modern chemistry mostly dissolves and decomposes all solid bodies, as well as water itself, into different forms of elements of air, and thereby has taken away from Nature the appearance of rigidity and petrifaction. There are every where living elemental powers hidden and shut up under this appearance of rigidity. The quantity of water in the air is so great that it would suffice for more than one deluge; a similar inundation of light would occur, if all the light latent in darkness were at once set free; and all things would be consumed by fire, if that element in the quantity in which it exists, were suddenly let loose. The salutary bonds, by which these elemental powers are held in due equilibrium, one bound by the other, and kept within its prescribed limits, I will not now make a matter of investigation; nor now examine the question, whether these bonds be not perhaps of a higher kind than naturalists commonly suppose."

The great apostle of the Gentiles represents all Nature as sighing for her deliverance from the bondage of death. "Every creature groaneth and travaileth in pain, even now." Some chapters in the Philosophy of life may be considered as one luminous commentary on that text. My limits will permit me to cite but one passage.

"That planetary world of sense, and the soul of the earth imprisoned therein, is only apparently dead. Nature only sleeps, and may again be awakened: and sleep is, if not the essence, yet a characteristic mark of Nature. Every thing in Nature hath this quality of sleep; not the animals merely, but the plants also sleep; and in the course of the seasons on the surface of the globe, there is a constant alternation between waking and slumber." ... "That soul, he continues, which slumbers under the prodigious tomb-stone of outward nature—a soul, which is not alien, but half akin to us—is divided between the troubled, painful reminiscence of eternal death, in which it originated—and the bright flowers of celestial Hope, which grow on the borders of that dark abyss. For this earthly Nature, as Holy Writ saith, is indeed subjected to nothingness—yet without its will, and without its fault: so it looks forward in expectation of Him who hath so subjected it—it looks forward in the hope that it may one day be free—one day have a share in the general resurrection and consummate revelation of God's glory; and for this last great day of future creation Nature anxiously sighs, and yearns from her inmost soul."[29]

I will now wind up this analysis with the following passage, in which the distinctive peculiarities of the different parts of ontology are shortly stated: "The distinctive characteristic of nature is sleep, or the struggle between life and death; the distinctive characteristic of man is imagination (for reason is a more negative faculty); the distinctive characteristic of the intelligences superior to man is restless, eternal activity, implanted in the very constitution of their being; and the distinctive characteristic of the Deity, in relation to his creatures, is infinite condescension."

Such is a brief summary of some of the principal observations in the psychological and ontological parts of the Philosophy of Life. And in this summary it has been my intention not so much to give an analysis of those parts, as to convey to the reader a clue for the better understanding of many passages in the work I have translated. The remaining parts of the "Philosophy of Life" are devoted to a variety of ethical, political, and æsthetic reflections, which it is unnecessary to enter into here.

Scarce had Germany recovered from the enthusiasm which this work, (the Philosophy of Life) excited; when its illustrious author delivered, in the year 1828, the following course of Lectures on the "Philosophy of History," which are now presented to the reader in an English garb. Defective as may be the medium through which the English reader becomes acquainted with this work, he will be enabled to form on it a more impartial, as well as more enlightened, judgment than any the translator could pronounce; and he will, therefore, only venture to observe that it has been considered in every respect worthy of its author's high reputation.

Towards the close of the year 1828, Schlegel repaired to Dresden; and that city, where the torch of his early enthusiasm had been first kindled, was now to witness its final extinction. He delivered in this city, before a numerous and distinguished auditory, nine lectures on the "Philosophy of Language," (Philosophie der Sprache), wherein he developed and expanded those philosophical views already laid down in his "Philosophy of Life." This work is even more metaphysical than the one last named—with untiring wing, the author here sustains his flight through the sublimest regions of philosophy. This production displays at times a gigantic vastness of conception which almost appals—we might almost say, that this mighty intelligence had in his ardent aspirations after Immortality, burst his earthly fetters—or that Divine Providence, judging a degenerate world unworthy of hearing such sublime accents, had called him to continue his hymn in eternity. On Sunday, the 11th of January, 1829, he was, between ten and eleven o'clock at night, preparing a lecture, which he was to deliver on the following Wednesday. He had in his former lectures spoken of Time and Eternity—he had called Time a distraction of Eternity—he had adverted to those ecstacies of great Saints, which he called transitions to Eternity. He was now in this lecture discoursing of the different degrees of knowledge attainable by man—of the perception—the notion—and the idea. He began a sentence with these remarkable words:—"Das ganz vollendete und vollkommne verstehen selbst aber"—"But the consummate and the perfect knowledge"—when the hand of sickness arrested his pen. That consummate and perfect knowledge he himself was now destined to attain in another and a better world; for, at one o'clock on the same night, he breathed out his pure and harmonious soul to heaven.

His death, though sudden, was not unprovided. He had ever lived up to his faith—through his writings there runs an under-current of calm, unostentatious piety; and I know no writer more deeply impressed with a sense of the loving agency of Providence. A gentleman, well acquainted with some of his most intimate friends, has assured me that, for some time prior to his death, he had prosecuted his devotional exercises with more than ordinary fervour; and that on the morning of that Sunday on which his last illness seized him, he had been united to his Lord in the Holy Communion—a presage and an earnest, let us hope, of that intimate union he was destined to enjoy in the long and cloudless day of Eternity!

The melancholy news of his death, when conveyed to his distinguished friend—Adam Müller, then at Vienna, gave such a violent shock to his feelings, that it brought on a stroke of apoplexy, which terminated his existence. A chain of the most exalted sympathies had united those souls in life—what marvel if the electric stroke, which prostrated the one should have laid low the other!

Frederick Schlegel married early in life the daughter of the celebrated Jewish philosopher Mendelsohn. This lady followed her husband in his change of religion. Mrs. Schlegel is one of the most intellectual women in Germany—she is advantageously known to the literary world by her German translation of Madame de Stael's Corinne; and report has ascribed to her elegant pen several of the poems in her husband's collection.[30]

In conclusion, I will endeavour to recapitulate the obligations which literature and science owe to the great man, whose literary biography I have attempted to sketch.

To have, in common with his illustrious brother, established a system of broad, comprehensive, synthetic criticism, by which the principles of ancient and modern art were unfolded to view—by which we were introduced into the intellectual laboratories of genius, made to assist at the birth of her mighty conceptions, and by whose plastic touch the great works of ancient and modern poetry were in a manner created anew:—to have unlocked the fountains of the old Germanic minstrelsy, and refreshed the poetry of his age with a new stream of fictions:—to have been among the first to do for philology what the Stagyrite had done for natural history; by classifying languages not according to their outward form, but their internal organization, not according to a specious, though often delusive, etymology, but according to grammatical structure: to have deciphered the mysterious wisdom of old days, and with admirable tact to have caught the spirit of the primitive world, as disclosed in its sagas and its symbols, its poetry and its philosophy: next to have evoked from the dust the better philosophy of ancient Greece, and presented her venerable form to the renewed love and respect of mankind, partly by an admirable translation of portions of Plato,[31] partly by luminous critiques, and partly again by the example of his own philosophy, in form as well as spirit so eminently Platonic: then, in the field of modern history, to have traced the rise and progress of the European states, the genius of their civil and political institutions, the causes and effects of their moral and social revolutions, with an extent of learning, a spirit of impartiality, and a depth and comprehensiveness of understanding, unsurpassed by preceding writers, and in his own age rivalled only by his illustrious countryman—Goerres: lastly, to have put the crowning glory to a life so full of glorious achievement by his last philosophical works, where a strong and broad light is thrown upon the mysteries of psychology, where the most important questions of ontology are treated with equal boldness and sublimity of thought, and magnificence of fancy, while even on physics many bright hints are thrown out, which a deeper science will know one day how to turn to account: such are the the services which this illustrious man has rendered to the cause of literature and philosophy. Living in an age which is only an epoch of momentous transition from the adolescence to the virility of the human mind, he was evidently, together with some other chosen spirits of his time, the precursor of an era of Christian philosophy, when, to use the language of a young, but very distinguished French writer,[32] "the sterile dust of futile abstractions will be swept away, and the antique faith will appear crowned with all the rays of science." "Already," continues the writer just quoted, "even infidel science, astonished at her own discoveries, which disconcert alike ideology and materialism, begins to suspect

"There are more things in heaven and earth
Than are dreamt of in that philosophy."[33]

THE

AUTHOR'S PREFACE.

The most important subject, and the first problem of philosophy, is the restoration in man of the lost image of God; so far as this relates to science.

Should this restoration in the internal consciousness be fully understood and really brought about, the object of pure philosophy is attained.

To point out historically in reference to the whole human race, and in the outward conduct and experience of life, the progress of this restoration in the various periods of the world, constitutes the object of the Philosophy of History.

In this way, we shall clearly see how, in the first ages of the world, the original word of Divine revelation formed the firm central point of faith for the future re-union of the dispersed race of man; how later, amid the various power, intellectual as well as political, which in the middle period of the world, all-ruling nations exerted on their times according to the measure allotted to them, it was alone the power of eternal love in the Christian religion which truly emancipated and redeemed mankind: and how, lastly, the pure light of this Divine truth, universally diffused through the world, and through all science—the term of all Christian hope, and Divine promise, whose fulfilment is reserved for the last period of consummation—crowns in conclusion the progress of this restoration.

Why the progress of this restoration in human history, according to the word, the power, and the light of God, as well as the struggle against all that was opposed to this Divine principle in humanity, can be clearly described and pointed out only by a vivid sketch of the different nations, and particular periods of the world; I have alleged the reasons in various passages of the present work. With this view, I have, for the purpose of my present undertaking, availed myself, as far as these discoveries lay within my reach, of the rich acquisitions which the recent historical researches of the last ten years have furnished for the better understanding of the primitive world, its spirit, its languages, and its monuments. Besides the well-known names mentioned with gratitude in the text, of Champollion, Abel Remusat, Colebrooke, my brother, Augustus William Von Schlegel, the two Barons Humboldt; and for what relates to natural history, G. H. Schubert; I have to name with the utmost commendation for the section on China, Windischmann's Philosophy; and for what relates to the Hebrew Traditions, drawn from the esoteric doctrines and other Jewish sources of information, which are here most copiously used, I have been much indebted to a very valuable work which appeared at Frankfort, 1827, entitled "The Philosophy of Tradition," and which reflects the highest honour on its anonymous author.[34] To these I might add the names of Niebuhr, and Raumer; but in the later periods of history, we are not so much concerned about new researches on certain special points as about a right comparison of things already known, and a just conception of the whole. In the Philosophy of History, historical events can and ought to be not so much matter of discussion, as matter for example and illustration; and if on those points, where the researches of the learned into antiquity are as yet incomplete, any historical particulars should, in despite of my utmost diligence, have been imperfectly conceived or represented, yet the main result, I trust, will in no case be thereby materially impaired.

The following sketch of the subject will shew the order of the Lectures, and give a general insight into the plan of the work. The first two Lectures embrace, along with the Introduction, the question of man's relation towards the earth, the division of mankind into several nations, and the two-fold condition of humanity in the primitive world.

The subjects discussed in the seven succeeding Lectures are as follows:—the antiquity of China, and the general system of her empire—the mental culture, moral and political institutions, and philosophy of the Hindoos—the science and corruption of Egypt—the selection of the Hebrew people for the maintenance of Divine revelation in its purity—the destinies and special guidance of that nation—next an account of those nations of classical antiquity, to whom were assigned a mighty historical power, and a paramount influence over the world—such as the Persians, with their Nature-worship, their manners, and their conquests—the Greeks, with the spirit of their science, and dominion—and the Romans, together with the universal empire which they were the first to establish in Europe. The next five Lectures treat of Christianity, its consolidation and wider diffusion throughout the world—of the emigration of the German tribes, and its consequences—and of the Saracenic empire in the brilliant age of the first Caliphs. Then follows an account of the various epochs and the various stages of the progress which the modern European nations have made in science and civil polity, according to their use and application of the light of truth vouchsafed to them. So the subjects here treated are—the establishment of a Christian imperial dignity in the old German empire—the great schism of the West, and the struggles of the middle age and the period of the Crusades, down to the discovery of the New World, and the new awakening of science. The three following Lectures are devoted to the Religious Wars, the period of Illuminism, and the time of the French Revolution.

The eighteenth and concluding Lecture turns on the prevailing spirit of the age, and on the universal regeneration of society.

We have yet to make the following observations with respect to this undertaking, in which we have attempted to lay the foundations of a new general Philosophy.

The first awakening and excitement of human consciousness to the true perception and knowledge of truth has been already unfolded in my work on "the Philosophy of Life."

To point out now the progressive restoration in humanity of the effaced image of God, according to the gradation of grace in the various periods of the world, from the revelation of the beginning, down to the middle revelation of redemption and love, and from the latter to the last consummation, is the object of this Philosophy of History.

A third work, treating of the science of thought in the department of faith and nature, will with more immediate reference to the Philosophy of Language, comprehend the complete restoration of consciousness, according to the triple divine principle.

It is my wish that this work should as soon as circumstances will permit, speedily follow the two works "The Philosophy of Life," and "The Philosophy of History," now presented to the Public.

Vienna, Sept. 6th, 1828.

CONTENTS

OF VOL. I.

PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY.

LECTURE I.

INTRODUCTION.

"And the earth was without form, and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep; but the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters." Gen. i. 2.

By philosophy of history must not be understood a series of remarks or ideas upon history, formed according to any concerted system, or train of arbitrary hypotheses attached to facts. History cannot be separated from facts, and depends entirely on reality; and thus the Philosophy of history, as it is the spirit or idea of history, must be deduced from real historical events, from the faithful record and lively narration of facts—it must be the pure emanation of the great whole—the one connected whole of history, and for the right understanding of this connexion a clear arrangement is an essential condition and an important aid. For although this great edifice of universal history, where the conclusion at least is still wanting, is in this respect incomplete, and appears but a mighty fragment of which even particular parts are less known to us than others;—yet is this edifice sufficiently advanced, and many of its great wings and members are sufficiently unfolded to our view, to enable us, by a lucid arrangement of the different periods of history, to gain a clear insight into the general plan of the whole.

It is thus my intention to render as intelligible as I possibly can the general results and the connection of all the past transactions in the history of the human race; to form a true judgment on the particular portions or sections of history, according to their intrinsic nature and real value in reference to the general progress of mankind, carefully distinguishing what was injurious, what advantageous, and what indifferent; and thereby, as far as is possible to the limited perceptions of man, to comprehend in some degree that mighty whole. This perception—this comprehension—this right discernment of the great events and general results of universal history, is what might be termed a science of history; and I would have here preferred that term, were it not liable to much misconception, and might have been understood as referring more to special and learned inquiries, than the other name I have adopted to denote the nature of the present work.

If we would seize and comprehend the general outline of history, we must keep our eye steadily upon it; and must not suffer our attention to be confused by details, or drawn off by the objects immediately surrounding us. Judging from the feelings of the present, nothing so nearly concerns our interests as the matter of peace or war; and this is natural, as in a practical point of view they are both affairs of the highest moment; while the courageous and successful conduct of the one insures the highest degree of glory, and the solid establishment and lasting maintenance of the other may be considered as the greatest problem of political art and human wisdom. But it is otherwise in universal history, when this is conceived in a comprehensive and enlarged spirit. Then the remotest Past, the highest antiquity, is as much entitled to our attention as the passing events of the day, or the nearest concerns of our own time.

When a war, indeed, carried on more than two thousand years ago, in which the belligerent parties have long since ceased to exist, when every thing has been since changed—when a long series of historical catastrophes has intervened between that period and our own; when such a warfare, offering as it does but at best a remote analogy to the circumstances of nearer times, and consequently possessing no immediate interest, has been investigated by the mighty intellect of a Thucydides, pourtrayed by him in the highest style of eloquence, and unfolded to our view with the most consummate knowledge of mankind, of public life, and of the most intimate relations of Government; such a warfare then retains a permanent interest, and is a lasting source of instruction. We love to dive into the minutest details of an event so widely removed from us—and such a study is to be regarded and prized as highly useful, were it only as an exercise of historical reflection, and a school of political science. This remark will equally hold good, when the internal feuds of a less powerful state have been analyzed and laid open by the acute perspicacity and delicate discrimination of a Machiavelli. And still more, perhaps, when a great system of pacification, like that which Augustus gave, or promised to give to the whole civilized world, and established for a certain period at least, has been fathomed by the searching eye of a Tacitus, and by his masterly hand delineated in its ulterior progress and remoter effects; shewing, as he does, how that surface, apparently so calm, concealed numberless sources of disquiet—an abyss of crime and destruction—how that evil principle in the degenerate government of Rome became more and more apparent, and, under a succession of wicked rulers, broke out into paroxysms more and more fearful.

As a school of political science and historical reflection, the study of these and similar classical historical works is of inestimable advantage. But independently of this, and considered merely in themselves, all those countless battles—those endless, and even, for the greater part, useless wars, of which the long succession fills up for so many thousand years the annals of all nations, are but little atoms compared with the great whole of human destiny. The same, with a slight distinction, will hold good of so many celebrated treaties of peace in past ages, when these have lost all interest for real life and the present order of things;—treaties, which though brought about by great labour, and upheld by consummate art, were yet internally defective, and sooner or later, and often quickly enough, fell to pieces and were destroyed.

From all these descriptions of ancient wars, and treaties of peace, no longer applicable or of interest to the present world or present order of things, historical philosophy can deduce but one, though by no means unimportant, result. It is this—that the internal discord, innate in man and in the human race, may easily and at every moment break out into real and open strife—nay, that peace itself—that immutable object of high political art, when regarded from this point of view, appears to be nothing else than a war retarded or kept under by human dexterity; for some secret disposition—some diseased political matter, is almost ever at hand to call it into existence. In the same way as a scientific physician regards the health of the body, or its right temperature, as a happy equipoise—a middle line not easy to be observed between two contending evils—we must ever expect in such an organic imperfection a tendency to, or the seeds of, disease in one shape or another.

Political events form but one part, and not the whole, of human history. A knowledge of details, however great and various it may be, constitutes no science in the philosophic sense of the word, for it is in the right and comprehensive conception of the whole that science consists.

As the greater part of the nine hundred millions of men on the whole surface of the earth, according to the highest estimate of a hazardous calculation, are born, live and die, without a history of them being possible, or without their reckoning a fraction in the general history—so that the extremely small number of those called historical men, forms but a rare exception—so there are nations and countries, which in a general comparative survey of nations, serve but as a mark or evidence of some particular stage of civilization, without of themselves holding any place in the general history of our species, or conducing to the social progress of mankind, or possessing any weight or importance in the scale of humanity.

There is a point of view, indeed, from which the matter appears under a different aspect, and is really different. To the all-seeing eye of Providence, every human life, however brief its duration, however apparently insignificant, presents a point of internal development and crisis, consequently a species of history, cognizable and visible to that Eye only, and therefore not entirely without an object. But this point of view belongs to another order of things, and is no longer historical—it has reference to the immortal destinies of the human soul, and the connection of the present life with another world invisible to us. But our historical science is limited to the department of man's present existence; and in our historical enquiries we must not lose sight of this principle.

But the internal development of mind, so far as it is historical, belongs as much as the external events of politics to the department of human history, and must by no means be excluded from it. Among these rare exceptions of historical men, must be named that ancient master of human acuteness who was the teacher of Alexander the Great, and who perhaps holds not an humbler or less important place in this exalted sphere than the conqueror himself, although this philosopher, whose genius embraced nature, the world and life, was by his own contemporaries less honoured and celebrated than by a remote posterity. Here in our western world, and long after the kingdoms founded by the Macedonian conqueror had disappeared, and were forgotten, Aristotle for many centuries reigned the absolute lord of the Christian schools, and directed the march of human science and human speculation in the middle age. Whether he were always rightly understood and studied in the right way is another question, for here we are speaking of his overruling influence and historical importance. Nay, in later times, he has materially served the cause of the better natural philosophy founded on experience, in which he himself accomplished things so extraordinary for his age, and was originally, and for a long while, the guide and master.

The first fundamental rule of historical science and research, when by these is sought a knowledge of the general destinies of mankind, is to keep these and every object connected with them steadily in view, without losing ourselves in the details of special enquiries and particular facts, for the multitude and variety of these subjects is absolutely boundless; and on the ocean of historical science the main subject easily vanishes from the eye. In history, as in every branch of mental culture, the first elementary school—instruction is not merely an important, but an essential, condition to a higher and more scientific knowledge. At first indeed it is merely a nomenclature of celebrated personages and events—a sketch of the great historical eras, divided according to chronological dates, or a geographical plan—which must be impressed on the memory, and which serves as a basis preparatory to that more vivid and comprehensive knowledge to be obtained in riper years. Thus this first knowledge stored up in the memory, and necessary for methodizing and arranging the mass of historical learning to be afterwards acquired, is more a preparation for the study of history, than the real science of history itself. In the higher grades of academic instruction, the lessons on history must vary with each one's calling and pursuits—one course of historical reading is necessary for the Theologian, another for the lawyer or civilian. To the physician, and in general to the naturalist, natural history, and what in the history of man is most akin to that science, will ever be the most captivating. And the philologist will find a boundless field for enquiry in special antiquarian researches, particularly now when, in addition to classical learning and the more common oriental tongues, the languages and historical antiquities of the remoter nations of Asia have attracted the attention of European scholars, and the original sources are becoming every day more accessible.

Even the sphere of modern political history, from which for the practical business of government so much is to be learned, will be found equally extensive—when, besides the modern classical works, we look to the countless multitude of private memoirs and other historical and political writings; especially at a time and in a world where even periodical publications and newspapers have become a power and an art or a science, and society itself falls more and more under the sway of journalism. If in this department of politics and statistics, we add also the number of unprinted documents, we shall find that the archives of many a state would alone furnish occupation for more than a man's life.

In all such special departments of historical science, the great whole of history is made subordinate to some secondary object; and this cannot be otherwise. It may even be advantageous for the profounder knowledge and more skilful exposition of universal history that we should seriously investigate some particular branch of history; and, in a science so various, select some special subject for more minute enquiry; but this can never be done without some decided predilection—some almost party bias towards the subject. Yet such special enquiries are only preparatory or auxiliary to the general science or philosophy of history—but not that science itself. Thus at the outset of my literary career, I devoted a considerable time to a very minute study of the Greeks—[35] and subsequently I applied myself to the Hindoo language and philosophy, at that time more difficult of access than at the present day.[36] In the struggles of life, and amid the public dangers of our times, I was alive to a patriotic feeling for the history of my own country, and recent times; and, perhaps, there are some among my present hearers who remember the historical lectures I delivered in this spirit eighteen years ago in this imperial city.[37] It is now my wish, and the object I propose to myself, to discard all antiquarian, oriental or European predilections for particular branches of history, and to unfold to view, and render completely clear and intelligible, the great edifice of universal history in all its parts, members and degrees.

The first fundamental rule here laid down, with respect to the mode of treating general history—namely to keep the attention fixed on the main subject, and not to let it be distracted or dissipated by a number of minute details—concerned more the method of historical science. The second rule regards the subject and purport of history, and stands in more immediate connexion with the first portion of this work—that relating to primitive history. This second fundamental rule of historical science may be thus simply expressed:—we should not wish to explain every thing. Historical tradition must never be abandoned in the philosophy of history—otherwise we lose all firm ground and footing. But historical tradition, ever so accurately conceived and carefully sifted, doth not always, especially in the early and primitive ages, bring with it a full and demonstrative certainty. In such cases, we have nothing to do but to record, as it is given, the best and safest testimony which tradition, so far as we have it, can afford; supposing even that some things in that testimony appear strange, obscure and even enigmatical; and perhaps a comparison with some other part of historical science—or, if I may so speak, stream of tradition, will unexpectedly lead to the solution of the difficulty. Extremely hazardous is the desire to explain every thing, and to supply whatever appears a gap in history—for in this propensity lies the first cause and germ of all those violent and arbitrary hypotheses which perplex and pervert the science of history far more than the open avowal of our ignorance, or the uncertainty of our knowledge: hypotheses which give an oblique direction, or an exaggerated and false extension, to a view of the subject originally not incorrect. And even if there are points which appear not very clear to us, or which we leave unexplained—this will not prevent us from comprehending, so far at least as the limited conception of man is able, the great outline of human history, though here and there a gap should remain.

This matter will be best explained by an example that will bring us at once to the subject we propose to treat. Let us imagine some bold Navigators (and what we here suppose by way of example has more than once actually occurred) touching at some island inhabited by wild savages in the midst of the great ocean between America and Eastern Asia. This island lies, we suppose, at a very great distance from either Continent, and the same will hold good of it, though there be a group of islands. These savages have but miserable fishing-boats made of hollow trunks of trees, by which it is not easy to conceive how they could have been transported so far. The question now naturally occurs how has this race of men come hither?—

A Pagan natural philosophy, which even now dares often enough to raise its voice, would be very ready with its answer: "There, it would say, you see plainly how every thing has sprung from the pap of the earth—the primitive slime—there is no need of the far-fetched idea of an imaginary Creator—these self-existing men of the earth—these well known autocthones of the ancients—these true sons of nature—have risen up or crawled out of the fruitful slime of the earth."

A deeper physiological science would, independently of every other consideration, and looking merely to the natural organization of man, scout this wild chaotic hypothesis respecting his origin from slime. For this organic frame of the human body, which has become a body of death, is still endowed with many and wonderful powers, and still encloses the hidden light of its celestial origin.—Without, however, entering further into this enquiry, which falls not within the limits here prescribed, let us rather tacitly believe that although, as the ancient history saith, man was formed out of the slime of the earth; yet it was by the same Hand which invisibly conducts each individual through life, and has more than once rescued all mankind from the brink of the abyss, that his marvellous body was framed, into which the Maker himself breathed the immortal spirit of life. This divine in-dwelling spark in man, the Heathens themselves, notwithstanding the opinion about the autocthones, recognized in the beautiful tradition or fiction of Prometheus; and many of their first spirits, philosophers, orators and poets, and grave and moral teachers, have in one form or another, and under a variety of figurative expressions, borne frequent and loud and repeated testimony to the truth of a higher spirit, a divine flame, animating the breast of man. This universal faith in the heavenly Promethean light—or as we should rather say, this spark of our bosoms—is the only thing we must here presuppose, and from which all our historical deductions must be taken. With the opposite doctrine—with the absolute unbelief in all which constitutes man really man—no history, and no science of history, is possible; and this is the only remark we shall here oppose to an infidelity that denies the existence of every thing high and godly. For the question respecting the creation of man, or as atheism terms it, the first springing up of the human race, is beyond the limits of history, and must be left to the decision of revelation and faith; for the question can be reached by no history, no science of history—no historical research. History begins, as this will be presently shown, with man's second step; which immediately follows his concealed origin antecedent to all history.

To recur now to the example already given of an island situated in the middle of the ocean, with its savage inhabitants and their miserable fishing-boats—the real solution, as experience has really proved, of this apparent difficulty is, on a nearer acquaintance with the subject, easily found. If, for example, the language and traditions of this rude, savage, or at least degraded, tribe, are minutely studied and investigated, then so striking a resemblance and affinity will be found with the languages and traditions of the races in either of the remotely situated continents, that the most sceptical mind will hardly entertain a doubt respecting the common origin of both; for this community in language and traditions is too strong, too strikingly evident, to be ascribed with any degree of probability to the sport of accident. This truth now once firmly established, (for a community of language, tradition and race among all the nations of the earth is a truth almost unanimously received and acknowledged by those historical enquirers most versed in nature, and most learned in philology of the present age,) it becomes a mere matter of indifference, or one at least of minor importance, how and in what way this originally savage, or at least barbarized tribe first arrived hither; and it were a mere waste of labour to select, among the hundred conceivable or inconceivable accidents and possibilities which may have occasioned or led to this arrival, any particular one as the best explanation, and to found thereon some ingenious hypothesis, how the land on both sides may have been differently situated, before a closer connexion with this little island was broken off by the destructive floods; or in which of the last great catastrophes of the earth that disjunction may have taken place. We may leave such conjectures to themselves, and, satisfied with the main result, proceed further in the historical investigation and survey of the earth. For, in truth, the earth's surface more narrowly and carefully examined, furnishes in reference to man and his primitive history, far other and weightier problems than those involved in the example first selected.

It is generally known that in a great many places situated in various parts of the earth, in the interior of mountains and even on plains, sometimes near the surface, and sometimes at a greater or less depth in the interior of mountainous chains rising to a very great elevation above the level of the sea, there are found whole strata of scattered bones belonging to animal species either actually existing, or which formerly existed and are now totally extinct—the chaotic remains of an all destroying inundation that immediately remind us of the general tradition respecting the great Flood. In other places again extensive layers of coral, sea-shells, marine plants, and other products of the sea, imbedded in the firm soil, prove these tracts of land to have been an ancient bottom of the sea. According to all appearance, these are not only monuments of one great natural revolution, but these elemental gigantic sepulchres of the primitive world offer to the mind many and various problems which more nearly, indeed, regard the earth, but as that planet is the habitation of man, have in consequence an indirect, but proximate, reference to mankind and their earliest history. A single example will best serve to point out among so many things, which are no longer perhaps susceptible of explanation, that which is of most moment to the historian; as well as the limits within which he should keep.

Not long back, about nine years ago, a cave was discovered in the county of Yorkshire in England, filled for the most part with the bones and skeletons of hyænas, of the same species now found in the southernmost point of Africa—the Cape of Good Hope. These bones were intermixed with those of tigers, bears, wolves, as also of elephants, rhinosceri, and other animals, among which were found the remains of the old large deer, that is not now to be met with in England. The profound Naturalist, Schubert, whom, in subjects of this kind, I willingly take for my guide, observes in his natural history with respect to this newly discovered cavern (which evidently belongs to another, long extinct, and anterior world of nature); that the opinion which would make a whole stratum of bones to have been swept thither by floods in so sound a state, and from so remote a distance, is perfectly inadmissible. He shews it to be much more probable that this cave was the den of a troop of hyænas, which had dragged thither the bones of the other animals; for this fell and rapacious animal feeds by preference on bones, which it knows how to break, as it is in the habit of raking up dead bodies.—What an immense interval separates that now highly civilized state—those flourishing provinces—that country abounding, and almost overteeming with all the fruits of human industry, with all the productions of mechanic skill;—that cultivated garden, that Island-Queen, the mistress of every sea;—what an immense interval separates her from those savage times, when troops of hyænas prowled about the land, together with the other gigantic animals of the southern zone, and tropic clime!

Thus it is natural to suppose that in one of the last great revolutions of nature the climate of the earth has undergone a total change; and that originally the now icy north enjoyed a glowing warmth, a rich fertility, and all the fulness of luxuriant life. A number of still more decisive facts declare for this supposition, or, to speak more properly, this certainty; since we discover in the upper parts of Northern Asia, and in general throughout the Polar regions, entire forests of palm in the subterraneous strata, as also well-preserved remains of whole herds of elephants, and of many other kindred species of animals now totally extinct. Long before most of these facts were discovered, Leibnitz had conjectured that originally the earth in general, even in the north, enjoyed a much warmer temperature than in the present period of all-ruling and progressive frost; and Buffon and others have established on this idea their hypothesis of a vast central fire in the interior of the earth. The interior parts of the earth and its internal depths are a region totally impervious to the eye of mortal man, and can least of all be approached by those ordinary paths of hypothesis adopted by naturalists and geologists. The region designed for the existence of man, and of every other creature endowed with organic life, as well as the sphere open to the preception of man's senses, is confined to a limited space between the upper and lower parts of the earth, exceedingly small in proportion to the diameter, or even semi-diameter of the earth, and forming only the exterior surface, or outer skin, of the great body of the earth. Even at a very slight depth below the earth's surface, all change of seasons ceases, and an even temperature eternally prevails, approximating rather to cold, than living heat. Yet on this side the earth is more easy of access than in the upper regions, where not only the higher Alps and glaciers are the last attainable limit to human daring, but even the pure ether of the supernal atmosphere made an aeronaut, celebrated for his disaster, learn at his own cost, how very near is that boundary where, in deadening cold, all life and all observation cease. It is in the physical, as in the moral world—where light and heat should exist, there two things are necessary—a power to give light and communicate heat, and a substance capable of receiving and absorbing the one and the other. Where either condition is wanting, there reigns eternal darkness, and deadly and eternal cold; and so the fact, that the whole action of heat, and of all the life it produces, is confined entirely to this lower atmosphere, should awake attention rather than create surprise. In all matters, even of this sort, we cannot be too mindful of the necessity of confining our researches to that small narrowly circumscribed sphere inhabited by man, and of never exceeding those limits.

Thus to explain the fact that the habitable earth has not, as originally, so warm a temperature as the north, we need not have recourse to any supposition of a central fire suddenly extinguished, like an oven that becomes cold, or to any other violent hypothesis of the same kind; for this fact may be sufficiently accounted for by the last great revolution of Nature—the general deluge, which as may be assumed with great probability, produced a change in the heretofore much purer, balmier, and more genial atmosphere. That, towards the equator, the position of the earth's axis has undergone a change, and that thereby this great revolution in the earth's climate was occasioned, is indeed a bare possibility; but until further proof, this must be regarded as a purely gratuitous hypothesis. But without subscribing to these fanciful suppositions, and mathematical theories, and without wishing to penetrate, with some geologists, into the hidden depths of the earth in quest of an imagined central fire, we shall find on the inhabited surface of the globe, or very near it, many proofs and indications of the once superior energy of the principle of fire—a principle whereof volcanoes whether subsisting or extinct, and the kindred phenomena of earthquakes, may be considered the last feeble, surviving effects; for not basalt only, but porphyry, granite, and in general all the primary rocks, and those which, according to the classifications of geologists, are more immediately akin to them, can be proved to be of a volcanic nature with as much certainty, as we can trace, in the horizontal secondary formations, the destructive influence and operation of the element of water. Hence this layer of subterraneous, though now in general slumbering fire, with all its volcanic arteries and veins of earthquakes, may once have been as widely diffused over the surface of the globe as the element of water, now occupying so large a portion of that surface. As volcanic rocks exist in the ocean, or rather at its bottom, and as their eruptions burst through the body of waters up to the surface of the sea; as their volcanic agency gives birth to earthquakes, and not unfrequently raises and heaves up new islands from the depths of the ocean; naturalists have concluded, with reason from these various facts, that the volcanic basis of the earth's surface though tolerably near, must still be somewhat deeper than the bottom of the sea. And without stopping to examine the hypothesis relative to the immeasurable depth of the ocean, the opinion which fixes the earth's basis at about 30,000 feet, or one geographical mile and a half below the surface of the sea, does not exceed the modest limits of a well-considered probability. In the present period of the globe, water is the predominant element on the earth's surface. But if that volcanic power which lies deeper in the bosom of the earth, and the kindred principle of fire, had at an earlier epoch of nature, the same influence and operation on the earth, as water afterwards had; we can well imagine such an influence to have materially affected the lower atmosphere, and to have rendered the climate of the earth, even in the North, totally different from what it is at present.

The strata of bones formed by the old flood, and the buried remains of a former race of animals, call forth a remark, which is not without importance in respect to the primitive history of man:—it is, that among the many bones of other large and small land animals, which form of themselves a rich and varied collection of the subterraneous products of nature, the fossile remains of man are scarcely any where to be found. It has sometimes happened that what were at first considered the bones of human giants have been afterwards proved to have been those of animals. It is so very rare an instance to meet in fossile remains with a real human bone, skull, jaw-bone or entire human skeleton (as in one particular instance was found enclosed in a lime-stone, mixed with some few utensils and instruments of the primitive world, such as a stone-knife, a copper axe, an iron club, and a dagger of a very ancient form, together with some human bones); that the very rareness of the exception serves only to confirm the general rule. Were we from this fact immediately to draw the conclusion that during all those revolutions of nature mankind had not yet existence, such an hypothesis would be rash, groundless, completely at variance with history—one to which many even physical objections, too long to detail here, might be opposed. That so very few, and indeed scarcely any human bones are to be found among the fossile remains of the primitive world, may possibly be owing to the circumstance that by the very artificial, hot, and highly seasoned food of men, their bones, from their chemical nature and qualities, are more liable to destruction than those of other animals. I may here repeat what I have already had occasion to remark, and what is here of especial importance, as applying particularly to the history and circumstances of the primitive world;—namely, that all things are not susceptible of an entire, satisfactory, and absolutely certain explanation; and that yet we may form a tolerably correct conception of general facts; though many of the particulars may remain for a time unexplained, or at least not capable of a full explanation. So on the other hand, it would be premature, and little conformable to the grave circumspection of the historian, to reduce all those natural catastrophes (the vouching monuments and mysterious inscriptions of which are now daily disclosed to the eye of Science as she explores the deep sepulchres of the earth)—to reduce, I say, all those natural catastrophes exclusively to the one nearest to the historical times, and which indeed is attested by the clear, unanimous tradition of all, or at least of most ancient nations; for several mighty and violent, revolutions of nature, of various kinds, though of a less general extent, may possibly have happened, and very probably did really happen simultaneously with, or subsequently, or even previously to the last general flood.

The irruption of the Black Sea into the Thracian Bosphorus is regarded by very competent judges in such matters, as an event perfectly historical, or at least, from its proximity to the historical times, as not comparatively of so primitive a date. A celebrated Northern naturalist has shewn it to be extremely probable, that the Caspian Sea, and the lake Aral were originally united with the Euxine, and that on the other hand the North Sea extended very far over land, and even near to those regions, leaving some marine plants very different from those of the Southern Seas. The sea originally must have stretched much farther over the earth and even over many places where now is dry land, as may easily be inferred from the great and extensive salt-steppes in Asia, Africa, and some parts of Eastern Europe, which furnish many and irrefragable proofs that the land was once occupied by the sea.

All these great physical changes are not necessarily and exclusively to be ascribed to the last general deluge. The presumed irruption of the Mediterranean into the ocean, as well as many other mere partial revolutions in the earth and sea, may have occurred much later and quite apart from this great event. The original magnificence of the climate of the North, as displayed in the luxuriant richness of all organic productions, is commemorated in many traditions of the primitive nations, especially those of Southern Asia; and in these sagas, the North is ever made the subject of uncommon eulogy. That the North enjoys a certain natural pre-eminence appears to be matter of certainty, and to be even susceptible of scientific demonstration. The northern and southern extremities of our planet appear at least to be very unlike, if we judge the terraqueous globe according to the present state of geographical knowledge. While the old and new continents, the north of Asia and of America, extend in long and wide tracts of land high up towards the North Pole, so that the boundaries of land cannot be every where perfectly defined; water is the predominant element around the colder South Pole, towards which even the southernmost point of America, and the remotest Island of Polynesia—the extreme verge of land—make no near approach; and beyond these points, so far as the boldest navigators have been able to penetrate, they have discovered only sea and ice, and no where a real Polar region of any great extent. Thus the South Pole is the cold and watery side, or as we should say in dynamics, the negative and weaker end of the earth's body, while the North Pole on the other hand appears to be the positive and stronger extremity; for, though the centre of the earth's magnetic attraction and magnetic life, accords not mathematically with the northern point, yet it lies at no very great distance from it. In other phenomena of nature, too, the real seat and principle of life will be found, not at the mathematical point, but a little removed from it.

Another circumstance worthy of consideration is, that the Northern firmament possesses by far the largest and most brilliant constellations, and that though the Southern firmament is embellished by its own, they are neither in the same number, nor of the same beauty. To the impressions made by such objects, the men of the primitive ages were certainly far more alive than those of the present day; and an obscure feeling for nature, grounded on the real natural superiority of the North, as well as the poetical sagas which were in part the natural offspring of such feelings, may have contributed to direct the stream of the first migrations of nations towards the North, and have occasioned the very early colonization and settlement of its regions: for, in primitive antiquity, a certain presentient instinct, it is right to suppose, was much oftener the primary cause of those migrations than such a spirit of commercial speculation as afterwards animated the Phœnicians and their various colonies. We may here also observe that even in its present state, the remoter North has its own peculiar charms and advantages, and that by human industry it may attain to a much higher degree of productiveness, than we should be at first-sight tempted to suppose. In this sense ought to be taken the tradition of antiquity, as to the happy and virtuous people of the Hyperboreans; and it is easy to understand it in this sense without inferring thence too many consequences. If on the other hand, some able and learned naturalists, led away by this fact, appear almost inclined to regard the region of the North Pole, once in the enjoyment of a warm southern temperature, as one of the earliest, nay the very earliest abode of the human race; I cannot follow them in their hypothesis, opposed as it is to the positive and unanimous tradition of many and most ancient nations, pointing with one concurrent voice to central Asia as man's primitive dwelling-place. It appears indeed that the tradition of antiquity as to the Island of Atlantis ought to be considered historical; but instead of regarding this country as an island of the Blessed situated in the arctic circle, I think it much more natural to refer the whole tradition to an obscure nautical knowledge of America, or of those adjacent islands at which Columbus first touched, and to which the Phœnician pilots (who beyond all doubt circumnavigated Africa) may not improbably have been driven in the course of their voyage.

I have laid it down as an invariable maxim constantly to follow historical tradition, and to hold fast by that clue, even when many things in the testimony and declarations of tradition appear strange and almost inexplicable, or at least enigmatical; for so soon as in the investigations of ancient history, we let slip that thread of Ariadne, we can find no outlet from the labyrinth of fanciful theories, and the chaos of clashing opinions. For this reason I cannot concur in the very violent hypothesis which a celebrated geologist, towards the close of the last century, M. De Luc, has hazarded respecting the deluge, and which the excellent Stolberg has adopted in his great historical work;[38] although the author of this theory, so far from intending to oppose it to the Mosaic account of the deluge, or to set aside the narrative of the inspired historian, conceived his hypothesis was calculated to furnish the strongest confirmation and clearest illustration of the sacred text. But I cannot reconcile his theory either with Holy Writ, or with the general testimony of historical tradition. The supposition is this, that the deluge was not a general inundation of the whole earth, according to the ordinary belief, but a mere change of the solid and fluid parts of the earth's surface, a dynamical transmutation of land and sea, so that what was formerly land became sea, and vice versa. This is much more than can be found in the old account of the Noachian flood, or than a sound critical interpretation would infer; and the supposition that the names of rivers and countries occurring in the Bible, refer to those objects as they existed in the original dry land; and are again to be transferred to similar objects in the new land that sprang up with, or after, or out of the deluge; this supposition, I say, bears too evidently the stamp of arbitrary conjecture, to gain admission and credit with those who have taken historical tradition for their guide. If by the geological facts which offer, or which we think offer, satisfactory proof, not only of the general Noachian flood, but of more than one deluge and of still more violent catastrophes of nature; if by these geological facts before our eyes, such a total revolution and dynamic transmutation of land and sea were really proved (and the character of these proofs I must abandon to the investigation and judgment of others); this great revolution examined in an historical point of view, and in reference to the Mosaic history, must then be rather referred to that elder period, whereof it is said: "The earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep; but the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters."

These words which announce the presage of a new morn of creation, not only represent a darker and wilder state of the globe, but very clearly show the element of water to be still in predominant force. Even the division of the elements of the waters above the firmament, and of the waters below it, on the second day of creation—the permanent limitation of the sea for the formation and visible appearance of dry land, necessarily imply a mighty revolution in the earth, and afford additional proof that the Mosaic history speaks not only of one, but of several catastrophes of nature; a circumstance that has not been near enough attended to in the geological interpretation and illustration of the Bible. But to the bold and ill-founded hypothesis above-mentioned, many geological facts may be opposed, for in the midst of vast tracts and strata of an ancient bottom of the sea, many spots are found covered with the accumulated remains of land animals, with trunks of trees and various other products of vegetation, pertaining not to the sea, but to dry land.

With the clearest and most indubitable precision, the Mosaic history fixes the primitive dwelling-place of man in that central region of Western Asia situate near two great rivers, and amid four inland seas, the Persian and Arabian gulfs on the one hand, and the Caspian and Mediterranean seas on the other, and which is likewise designated for the same purpose by the concurrent traditions of most other primitive nations. The ancient tradition of the European nations as to their own origin and early history, conducts the enquirer constantly to the Caucasian regions, to Asia Minor, to Phœnicia, and to Egypt; countries all of them contiguous to, in the vicinity and even on the coast of, that central region. Among the primitive Asiatic nations, the Chinese place the cradle of their origin and civilization in the north-western province of Shensee; and the Indians fix theirs towards the north of the Himalaya mountains. Thus this last tradition points to Bactriana, which, as it borders on Persia, approximates consequently to that central region; whereof the holy and primitive country of the Persian Sagas, Atropatena or land of fire, now known by the name of Adherbijan forms a part. With a clearness and precision which admit of no doubt, the Mosaic history designates the two great rivers of that central region, the Tigris and Euphrates, by the same names which they have ever afterwards borne; and even the name of Eden, down to a later period, was affixed to a country near Damascus, and to another in Assyria. The third river of Paradise has been sought for by some in a more Northerly direction—in the region of Mount Caucasus; and though not with equal certainty as in the other two instances, they have thought to find it in the Phasis. The fourth river towards the South, the old Interpreters generally took to be the Nile; but the description of its course is so widely different from the present situation of that river, and the present geography of the whole of those regions, that here at least a very great change must have occurred, in order to occasion this discrepancy between the old description of this river's course, and the present geography of the country.

In another circumstance, also, which has been mostly too little attended to, this disparity between the Mosaic description and the present conformation of those regions is particularly striking. The geography of the rivers of Paradise, at least of two or three, may be easily traced, though the fourth remains a matter of uncertainty; but the one source of Paradise in which those four rivers had their rise, in order thence to spread, and diffuse fertility over the whole earth—this one source, which is precisely the object of most importance, can no where be found on the earth; whether it be dried or filled up, or howsoever it has been removed. In attending to some indications in Scripture, and without transgressing the due limits of interpretation, may we not be permitted to conjecture that the first chastisement inflicted on man by expulsion from his first glorious habitation and primeval home, may have been accompanied by a change in Paradise brought about by some natural convulsion? To judge by analogy, and from circumstances, which even a passage in Holy Writ alludes to, this convulsion must have been rather a volcanic eruption, by which even at the present day the sources of rivers are dried up, and their course completely changed, than a mere inundation that we are ever wont to regard as the sole possible cause of physical revolutions. Many vestiges of such changes may perhaps be proved from even geological observation;—thus to cite only one example, the dead sea in Palestine itself may be included in the number of those lakes that bear very evident traces of a volcanic origin. The supposition, however, which we have ventured to make, must not be looked upon in the light of a formal hypothesis, but rather as a question dictated by a love of enquiry, and by a desire for the further elucidation of a subject not yet sufficiently understood.

Thus have I now taken a general survey of the early condition of the globe, considered as the habitation of man, and as far as was necessary for that object; and in this rapid sketch, I have endeavoured, as far as was possible for a layman, to place in the clearest light the most remarkable and best attested facts and discoveries of geology, with a constant attention to the testimony of primitive and historical tradition. No longer embarrassed by these physical discussions, we may now proceed to meet the main question: "What relation hath man to this his habitation—earth; what place doth he occupy therein; and what rank doth he hold among the other creatures and cohabitants of this globe, what is his proper destiny upon, and in relation to, the earth, and what is it which really constitutes him Man?"

The absolute, and, for that reason, Pagan system of natural philosophy spoken of above, has indeed in these latter times had the courage, laudable perhaps in the perverse course which it had taken, to rank man with the ape, as a peculiar species of the general kind. When in its anatomical investigations, it has numbered the various characteristics of this human ape, according to the number of its vertebræ, its toes, &c. it concedes to man, as his distinguishing quality, not what we are wont to call reason, perfectibility, or the faculty of speech, but "a capacity for Constitutions!" Thus man would be a liberal ape! And so far from disagreeing with the author of this opinion, we think man may undoubtedly become so to a certain extent, although the idea that he was originally nothing more than a nobler or better disciplined ape is alike opposed to the voice of history, and the testimony of natural science. If in the examination of man's nature we will confine our view exclusively to the lower world of animals, I should say that the possible contagion and communication of various diseases, and organic properties and powers of animals, would prove in man rather a greater sympathy and affinity of organic life and animal blood with the cow, the sheep, the camel, the horse and the elephant, than with the ape. Even in the venomous serpent and the mad dog, this deadly affinity of blood and this fearful contact of internal life exist in a different and nearer degree, than have yet been discovered in the ape. The docility too, of the elephant and other generous animals, bears much stronger marks of analogy with reason than the cunning of the ape, in which the native sense of a sound, unprejudiced mind will always recognize an unsuccessful and abortive imitation of man. The resemblance of physiognomy and cast of countenance in the lion, the bull, and the eagle, to the human face—a resemblance so celebrated in sculpture and the imitative arts, and which was interwoven into the whole mythology and symbolism of the ancients—this resemblance is founded on far deeper and more spiritual ideas than any mere comparison of dead bones in an animal skeleton can suggest.

The extremes of error, when it has reached the height of extravagance, often accelerate the return to truth; and thus to the assertion that man is nothing more than a liberalized ape, we may boldly answer that man, on the contrary, was originally, and by the very constitution of his being, designed to be the lord of creation, and, though in a subordinate degree, the legitimate ruler of the earth and of the world around him—the vice-gerent of God in nature. And if he no longer enjoys this high prerogative to its full extent, as he might and ought to have done, he has only himself to blame; if he exercises his empire over creatures rather by indirect means and mechanical agency than by the immediate power and native energy of his own intellectual pre-eminence, he still is the lord of creation, and has retained much of the power and dignity he once received, did he but always make a right use of that power.

The distinguishing characteristic of man, and the peculiar eminence of his nature and his destiny, as these are universally felt and acknowledged by mankind, are usually defined to consist, either in reason, or in the faculty of speech. But this definition is defective in this respect, that, on one hand, reason is a mere abstract faculty, which to be judged, requires a psychological investigation or analysis; and that on the other hand, the faculty of speech is a mere potentiality, or a germ which must be unfolded before it can become a real entity. We should therefore give a much more correct and comprehensive definition, if, instead of this, we said: The peculiar pre-eminence of man consists in this—that to him alone among all other of earth's creatures, the word has been imparted and communicated. The word actually delivered and really communicated is not a mere dead faculty, but an historical reality and occurrence; and for that very reason, the definition we have given stands much more fitly at the head of history, than the other more abstract one.

In the idea of the word, considered as the basis of man's dignity and peculiar destination, the internal light of consciousness and of our own understanding, is undoubtedly first included—this word is not a mere faculty of speech, but the fertile root whence the stately trunk of all language has sprung. But the word is not confined to this only—it next includes a living, working power—it is not merely an object and organ of knowledge—an instrument of teaching and learning; but the medium of affectionate union and conciliatory accommodation, judicial arbitrement and efficacious command, or even creative productiveness, as our own experience and life itself manifest each of those significations of the word; and thus it embraces the whole plenitude of the excellencies and qualities which characterize man.

Nature too, has her mute language and her symbolical writing; but she requires a discerning intellect to gain the key to her secrets, to unravel her profound enigmas; and, piercing through her mysteries, interpret the hidden sense of her word, and thus reveal the fulness of her glory. But he, to whom alone among all earth's creatures, the word has been imparted has been for that reason constituted the lord and ruler of the earth. As soon, however, as he abandons that divine principle implanted in his breast; as soon as he loses that word of life which had been communicated and confided to him; he sinks down to a level with nature, and, from her lord, becomes her vassal; and here commences the history of man.

END OF LECTURE I.

LECTURE II.

ON THE DISPUTE IN PRIMITIVE HISTORY, AND ON

THE DIVISION OF THE HUMAN RACE.

"In the beginning man had the word, and that word was from God."

Thus the divine, Promethean spark in the human breast, when more accurately described and expressed in less figurative language, springs from the word originally communicated or intrusted to man, as that wherein consist his peculiar nature, his intellectual dignity and his high destination.—The pregnant expression borrowed above from the New Testament, on the mystery and internal nature of God, may with some variation, and bating, as is evident, the immense distance between the creature and the Creator, be applied to man and his primitive condition; and may serve as a superscription or introduction to primitive history in the following terms: "In the beginning man had the word, and that word was from God—and out of the living power communicated to man in and by that word, came the light of his existence."—This is at least the divine foundation of all history—it falls not properly within the domain of history, but is anterior to it.—To this position the state of nature among savages forms no valid objection; for that this was the really original condition of mankind is by no means proved, and is arbitrarily assumed; nay, on the contrary, the savage state must be looked upon as a state of degeneracy and degradation—consequently not as the first, but as the second, phenomenon in human history—as something which, as it has resulted from this second step in man's progress, must be regarded as of a later origin.

In history, as in all science and in life itself the principal point on which every thing turns, and the all-deciding problem, is whether all things should be deduced from God, and God himself should be considered the first, nature the second, existence—the latter holding undoubtedly a very important place;—or, whether, in the inverse order, the precedency should be given to nature, and, as invariably happens in such cases, all things should be deduced from nature only, whereby the deity, though not by express, unequivocal words, yet in fact is indirectly set aside, or remains at least unknown. This question cannot be settled, nor brought to a conclusion, by mere dialectic strife, which rarely leads to its object. It is the will which here mostly decides; and, according to the nature and leaning of his character, leads the individual to choose between the two opposite paths, the one he would follow in speculation and in science, in faith and in life.

Thus much at least we may say, in reference to the science of history, that they who in that department will consider nature only, and view man but with the eye of a naturalist (specious and plausible as their reasons may at first sight appear), will never rightly comprehend the world and reality of history, and never obtain an adequate conception, nor exhibit an intelligible representation of its phenomena.—On the other hand, if we proceed not solely and exclusively from nature, but first from God and that beginning of nature appointed by God, so this is by no means a degradation or misapprehension of nature; nor does it imply any hostility towards nature—an hostility which could arise only from a very defective, erroneous, or narrow-minded conception of historical philosophy. On the contrary, experience has proved that by this course of speculation we are led more thoroughly to comprehend the glory of God in nature, and the magnificence of nature herself—a course of speculation quite consistent with the full recognition of nature's rights, and the share due to her in the history and progress of man.

Regarded in an historical point of view, man was created free—there lay two paths before him—he had to choose between the one, conducting to the realms above, and the other, leading to the regions below;—and thus at least he was endowed with the faculty of two different wills. Had he remained steadfast in his first will—that pure emanation of the deity—had he remained true to the word which God had communicated to him—he would have had but one will. He would, however, have still been free; but his freedom would have resembled that of the heavenly spirits, whom we must not imagine to be devoid of freedom because they are no longer in a state of trial, and can never be separated from God. We should, besides, greatly err, if we figured to ourselves the Paradisaic state of the first man as one of happy indolence; for, in truth, it was far otherwise designed, and it is clearly and expressly said that our first parent was placed in the garden of the earth to guard and to cultivate it. "To guard," because an enemy was to be at hand, against whom it behoved to watch and to contend. "To cultivate," possibly in a very different manner, yet still with labour, though, doubtless, a labour blessed with far richer and more abundant recompense than afterwards when, on man's account, the earth was charged with malediction.

This first divine law of nature, if we may so speak, by virtue of which labour and struggle became from the beginning the destiny of man, has retained its full force through all succeeding ages, and is applicable alike to every class, and every nation, to each individual as well as to mankind in general, to the most important, as to the most insignificant, relations of society. He who weakly shrinks from the struggle, who will offer no resistance, who will endure no labour nor fatigue, can neither fulfil his own vocation, whatever it be, nor contribute aught to the general welfare of mankind.—But since man hath been the prey of discord, two different wills have contended within him for the mastery—a divine and a natural will. Even his freedom is no longer that happy freedom of celestial peace—the freedom of one who hath conquered and triumphed—but a freedom, as we now see it—the freedom of undetermined choice—of arduous, still undecided, struggle. To return to the divine will, or the one conformable to God—to restore harmony between the natural and the divine will, and to convert and transform more and more the lower, earthly and natural will into the higher, and divine one, is the great task of mankind in general, as of each individual in particular. And this return—this restoration—this transformation—all the endeavours after such—the progress or retrogressions in this path—constitute an essential part of universal history, so far as this embraces the moral development and intellectual march of humanity.—But the fact that man, so soon as he loses the internal sheet-anchor of truth and life—so soon as he abandons the eternal law of divine ordinance, falls immediately under the dominion of nature, and becomes her bondsman, each individual may learn from his own interior, his own experience, and a survey of life; since the violent, disorderly might of passion herself is only a blind power of nature acting within us. Although this fact is historical, and indeed the first of all historical facts, yet as it belongs to all mankind, and recurs in each individual, it may be regarded as a psychological fact and phenomenon of human consciousness. And on this very account it does not precisely fall within the limits of history, and it precedes all history; but all the consequences or possible consequences of this fact, all the consequences that have really occurred, are within the essential province of history.

The next consequence which, after this internal discord had broken out in the consciousness and life of man, flowed from the developement of this principle, was the division of the single race of man into a plurality of nations, and the consequent diversity of languages. As long as the internal harmony of the soul was undisturbed and unbroken, and the light of the mind unclouded by sin, language could be nought else than the simple and beautiful copy or expression of internal serenity; and consequently there could be but one speech. But after the internal word, which had been communicated by God to man, had become obscured; after man's connection with his Creator had been broken; even outward language necessarily fell into disorder and confusion. The simple and divine truth was overlaid with various and sensual fictions, buried under illusive symbols, and at last perverted into a horrible phantom. Even Nature, that, like a clear mirror of God's creation, had originally lain revealed and transparent to the unclouded eye of man, became now more and more unintelligible, strange and fearful; once fallen away from his God, man fell more and more into a state of internal conflict and confusion.—Thus there sprang up a multitude of languages, alien one from the other, and varying with every climate, in proportion as mankind became morally disunited, geographically divided and dispersed, and even distinguished by an organic diversity of form;—for when man had once fallen under the power and dominion of nature, his physical conformation changed with every climate. As a plant or animal indigenous to Africa or America has a totally different form and constitution in Asia, so it is with man; and the races of mankind form so many specific variations of the same kind, from the negro to the copper-coloured American and the savage islander of the south sea.—The expression races, however, applied to man, involves something abhorrent from his high uplifted spirit, and debasing to its native dignity.—This diversity of races among men no one ought to exaggerate in a manner so as to raise doubts as to the identity of their origin, for, according to a general organic law, which indeed is allowed to hold good in the natural history of animals, races capable of a prolific union must be considered of the same origin, and as constituting the same species.—Even the apparent chaos of different languages may be classed into kindred families, which though separated by the distance of half the globe, seem still very closely allied. Of these different families of tongues, the first and most eminent are those which by their internal beauty, and by the noble spirit breathing through them and apparent in their whole construction, denote for the most part a higher origin and divine inspiration; and, much as all these languages differ from each other, they appear, after all, to be merely branches of one common stem.

The American tribes appeared indeed to be singularly strange, and to stand at a fearful distance from the rest of mankind; yet the European writer[39] most deeply conversant with those nations and their languages has found in their traditions and tongues, and even in their manners and customs, many positive and incontestable points of analogy with eastern Asia and its inhabitants.

When man had once fallen from virtue, no determinable limit could be assigned to his degradation; nor how far he might descend by degrees, and approximate even to the level of the brute; for, as from his origin he was a being essentially free, he was in consequence capable of change, and even in his organic powers most flexible.

We must adopt this principle as the only clue to guide us in our enquiries, from the negro who, as well from his bodily strength and agility as from his docile and in general excellent character, is far from occupying the lowest grade in the scale of humanity, down to the monstrous Patagonian, the almost imbecile Peshwerais, and the horrible cannibal of New Zealand, whose very portrait excites a shudder in the beholder. How, even in the midst of civilization, man may degenerate into the savage state; to what a pitch of moral degradation he may descend, those can attest who have had opportunities of investigating more closely the criminal history of great culprits, and even, at some periods, the history of whole nations. In fact, every revolution is a transient period of barbarism, in which man, while he displays partial examples of the most heroic virtue and generous self-devotion, is often half a savage. Nay, a war conducted with great animosity and protracted to extremities, may easily degenerate into such a state of savage ferocity: hence it is the highest glory of truly civilized nations to repress and subdue by the sentiment of honour, by a system of severe discipline, and by a generous code of warfare, respected alike by all belligerent parties, that tendency and proneness to cruelty and barbarity inherent in man.

Among the different tribes of savages, there are many indeed that appear to be of a character incomparably better and more noble than those above mentioned; yet, after the first ever so favourable impression, a closer investigation will almost always discover in them very bad traits of character and manners.—So far from seeking with Rousseau and his disciples for the true origin of mankind, and the proper foundation of the social compact, in the condition even of the best and noblest savages; and so little disposed are we to remodel society upon this boasted ideal of a pretended state of nature, that we regard it, on the contrary, as a state of degeneracy and degradation. Thus in his origin, and by nature, man is no savage:—he may indeed at any time and in any place, and even at the present day, become one easily and rapidly, but in general, not by a sudden fall, but by a slow and gradual declension; and we the more willingly adopt this view as there are many historical grounds of probability that, in the origin of mankind, this second fall of man was not immediate and total, but slow and gradual, and that consequently all those tribes which we call savage are of the same origin with the noblest and most civilized nations, and have only by degrees descended to their present state of brutish degradation.

Even the division of the human race into a plurality of nations, and the chaotic diversity of human tongues, appear, from historical tradition, to have become general and complete only at a more advanced period; for, in the beginning, mention is made but of one separation of mankind into two races or hostile classes. I use the general expression historical tradition; for the brief and almost enigmatical, but very significant and pregnant, words, in which the first great outward discord, or conflict of mankind in primitive history, is represented in the Mosaic narrative, are corroborated in a very remarkable degree by the Sagas of other nations, among which I may instance in particular those of the Greeks and the Indians. Although this primitive conflict, or opposition among men, is represented in these traditions under various local colours, and not without some admixture of poetical embellishment, yet this circumstance serves only for the better confirmation of the fundamental truth, if we separate the essential matter from the adventitious details. Before I attempt to place in a clearer light this first great historical event, which indeed constitutes the main subject of all primitive history, by showing the strong concurrence of the many and various authorities attesting it; it may be proper to call your attention to a third fundamental canon of historical criticism, which indeed requires no lengthened demonstration, and is merely this, that in all enquiries, particularly into ancient and primitive history, we must not reject as impossible or improbable whatever strikes us at first as strange or marvellous. For it often happens that a closer investigation and a deeper knowledge of a subject proves those things precisely to be true, which at the first view or impression, appeared to us as the most singular; while on the other hand, if we persist in estimating truth and probability by the sole standard of objects vulgar and familiar to ourselves; and if we will apply this exclusive standard to a world and to ages so totally different, and so widely remote from our own, we shall be certainly led into the most violent, and most erroneous hypotheses.

In entering on this subject we must observe that, in the Mosaic account, primitive and, what we call, universal history, does not properly commence with the first man, his creation or ulterior destiny, but with Cain—the fratricide and curse of Cain. The preceding part of the sacred narrative regards, if we may so speak, only the private life of Adam, which however will always retain a deep significacy for all the descendants of the first progenitor.

The origin of discord in man, and the transmission of that mischief to all ages and all generations, is indeed the first historical fact; but on account of its universality, it forms, at the same time, as I have before observed, a psychological phenomenon; and while, in this first section of sacred history, everything points and refers to the mysteries of religion; the fratricide of Cain on the other hand, and the flight of that restless criminal to Eastern Asia, are the first events and circumstances which properly belong to the province of history. In this account we see first the foundation of the most ancient city, by which undoubtedly we must understand a great, or at least an old and celebrated city of Eastern Asia; and secondly, the origin of various hereditary classes, trades and arts; especially of those connected with the first knowledge and use of metals, and which doubtless hold the first place in the history of human arts and discoveries.

The music, which is attributed to those primitive ages, consisted probably rather in a medicinal or even magical use of that art, than in the beautiful system of later melody. Among the various works and instruments of smith-craft, and productions of art which the knowledge of mines and metals led to, the momentous discovery of the sword is particularly mentioned: by the brief enigmatic words which relate this discovery, it is difficult to know whether we are to understand them as the expression of a spirit of warlike enthusiasm, or of a renewed curse and dire wailing over all the succeeding centuries of hereditary murder, and progressive evil, under the divine permission. In all probability, these words refer to the origin of human sacrifices, emanating as they did from an infernal design, which we must consider as one of the strongest characteristics of this race; and those bloody sacrifices of the primitive world seem to have stamped on the rites and customs, as well as on the traditions and sentiments, of many nations a peculiar character of gloom and sadness. From this race were descended not only the inhabitants of cities, but nomade tribes, whereof many led, several thousand years ago, the same wandering life which they follow at the present day in the central parts of Eastern Asia; where vast remains of primitive mining operations are frequently found.

It is worthy of remark that, among one of these nations, the Ishudes,who inhabit a metallic mountain, we find, if we may so speak, an inverted history of Cain; mention is made of the enmity between the first two brothers of mankind, but all the circumstances are set forth in a party-spirit favourable to Cain. It is said that the elder brother acquired wealth by gold and silver mines, but that the younger, becoming envious, drove him away, and forced him to take refuge in the East.[40]

So is the race of Cain and Cain's sons represented from its origin, as one attached to the arts, versed in the use of metals, disinclined to peace, and addicted to habits of warfare and violence, as again at a later period, it appears in scripture as a haughty and wicked race of giants.

On the other hand the peaceful race of Patriarchs who lived in a docile reverence of God and with a holy simplicity of manners, were descended from Seth. This second progenitor of mankind occupies a very prominent place even in the traditions of other nations, which make particular mention of the columns of Seth, signifying no doubt, in the language of remote antiquity, very ancient monuments, and, as it were, the stony records of sacred tradition. In general the first ten holy Progenitors or Patriarchs of the primitive world are mentioned under different names in the Sagas, not only of the Indians, but of several other Asiatic nations, though undoubtedly with important variations, and not without much poetical colouring. But as in these traditions we can clearly discern the same general traits of history, this diversity of representation serves only to corroborate the main truth, and to illustrate it more fully and forcibly. The views, therefore, of those modern theologians, who represent the concurrent testimony of Gentile nations to the truths of primitive history as derived solely from the Mosaic narrative, and as it were transcribed from a genuine copy of our Bible, are equally narrow-minded and erroneous.

It would be more just and more consonant with the whole spirit of the primitive world, to assert, what indeed may be conceded with little difficulty, that these nations had received much from the primeval source of sacred tradition; but they regarded as a peculiar possession, and represented under peculiar forms, the common blessings of primitive revelation; and, instead of preserving in their integrity and purity the traditions and oracles of the primitive world, they overlaid them with poetical ornament, so that their whole traditions wear a fabulous aspect, until a nearer and more patient investigation clearly discovers in them the main features of historic truth.

Under these two different forms, therefore doth Tradition reveal to us the primitive world, or in other words, these are the two grand conditions of humanity which fill the records of primitive history. On the one hand, we see a race, lovers of peace, revering God, blessed with long life which they spend in patriarchal simplicity and innocence, and still no strangers to deeper science, especially in all that relates to sacred tradition and inward contemplation, and transmitting their science to posterity in the old or symbolical writing, not in fragile volumes, but on durable monuments of stone. On the other hand, we behold a giant race of pretended demigods, proud, wicked and violent, or, as they are called in the later Sagas of the heroic times, the heaven-storming Titans.

This opposition, and this discord,—this hostile struggle between the two great divisions of the human race, forms the whole tenour of primitive history. When the moral harmony of man had once been deranged, and two opposite wills had sprung up within him, a divine will or a will seeking God, and a natural will or a will bent on sensible objects, passionate and ambitious, it is easy to conceive how mankind from their very origin must have diverged into two opposite paths.

Although this primitive division of mankind is now characterized as a difference of races, this is far from being merely the case; and that opposition which distracted the primitive world had far deeper causes than the mere distinction of a noble and a meaner race of men. It is somewhat in this manner a German scholar of the last generation, divided all nations now existing, or which have appeared within the later historical ages, into two classes; wherever he imagined he found his favourite Celts and their descendants, he had not words strong enough to extol their romantic heroism; while he pursued with the most pitiless animosity, over the whole face of the earth, the unfortunate Monguls and all those he deduced from that stock. The struggle which divided the primitive world into two great parties arose far more from the opposition of feelings and of principles, than from difference of extraction. Great as is the interval which separates those ages and that world from our own, we can easily comprehend how this first mighty contest of nations, which history makes mention of, was in fact a struggle between two religious parties—two hostile sects, though indeed under far other forms, and in different relations from anything we witness in the present state of the world. It was, in one word, a contest between religion and impiety, conducted however on the mighty scale of the primitive world, and with all those gigantic powers which, according to ancient tradition, the first men possessed.[41]

The Greek Sagas represent this two-fold state of mankind in the primitive ante-historical ages in a very peculiar manner, as the gradual decline and corruption of successive generations; of this kind is the tradition of the ages of the world, whereof four or five are numbered. The Golden age of human felicity and the brazen age of all-ruling violence form the two essential terms of this tradition; and the intermediate ages are mere links, or points of transition to render the account more complete.

In the age of Saturn, the first race allied to the Gods lived in peace and happiness, and were blessed with eternal youth; the earth poured forth her fruits and gifts in spontaneous abundance, and even the end of human life was not a real or painful death, but a gentle slumber into another and higher world of immortal spirits. But the next generation in the age of Silver is represented as wicked, devoid of reverence for the Gods, and giving loose to every turbulent passion. In the Brazen age this state of crime and disorder reached its highest pitch; lordly violence was the characteristic of the rude and gigantic Titans. Their arms were of copper and their instruments and utensils of brass, and even, in the construction of their edifices, they made use of copper; for as the old poet says, "black iron was not then known;" a circumstance which we must consider as strictly historical and as characteristic of the primitive nations. Between this and the following age, the better heroic race of poetical and even historic tradition is somewhat strangely introduced; and the whole series of generations is closed by the Iron age, the present and last period of the world—the term of man's progressive degeneracy.

This idea of a gradual and deeper degradation of human kind in each succeeding age appears at first sight not to accord very well with the testimony which sacred tradition furnishes on man's primitive state; for it represents the two races of the primitive world as cotemporary; and indeed Seth, the progenitor of the better and nobler race of virtuous Patriarchs, was much younger than Cain. However, this contradiction is only apparent, if we reflect that it was the wicked and violent race which drew the other into its disorders, and that it was from this contamination a giant corruption sprang, which continually increased till, with a trifling exception, it pervaded the whole mass of mankind, and till the justice of God required the extirpation of degenerate humanity by one universal Flood.

In the Indian Sagas, the two races of the primitive world are represented in a state of continual or perpetually renewed warfare:—wicked nations of giants attack one or other of the two Brahminical races that descend from the virtuous Patriarchs; generous and divinely inspired heroes come to their assistance, and achieve many wonderful victories over these formidable foes. Such is the chief subject of all the great epic poems, and most ancient heroic Sagas of the Indians. In conformity to their present modes of thinking, and to their present constitution of society, they describe that fierce race of giants as a degraded caste of warriors; and they even give that denomination to many nations well known in later history, such as the Chinese, who bear the same name with them as with ourselves; the Pahlavas, who were a tribe of the ancient Medes and Persians, corresponding to one of the two sacred languages of ancient Persia—the Pahlavi—and the Ionians or Yavanas according to the Asiatic denomination of the primitive Greeks. It may even be a matter of doubt, whether a regular caste of warriors, and an hereditary priesthood, according to the very ancient system of the hereditary division of classes, did not exist in the primitive world. However great may be the chronological confusion evinced in these poems and Sagas, however much, perhaps, of later history may have been interwoven into their ancient narratives, and however much of poetical embellishment and gigantic hyperbole the whole may have received, the leading features of historic truth may still be distinguished with certainty in the chequered tablet of tradition. For the hostility of two rival races in the primitive world, considered in itself, and independently of adventitious circumstances, must be looked upon as a positive and well authenticated fact. It might perhaps be proved before the tribunal of the severest historical criticism that poetry, that is to say, primitive historic tradition clothed with the ornaments of poetry—is often much nearer the truth in its representations of the primitive world than a dull Reason, that draws its estimate of probability from mere vulgar analogies, and which sees or affects to see every where only stupid and brutish savages.

A circumstance which we must never lose sight of in this inquiry is that man did not suffer an immediate and entire loss of those high powers with which he had been endowed at his origin; but that the loss was gradual, and that for a long time yet he retained much of those powers, and that it was indeed the fearful abuse of those faculties in his last stage of degeneracy which produced that enormous licentiousness and wickedness spoken of in Holy Writ. And this is the real clue to the whole purport of primitive history, and to all that appears to us in it so full of enigma. This leading subject of primitive history—the struggle between two races, as it is the first great event in universal history, is also of the utmost importance in the investigation of the subsequent progress of nations; for this original contest and opposition among men, according to the two-fold direction of the will, a will conformable to that of God, and a will carnal, ambitious, and enslaved to Nature, often recurs, though on a lesser scale, in later history; or at least we can perceive something like a feeble reflection or a distant echo of this primal discord. And even at the present period, which is certainly much nearer to the last than to the first ages of the world, it would appear sometimes as if humanity were again destined, as at its origin, to be more and more separated into two parties, or two hostile divisions. And as the greatest of German philosophers, Leibnitz, admirably observed that the sect of atheism would be the last in Christendom and in the world; so it is highly probable that this sect was the last in the primitive world, though stamped with the peculiar form which society at that period must have given to it, and on a scale of more gigantic magnitude.

On this important subject we have another observation to make, which refers more properly to an incidental circumstance in primitive history; for our great business is with the moral and intellectual progress of man. But even in respect to this more important object, the circumstance which we allude to should not be passed over in silence, as it tends to exemplify, illustrate and confirm the principle we have already had occasion to enforce; namely that we ought not to estimate by the narrow standard of present analogies and vulgar probabilities, all those facts in primitive nature and in primitive history which strike us as so strange, mysterious, and marvellous; provided they be really attested by ancient monuments and ancient tradition. We should ever bear in mind what a mighty wall of separation—what an impassable abyss—divides us from that remote world both of nature and of man. I refer to the unanimous testimony of ancient tradition respecting the gigantic forms of the first men, and their corresponding longevity, far exceeding, as it did, the present ordinary standard of the duration of human life. With respect to the latter circumstance, indeed, there are so very many causes contributing to shorten considerably the length of human life, that we have completely lost every criterion by which to estimate its original duration; and it would be no slight problem for a profound physiological science to discover and explain from a deeper investigation of the internal constitution of the earth, or of astronomical influences, which are often susceptible of very minute applications the primary cause of human longevity. By a simpler course of life and diet than the very artificial, unnatural and over-refined modes we follow, there are even at the present day numerous examples of a longevity far beyond the ordinary duration of human life. In India it is by no means uncommon to meet with men, especially in the Brahminical caste, more than a hundred years of age, and in the enjoyment of a robust, and even generative vigour of constitution. In the labouring class in Russia, whose mode of living is so simple, there are examples of men living to more than a hundred, a hundred and twenty, and even a hundred and fifty years of age; and although these instances form but rare exceptions, they are less uncommon there than in other European countries. There are even remarkable cases of old men, who after the entire loss of their teeth, have gained a complete new set as if their constitution had received a new sap of life, and a principle of second growth. What, in the present physical degeneracy of mankind, forms but a rare exception, may originally have been the ordinary measure of the duration of human life, or at least may afford us some trace and indication of such a measure; more especially as other branches of natural science offer correspondent analogies. On the other side of that great wall of separation which divides us from the primitive ages—in that remote world so little known to us, a standard for the duration of human life very different from the present may have prevailed; and such an opinion is extremely probable, supported as it is by manifold testimony, and confirmed by the sacred record of man's divine origin.

In order better to understand and judge more correctly of the biblical number of years in human life, we ought never to overlook the very religious purport of the symbolical relation of numbers in the divine chronology. We should thus ever keep ourselves in readiness, as, according to the expression of Holy Writ, the hairs on a man's head are numbered—and how much more so the years of his life!—and as nothing here must be considered fortuitous, but all things as predetermined and regulated according to the views of Providence. Again, as the Scripture often mentions that, in the hidden decrees of his mercy, the Almighty hath graciously been pleased to shorten the duration of a determined space of time:—as, for example, a course of irreversible suffering—or on the other hand, hath added a certain number of years to a determined period of grace, or prolonged the duration of a man's life; it behoves us to examine which of these two courses of divine favour be in any proposed case discoverable. In the extreme longevity of the holy Patriarchs of the primitive world—a longevity which as has been long proved and acknowledged, must be understood with reference only to the common astronomical years, the latter course of the divine goodness is discernible, and human life in those ages must be regarded as miraculously and supernaturally prolonged.[42] In the duration of Enoch's life, that holy prophet of the primitive world, whose translation was no death, but which, as the exit originally designed for man, should on that account be considered natural, the coincidence with the astronomical number of days in the sun's course round the earth is the more striking, as in the number of 365 years the number 33 is comprised as the root—a number which, in every respect and in the most various application, is discovered to be the primary number of the earth. For, with the slight difference of an unit, the number of 365 years corresponds to the sum of 333, with the addition of 33; but the number of days strictly comprised in those 365 years amounts to four times 33,000, with the addition of four times 330 days.

With regard to the gigantic stature attributed to the primitive race of men, by the authentic testimony of universal tradition;—a testimony which it is easy to distinguish from mere poetical embellishment or exaggeration—it is singular that those who are otherwise so disposed to apply the analogies of nature to the human species, should in this instance at least hold up the now ordinary scale of human bulk as the only standard of probability and certainty. The remains, more than once alluded to, of that primitive world which has perished, show that of the elephant, rhinoceros, and hippopotamus, the largest of all existing animals, there were originally from twenty to thirty different tribes and species which are now extinct. Of the mammoth, that gigantic animal of antiquity, remains of which are found not only in Siberia and America, but in the different counties of Europe, near Paris, and even in this immediate neighbourhood, a great number of various species have been also proved to have existed from the investigation of these antediluvian remains. Even of animals more familiar to us, bones and other remains have been discovered of a very unusual and truly gigantic size. Bulls' horns fastened together by a front-bone—antlers of stags, and elephants' tusks have been found, which prove those animals to have been of a dimension three, four, and even five times greater than they usually are at present. If in this elder period of organic nature, and of an animal kingdom which has become extinct, this gigantic style was so very prevalent, is it not reasonable to infer a similar analogy in the human species, so far at least as relates to their physical conformation, especially when this analogy is unanimously attested by the primitive Sagas and traditions of all nations?

As regards our sacred writings, I must observe that they tacitly imply and indeed pretty clearly attest the superior stature as well as great longevity of the first men; while, on the other hand, they represent the really gigantic structure of body as an organic degradation and degeneracy, originating in the illicit union of the two primitive races—the Cainites and the Sethites—an union which was the source of universal corruption—as the all-destroying deluge was a mighty judgment brought about by the pride and wickedness of those giants, and was indeed against these principally directed.—Even at a later period, the Scripture speaks of some nations of giants, that, prior to the introduction of the Israelites into the promised land, occupied several of its provinces, such as Moab, Ammon, Bashan, and the country about the primitive city of giants—Hebron. These tribes are represented as celebrated for valour indeed, yet as inclined solely to warfare, wild, and wicked; and even the individual giants, that appear in the age of Moses and in the history of David, are described as peculiarly monstrous from their great corporal deformity. The only savage tribe now existing, (as far as our present knowledge of the globe can enable us to speak,) possessed of a very uncommon, enormous and almost gigantic stature—the Patagonians of America, are at the same time noted for their personal deformity. With them it is the upper part of the body that is of such a disproportionate length, for when seen on horseback they appear to be real giants, and hence they were so accounted at first. When on a closer inspection we see the whole length of their bodies in the attitude either of standing or of walking, we perceive indeed they are of the very extraordinary height of from seven to eight feet, but not of that gigantic stature which the first impression led us to suppose, and which may so naturally have given rise to exaggerated accounts.

After all this, and what has been above stated, I need say no more than frankly declare that, as to these two points, the extraordinary longevity and gigantic stature of the first men,—I never could have the courage to raise a formal doubt against the plain declaration of Holy Writ, and the general testimony of primitive tradition. The full explanation, the more correct conception, and the perfect comprehension of these two facts are perhaps reserved for a later period, and the investigations of a deeper physical science.

There exist also monuments, or rather fragments of edifices, of the most primitive antiquity, which, as they are connected with the subject under discussion, are here deserving of a slight notice. I allude to those Cyclopean walls, which are to be found in several parts of Italy, and which those who have once seen will not easily forget, nor the singular stamp of antiquity they bear. In this very peculiar architecture, we see, instead of the stones of the usual cubical or oblong form, huge fragments of rock rudely cut into the shape of an irregular polygon, and skilfully enough joined together. Even the great, and often admired, subterraneous aqueduct, or Cloaca of ancient Rome is considered as belonging to this cyclopean architecture, remains of which exist also near Argos and in several other parts of Greece. These edifices were certainly not built by the celebrated nations that at a later period occupied those countries; for even they regarded them as the work and production of a primitive and departed race of giants; and hence the name which these monuments received. When we consider how very imperfect must have been the instruments of those remote ages, and that they cannot be supposed to have possessed that knowledge in mechanics which the Egyptians, for instance, display in the erection of their obelisks; we can easily conceive how men were led to imagine that more vigorous arms and other powers, than those belonging to the present race of men, were necessary to the construction of those edifices of rock.

Thus have we now endeavoured to explain, as far as was necessary for our purpose, the origin of that dissension, which is inherent in human nature, and forms the basis of all history. We have in the next place sought to unfold and illustrate the universal tradition, which attests the hostility between the virtuous Patriarchs and the proud Titans of the primitive world, or the different and opposite spirit that characterized the two primitive races of mankind; assigning, at the same time, to savage nations, or to the more degraded portions of human kind, their proper place in history—a place important undoubtedly, but still secondary in the great scheme of humanity.

These facts, too important to be passed over in silence, form the introduction and are, as it were, the porch to universal history, and to the civilization of the human species in the later historical ages. Now that we have seen mankind divided and split into a plurality of nations, our next task, in the period which follows, is to discover the most remarkable and most civilized nations, and to observe what peculiar form the Word, whether innate in man, or communicated to him—the word which may be considered as the essence of all the high prerogatives and characteristic qualities of man; to observe, we say, what peculiar form the word assumed among each of those nations, in their language and writing, in their religious traditions, their historical Sagas, their poetry, art, and science. In the account of ancient nations, we shall adopt the ethnographical mode of treating history; and it will be only in modern and more recent times that this method will gradually give place to the synchronical; and the reasons of this change will be suggested by the very nature of the subject. In this general survey, we must confine ourselves to those mighty and celebrated nations who have attained to a high degree of intellectual excellence; and we shall select and briefly state remarkable traits or extraordinary historical facts illustrative of the manners, social institutions, political refinement, and even political history of every nation, worthy of occupying a place in this sketch, in order the better to mark the progress of the intellectual principle in the peculiar culture and modes of thinking of each. It is only at a later period that political history becomes the main object of attention, and almost the leading principle in the progressive march, and even the partial retrogressions of mankind.

In this general picture of the earliest development of the human mind, we can select such nations only as are sufficiently well known, or respecting whom the sources of information are now at least of easier access; for were we to comprehend in this general survey, nations with whom we were less perfectly acquainted, we should be led into minute and interminable researches, without, after all, perhaps, obtaining any new or satisfactory result for the principal object in view. In the first period of antiquity will figure the Chinese, the Indians and the Egyptians, besides the isolated, and the so-called chosen people of the Hebrews; and if I commence by the remotest of the civilized countries of Asia, China, I beg leave to premise that I mean to determine no question of priority as to the respective antiquity of those nations, or to adjudge any preference to one or other amongst them. Indeed their own chronological accounts and pretensions, which often deserve the name of chronological fictions, turn out, on a closer inquiry, to be mere calculations of astronomical periods; and a sound historical criticism will not admit that they were originally meant to be chronological. Suffice it to say that the three nations we have mentioned belonged to the same period of the world, and attained to an equal, or a very similar, degree of moral and intellectual refinement; and so in respect to that higher object, the chronological dispute becomes unnecessary, or is, at least, of minor importance. Among those, however, who take an active part in these researches, a partiality for one or other of these nations, and for their respective antiquity easily springs up; for even objects the most remote will excite in the human breast the spirit of party. In order to keep as free as possible from prepossessions of this kind, I have adopted a species of geographical division of my subject, which, when I come to treat later of the different periods of modern history, will give place to a more chronological arrangement. I said a species of geographical division, for undoubtedly from the special nature of this historical enquiry, it must be supposed I shall take a different point of view in the geographical survey of the earth than ordinarily occurs in geographical investigations. The geographies for common use properly take as their basis the present situation of the different states and kingdoms now in existence. But a more scientific geography adopts the direction of mountains, and the course of rivers, the vallies produced by the former, and the space occupied by the waters of the latter, as the leading clue to the division and arrangement of the earth. Thus in the philosophy of history the series of the principal civilized states will form a high, commanding chain; and the philosophic historian will have to follow from east to west, or in any other direction that history may point out, not merely rivers transporting articles of commerce, but the mighty stream of traditions and doctrines which has traversed and fertilized the world.

As the individuals who can be termed historical, form but rare exceptions among mankind, so in the whole circumference of the globe, there are only a certain number of nations that occupy an important and really historical place in the annals of civilization. By far the greater part of the inhabited or habitable globe, however rich and ample a field it may offer to the investigations of the naturalist, cannot be included in this class, or has not attained to this degree of eminence. In the whole continent of Africa there is, besides Egypt, only the northern coast stretching along the Mediterranean, that is at all connected with the history and intellectual progress of the civilized world. The other coasts of Africa, including its southernmost cape, furnish points of importance to commerce, navigation, and even some attempts at colonization; while the interior parts of this continent, still so little known, possess much to excite the attention and wonder of the naturalist; but beyond this, its maritime as well as central regions, cannot be said to occupy a place in the intellectual history, or in the moral progress, of our species. It is only since it has formed a province of the Russian empire that the vast territory of Northern Asia has become known to us, and has been, as it were, newly discovered. From central and eastern Asia, from the south of Tartary and the north of China, many mighty and conquering nations have issued, that have spread the terror of their arms over the face of civilization, as far as the frontiers of Europe.

But, in the march and development of the human mind, these nations are far from occupying the same eminent station. In this respect, also, the fifth continent of the globe, Polynesia—though nearly equal to Europe in extent, counts as nought. Even America, the largest of those continents, occupies here a comparatively subordinate rank; and it is only in latter ages, and since its discovery, that it can be said to belong to history. Since that period, indeed, the inhabitants of this portion of the world have adopted, for the most part, the language, the manners, the modes of thinking, and the political Institutions of Europe; for the still subsisting remnant of its ancient savages is very inconsiderable: so that America may be regarded as a remote dependency, and, as it were, a continuation of old Europe on the other side of the Atlantic. Great as the re-action may be, which this second Europe, sprung up in the solitudes of the new world, has during the last fifty years exerted on its mother-continent, still as this influence forms a part but of very recent history, it is only in very modern times that America has obtained any historical weight and importance.

Even in its natural configuration, the new world is more widely different from the old, than the principal parts of the latter are from each other. As in comparing the Northern extremity of the earth with its Southern or aqueous extremity, we observe a striking disparity, and almost complete opposition between the two; so we shall find this to be the case, if, in advancing in the opposite direction from east to west, we divide the whole surface of the earth into two equal parts. On one hand that more important division of the earth, extending from the Western coast of Africa to the Eastern coast of Asia, comprises the three ancient continents, which, from the upper to the middle part, occupy almost the whole space of this half of the globe. Here is the greatest quantity of land, and the animal kingdom, too, is on a more large and magnificent scale. It is only at the Southern extremity of this hemisphere that sea and water are predominant; and here a continuous chain of islands from the southernmost point of Asia reaches to the fifth and last portion of the globe—Australia, making it a sort of Asiatic dependency. In the American hemisphere, the element of water is predominant, not only at the Southern extremity, but towards the middle; for, large as America may be, it can bear no comparison with the other continents in respect to extent of surface. Our hemisphere is more remarkable even for extent of population than for the quantity of land. Here indeed is the chief seat of population, and the principal theatre of human history and human civilization.

The entire population of America, which, as it is for the most part of European extraction, is better known to us than that of many countries more contiguous—the entire population of America at the highest computation of the whole number of inhabitants on the globe, forms but a thirtieth part, and at the lowest computation, not a four-and-twentieth part of the whole. Widely extended as this thinly peopled continent is, the whole number of its inhabitants scarcely exceeds the population of a single great European state, such as either France or Germany, whose population, indeed, it about equals. Vegetation, indeed, is most rich and luxuriant in America; but the two most generous plants reared by human culture, and which are so closely connected with the primitive history of man—corn and the vine—were originally unknown in this quarter of the world. In the animal kingdom, America is far inferior to the other and more ancient continents of the globe. Many of the noblest and most beautiful species of animals did not exist there originally; and others again were found most unseemly in form, and most degenerate in nature. Some species of animals indigenous to that continent form but a feeble compensation for the absence of others, the most useful and most necessary for the purposes of husbandry and the domestic uses of man. We may boldly lay it down as a general proposition not to be taxed with error or exaggeration, that in the new hemisphere, vegetation is predominant, while in the old, animal force preponderates, and is more fully developed. This superiority is apparent not only in the comparative extent of population, but in the organic structure of the human form. Even the African tribes are far superior in bodily strength and agility to the aboriginal natives of America; and in point of longevity and fecundity, the latter are not to be compared with the Malayan race, and the Mongul tribes in the central or North-eastern parts of Asia, and in Southern Tartary, races with whom, in other respects, they seem to bear some analogy.

As the American continent, in other respects so incomplete, is mostly separated from all the others; and its form is more simple and less complex than that of the ancient divisions of the globe, it well deserves our consideration in that point of view; and it may perhaps furnish the general type and true geographical outline of a continent in its natural state. A narrow isthmus connects the upper half, stretching in a widely extended tract towards the North Pole, and the inferior part, with its Southern peak; and thus both form, according to general impression but one and the same continent; and so prove, in fact, how totally the Northern and Southern parts of a continent may differ. That now in the period when the Euxine was still united to the Caspian, when the White sea stretched farther into land, and the Ural mountains formed an island, or were surrounded to the North and South by the sea, Asia and Europe were probably separated towards the North, is a point to which we have already had occasion to allude. But if, on the one hand, Europe were separated from Asia, it might on the other have been easily joined to Africa by an isthmus, where it is now divided from it by a straight, and so have formed with it one connected continent; in the same way as Australia is united with Asia, if at least we consider the long chain of islands between them as one unbroken continuity. Then in truth there would have been but three continents of a form similar to the above-mentioned one of America; except that the two nobler continents closely entangled with one another would not on that account have so well preserved the original conformation. That it is on the whole more correct, and more consonant with nature, as well as with theory, to suppose the existence of only three original portions of the globe, might be shown by much additional evidence.

But, laying aside these geological facts and observations, ideas and conjectures, the philosophic historian can reckon over the whole surface of the globe but fifteen historical and important civilized countries of greater or less extent, which can form the subject, and furnish the geographical outline of his remarks. This historical chain of lands, or this stream of historical nations from the south-east of Asia to the Northern and Western extremities of Europe, forms a tract, through both continents, which though of considerable breadth, is not, in proportion to the extent of these continents, of very great magnitude, and which may be divided into three classes, coinciding chronologically in their several periods of historical glory and development with the great eras or sections of universal history from the primitive ages down to the present times. In the first class of these mighty and celebrated civilized countries, I would place the three great magnificent regions in Eastern and Southern Asia, China, India, between which the ancient Bactriana forms a point of transition and connecting link—and lastly Persia. In a more westerly and somewhat more northerly direction than the three countries just named, the second or middle class is composed of four or five regions remarkable for extent and beauty, and above all for their historical importance and celebrity. First of all, there is that middle country of Western Asia above-mentioned, which is situate near two great streams—the Tigris and the Euphrates, and bounded by four inland seas, the Persian and Arabian gulfs, and the Caspian and Mediterranean seas. Upon this midland country of ancient history, in every respect so worthy of notice, I have but one observation to add, that in this great series of civilized countries it occupies nearly the middle place; for the Southern extremity of India is about as far removed from it as, in the opposite direction, the North of Scotland. And the Eastern part of China is not much more distant from this region than in the opposite quarter the Western coast of the Hesperian Peninsula. Next must be included in this class the circumjacent countries, Arabia, Egypt, and Asia Minor, together with the Caucasian regions.

As in the flourishing period of her ancient history, Greece was in every way far more closely connected with Asia Minor, Phœnicia, and Egypt, than with the countries of Europe, she also must be comprised in this division of Central Asia. On the other hand, there is no country in Europe which, considered in itself, bears so strongly the distinctive geographical configuration peculiar to the European continent. This peculiar configuration of Europe, so well adapted to the purposes of settlement, and to the progress of civilization, consists in this—that in no other continent does the same given space of territory present to the sea so extensive and diversified a line of coast, and furnish it with so many streams, great and small, as Europe shut in, as it is, between two inland seas, and the great ocean, and which runs out into so many great and commodiously situated Peninsulas, and possesses large, magnificent, and, in part, very anciently and highly civilized islands, like Sicily and the British Isles. What Europe is in a large way, Greece is in a small—a region of coasts, islands and peninsulas. Belonging more to one continent in its natural conformation, and to the other by its historical connexion, Greece forms the point of transition and the intermediate link between Asia and Europe.

The other six or seven principal countries in Europe, taken according to a strict geographical classification, and without paying attention to the political variations of territory, whether in antiquity, the middle ages, or modern times, form the members of the third class. These are first the two beautiful peninsulas, Italy and Spain; next France on the North and South washed by two different seas, and towards the North, jutting out into a by no means inconsiderable peninsula—further on, the British isles, the ancient Germany with its Northern coast stretching along two seas, to which must be annexed from the ancient consanguinity of their inhabitants, the Cimbric and Scandinavian islands and peninsulas; lastly, the vast Sarmatia, towards the North and East extending far into Asia, in the wide tract from the Euxine to the Frozen sea. From Sarmatia, however, must be separated, on account of their natural situation, the great Danubian countries, extending from the South of the Carpathian mountains, down to the other mountainous chain northward of Greece—such as the ancient Illyricum, Pannonia and Dacia—regions which, in a strict geographical point of view, must be regarded as forming a distinct class. In an historical point of view, the whole Northern coast of Africa, stretching along the Mediterranean, should be included in this division of European countries, not only from that early commercial and colonial connexion, established in the time of the Carthaginian republic, and in the first period of the Roman wars and conquests; but from the prevalence in that country, down to the fourth and fifth centuries, of European manners, language and refinement. Even during the existence of the Saracenic empire, a very close intercourse subsisted for many centuries between this coast and Spain.

Such, according to a general geographical survey of the globe, would be the historical land-chart of civilization, if I may so express myself, which forms the grand outline I must steadily keep in view, in the following sketch of nations, in which I will endeavour to explain with the utmost clearness and precision, and point out closely in all its particular bearings, the principle laid down in this work respecting the internal Word, as the essential characteristic of man.

END OF LECTURE II.

LECTURE III.

Of the constitution of the Chinese Empire—the moral and political condition of China—the character of Chinese intellect and Chinese science.

"Man and the earth,"—this has been the subject of our previous disquisitions, and might serve as the superscription to this first portion of the work. In the second part, comprised in the four or five following lectures, the subject discussed is sacred Tradition, according to the peculiar form which it assumed among each of the great and most remarkable nations in primitive antiquity, and as it is known from the visible and universally scattered traces of a divine Revelation. It will be our duty to trace, with a discriminating eye, the various course which, in the lapse of ages, this sacred tradition followed among each of those nations; and at the same time to point out, as far as the subject will admit of historical proof, the one common source whence, as from a centre, issued those different streams of tradition to diffuse throughout all the regions of the earth fertility and life, or to be lost and dried up in the sterile sands of human error. It will be also our task more accurately to define the share allotted to each of those leading nations in divine truth, or the heritage of higher knowledge which had been imparted to them. Closely connected with this subject, is the designation of the internal Word, constituting as it does the distinguishing mark and intellectual being of man and mankind; and which, as it has been variously manifested and developed in the language, writings, Sagas, history, art and science—in the faith, the life and modes of thinking of each of those nations, will be described in its most essential traits.

I shall commence with the Chinese Empire, because, among the fifteen historical countries included in the line of civilization we have drawn above, it occupies the extreme point of Eastern Asia. The names of East and West are indeed purely relative; and have not the same permanent and definite signification as the North or South pole in every portion of the globe. China lies to the west of Peru; and to North America, or Brazil, Europe forms the east or north-east point. We still however adhere to common speech, purely relative as it is, and take our point of view from this Asiatic and European hemisphere, in which we dwell. If we would extend in a westerly direction and to the great continent of America, which is more and more assuming an important place in the history of the world, that series of great and civilized states, stretching from the south-east to the north-west in our mightier, more celebrated, and earlier civilized hemisphere, we might add to the before-mentioned fifteen ancient and modern countries three young or rising states in the new world, which, springing in a three-fold division from British, Spanish, and Portuguese extraction, would constitute the most recent, or last historical links in this chain of communities.

The Chinese empire is the largest of all the Monarchies now existing on the earth, and even in this respect may well challenge the attention of the historical enquirer. This empire is not absolutely the greatest in territorial extent, though even in this respect it is scarcely inferior to the greatest; but in point of population it is in all probability the first. Spain, if we could now include in the number of her possessions her American colonies, would exceed all empires in extent. The same may be said of Russia, with her annexed colonies, and boundless provinces in the north of Asia. But, great as the population of this Empire may be, when considered in itself and relatively to the other European states, it can sustain no comparison with that of China. England with the East Indies and her colonial possessions in the three divisions of the globe, Polynesia, Africa, and America, has indeed a very wide extent, and, perhaps, when we include the hundred and ten millions that own her sway in India, comes the nearest in point of population to China. Of the amount of the Chinese population, which is not with certainty known, that of India may furnish a criterion for a conjectural and probable estimate. The British ambassador, Lord Macartney received an official document, in which the whole population of China was computed at the monstrous amount of 330 millions. Even if the Chinese possessed those exact statistical estimates we have in Europe, it would still be a matter of doubt how far in such cases we could confide in their veracity, especially in their relations with foreigners and Europeans. In another and somewhat earlier statistical work, composed towards the close of the 18th century, the population of this empire is estimated at 147 millions; and the very incredible statement is added, that a hundred and fifty years before, or about the middle of the 17th century, the Chinese population amounted only to 27 millions and a half. This rapid rise, or rather this prodigious stride in the numbers of a people, would be in utter opposition to all principles and observations on the growth and progressive increase of population, even in the most civilized countries. Thus even the statistical estimates of the Chinese furnish us with no certain information on this subject. However as this vast region is every where intersected by navigable rivers and canals, every where studded with large and highly populous cities, and enjoys a climate as genial, or even still more genial, and certainly far more salubrious than that of India; as, like the latter country, it every where presents to the eye the richest culture, and is in all appearance as much peopled, or over-peopled, we may take India, whose total population is not near included in the 110 millions under British rule, as furnishing a pretty accurate standard for the computation of the Chinese population. Now, when we reflect that even the proper China is larger than the whole western peninsula of India, and that the vast countries dependent on China, such as Thibet and southern Tartary are very populous, the conjectural calculation of the English writer, from whom I have taken these critical remarks on the early estimates of Chinese population, and who reckons it at 150 millions, may be regarded as a very moderate computation, and may with perfect safety, be considerably raised. Thus then the Chinese population is nearly as large as the whole population of Europe, and constitutes, if not a fourth, at least a fifth, of the total population of the globe.

I permit myself to indulge in cursory comparisons of this kind, and for the reason that the history of civilization, which forms the basis, and as it were the outward body, of the philosophy of history, which should be the inner and higher sense of the whole, is deeply interested in all that refers to the general condition of humanity. And such an interest, which does not of itself lie in mere statistical calculations, but in the outward condition of mankind, as the symbol of its inward state, may very well attach to comparisons of this nature.

The interest, however, which the philosophic historian should take in all that relates to humanity in general, and to the various nations of the earth, ought not to be regulated by the false standard of an indiscriminate equality, that would consider all nations of equal importance, and pay equal attention to all without distinction. This would indeed betray an indifference to, or at least ignorance of, the higher principle implanted in the human breast. But this interest should be measured not merely by the degree of population in a state, or by geographical extent of territory, or by external power, but by population, territory and power combined—by moral worth and intellectual pre-eminence, by the scale of civilization to which the nation has attained. The Tongoosses, though a very widely diffused race, the Calmucks, though, compared with the other nations of central Asia, they have much to claim our attention, cannot certainly excite equal interest, or hold as high a place in the history of human civilization, as the Greeks or the Egyptians; though the territory of Egypt itself is certainly not particularly large, nor according to our customary standard of population, were its inhabitants in all probability ever very numerous. In the same way, the Empire of the Moguls, which embraced China itself, has not the same high interest and importance in our eyes as the Roman Empire either in its rise or in its fall. Writers on universal history have not however always avoided this fault, and have been too much disposed to place all nations on the same historical footing,—on the false level of an indiscriminate equality; and to regard humanity in a mere physical point of view, and according to the natural classification of tribes and races. In these sketches of history, the high and the noble is often ranked with the low and the vulgar, and neither what is truly great, nor what is of lesser importance, (for this, too, should not be overlooked) has its due place in these portraits of mankind.

A numerous, or even excessive population is undoubtedly an essential element of political power in a state; but it is not the only, nor in any respect, the principal symptom or indication of the civilization of a country. It is only in regard to civilization that the population of China deserves our consideration. Although in these latter times, when Europe by her political ascendency over the other parts of the world has proved the high pre-eminence of her arts and civilization; England and Russia have become the immediate neighbours of China towards the north and west; still these territorial relations affect not the rest of Europe; and China, when we leave out of consideration its very important commerce, cannot certainly be accounted a political power in the general system. Even in ancient, as well as in modern times, China never figured in the history of Western Asia or Europe, and had no connection whatever with their inhabitants; but this great country has ever stood apart, like a world within itself, in the remote, unknown Eastern Asia. Hence the earlier writers on universal history have taken little or no notice of this great Empire, shut out as it was from the confined horizon of their views. And this was natural, when we consider that the conquests and expeditions of the Asiatic nations were considered by these writers as subjects of the greatest weight and importance. No conquerors have ever marched from China into Western Asia, like Xerxes, for instance, who passed from the interior of Persia to Athens; or Alexander the Great, who extended his victorious march from his small paternal province of Macedon, to beyond the Indus, and almost to the borders of the Ganges, though the latter river, he was in despite of all his efforts, unable to reach. But the great victorious expeditions have proceeded not from China, but from central Asia, and the nations of Tartary, who have invaded China itself; though in these invasions the manners, mind, and civilization of the Chinese have evinced their power, as their Tartar conquerors, in the earliest as in the latest times, have after a few generations, invariably conformed to the manners and civilization of the conquered nation, and become more or less Chinese.

Not only the great population and flourishing agriculture of this fruitful country, but the cultivation of silk, for which it has been celebrated from all antiquity; the culture of the tea-plant, which forms such an important article of European trade; as well as the knowledge of several most useful medicinal productions of nature; and unique and, in their way, excellent products of industry and manufacture; prove the very high degree of civilization which this people has attained to. And how should not that people be entitled to a high or one of the highest places among civilized nations, which had known, many centuries before Europe, the art of printing, gun-powder, and the magnet—those three so highly celebrated and valuable discoveries of European skill? Instead of the regular art of printing with transposeable letters, which would not suit the Chinese system of writing, this people make use of a species of lithography, which, to all essential purposes is the same, and attended with the same effects. Gunpowder serves in China, as it did in Europe in the infancy of the discovery, rather for amusement and for fire-works, than for the more serious purpose of warlike fortification and conquest: and though this people are acquainted with the magnetic needle, they have never made a like extended application of its powers, and never employ it either in a confined river and coasting navigation, or on the wide ocean, on which they never venture.

The Chinese are remarkable too for the utmost polish and refinement of manners, and even for a fastidious urbanity and a love of stately ceremonial. In many respects indeed their politeness and refinement almost equal those of European nations, or at least are very superior to what we usually designate by the term of oriental manners—a term which in our sense can apply only to the more contiguous Mahometan countries of the Levant. Of this assertion we may find a sufficient proof in any single tale that pourtrays the present Chinese life and manners, in the novel, for instance, translated by M. Remusat.[43] In their present manners and fashions, however, there are many things utterly at variance with European taste and feelings; I need only mention the custom of the dignitaries, functionaries, and men of letters, letting their nails grow to the length of birds' claws, and that other custom in women of rank, of compressing their feet to a most artificial diminutiveness. Both customs, according to the recent account of a very intelligent Englishman, serve to mark and distinguish the upper class; for the former renders the men totally incapable of hard or manual labour, and the latter impedes the women of rank in walking, or at least gives them a mincing gait, and a languid, delicate and interesting air. These minute traits of manners should not be overlooked in the general sketch of this nation, for they perfectly correspond to many other characteristic marks and indications of unnatural stiffness, childish vanity, and exaggerated refinement, which we meet with in the more important province of its intellectual exertions. Even in the basis of all intellectual culture, the language, or rather the writing of the Chinese, this character of refinement pushed beyond all bounds and all conception is visible, while on the other hand it is coupled with great intellectual poverty and jejuneness. In a language where there are not much more than three hundred, not near four hundred, and (according to the most recent critical investigation,) only 272 monosyllabic primitive roots without any kind of grammar; where the not merely various but utterly unconnected significations of one and the same word are marked in the first place by a varying modulation of the voice, according to a fourfold method of accentuation; in the next place, and chiefly by the written characters, which amount to the prodigious number of eighty thousand; while the Egyptian hieroglyphs do not exceed the number, of eight hundred; and this Chinese system of writing is the most artificial in the whole world. An inference which is not invalidated by the fact that, out of that great number of all actual or possible written characters, but a fourth part perhaps is really in use, and a still less portion is necessary to be learned. As the meaning, especially of more complex notions and abstract ideas can be fully fixed and accurately determined only by such artificial ciphers; the language is far more dependent on these written characters than on living sound; for one and the same sound may often be designated by 160 different characters, and have as many significations. It not rarely occurs that Chinese, when they do not very well understand each other in conversation, have recourse to writing, and by copying down these ciphers are enabled to divine each other's meaning, and become mutually intelligible. To comprehend rightly this immeasurable chaos of originally symbolic, but now merely conventional signs—in other words, to be able to read and write, though this science involves great and difficult problems even for the most practised, constitutes the real subject and purport of the scientific education of a Chinese. Indeed it furnishes labour sufficient to fill up the life of man, for even the European scholars, who have engaged in this study, find it a matter of no small difficulty to devise a system whereby a dictionary, or rather a systematic catalogue of all these written characters may be composed, to serve as a fit guide on this ocean of Chinese signs.—But we shall have again occasion to recur to this subject; and indeed it is only in connexion with the peculiar bearings of the Chinese mind this writing system can be properly explained and understood in its true meaning, or rather its meaningless construction and elaborateness.

Of the external civilization of China, we have a striking proof and a standing monument in the construction of so many canals that intersect the whole country, and in every thing connected therewith. As the extraordinary fertility of the soil is produced by the many rivers of greater or less magnitude that intersect the country, but which at the same time threaten the flat plains with inundation, it is the first object and most important care of government, to avert the danger of such inundations, to distribute the fertilizing waters in equal abundance over the whole country, and thus by means of canals, to maintain in all parts the communication by water which is at the same time of equal benefit and importance to industry and internal commerce. In no civilized state are establishments of this kind so extensively diffused and brought to so high a state of perfection as in China. The great imperial canal which extends to the length of 120 geographical leagues, has, it is said, no parallel on the earth. Although the construction of canals, and all the regulations on water-carriage could have attained by degrees only to their present state of perfection, still this alone would prove the very early attention which this people had bestowed on the arts of civilized life. Mention is often made of them in the old Chinese histories and imperial annals; and the canals of China, like the Nile in Egypt, were ever the objects of most anxious solicitude to the government. These annals, whenever they have occasion to speak of those great inundations and destructive floods, which are of such frequent occurrence in Chinese history, invariably represent the attention bestowed on water-courses and water-regulations, as the most certain mark of a wise, benevolent, and provident administration. On the other hand the neglect of this most important of administrative concerns is ever regarded as the proof of a wicked, reckless and unfortunate reign; and in these histories some great calamity, or even violent catastrophe, is sure to follow, like a stroke of divine vengeance, on this unpardonable neglect of duty. Together with the imperial canal, the great Chinese wall, which extends on the Northern frontier of China proper, to the length of 150 geographical leagues, is another no less important, and still standing monument of the comparatively high civilization which this country had very early attained. Such is the height and thickness of this wall, that it has been calculated that its cubic contents exceed all the mass of stone employed in all the buildings in England and Scotland; or again that the same materials would serve to construct a wall of ordinary height and moderate thickness round the whole earth. This great wall of China may be considered as a characteristic, and as it were a symbol of the seclusive spirit and aversion to every thing foreign in person, manners and modes of thinking which distinguish the Chinese state. This spirit, however has been as little able as the great wall itself, to defend China against foreign conquests, or even against the introduction of foreign sects. This wall, which was built about two centuries before the Christian era, is a historical monument, which furnishes far stronger proof than all the dubious accounts of the old annals that even in ancient times, and long before the conquest of the Monguls, and the establishment of the present dynasty of Mantchou Tartars, the empire had been often conquered, or at least was constantly exposed to the invasions of the Tartar tribes of the North.

The long succession of the different native dynasties of China, Tchin, Han, Tang, and Sung, down to the Monguls, which fills the diffuse annals of the empire, furnishes few important data on the intellectual progress of the Chinese; and every thing of importance to the object of our present inquiries, that can be gathered out of the mass of political history, may be reduced to a very few plain facts. The English writer, whom we have already cited, though otherwise inclined to a certain degree of scepticism in his views, fixes the commencement of the historical ages of authentic history in the ancient dynasty of Chow, eleven hundred years before the Christian era. The first fact of importance, as regards the moral and intellectual civilization of China, is that this country was originally divided into many small principalities, and, under petty sovereigns, whose power was more limited, enjoyed a greater share of liberty; and that it was formed into a great and absolute monarchy only two hundred years before Christ. The general burning of the books, of which more particular mention will be presently made, as well as the erection of the great wall, are attributed to the first general Emperor of all China, Chi-ho-angti; in whose reign, too, Japan became a Chinese colony, or received from China a political establishment. At a still later period, as in the fifth century of our era, and again at the time of the Mogul conquest under Zingis Khan, China was divided into two kingdoms, a northern and a southern. But there is another fact already mentioned that throws still stronger light on the high civilization of China—it is that at every period, when this empire has been conquered by the Moguls and Tartars, the conquerors, overcome in their turn by the ascendancy of Chinese civilization, have, within a short time, invariably adopted the manners, laws, and even language of China, and thus its institutions have remained, on the whole, unaltered. But here is a circumstance in Chinese history particularly worthy of our attention. In no state in the world do we see such an entire, absolute, and rigid monarchical unity as in that of China, especially under its ancient form; although this government is more limited by laws and manners, and is by no means of that arbitrary and despotic character which we are wont to attribute to the more modern oriental states. In China, before the introduction of the Indian religion of Buddha, there was not even a distinct sacerdotal class—there is no nobility, no hereditary class with hereditary rights—education, and employment in the service of the state, form the only marks of distinction; and the men of letters and government functionaries are blended together in the single class of Mandarins; but the state is all in all. However, this absolute monarchical system has not conduced to the peace, stability, and permanent prosperity of the state, for the whole history of China, from beginning to end, displays one continued series of seditions, usurpations, anarchy, changes of dynasty, and other violent revolutions and catastrophes. This is proved by the bare statement of facts, though the official language of the Imperial annals ever concedes the final triumph to the monarchical principle.

The same violent revolutions occurred in the department of science and of public doctrines, as in the instance already cited of the general burning of the books by order of the first general Emperor; when the men of letters, or at least a party of them, were persecuted, and four hundred and sixty followers of Confucius burnt. This act of tyranny undoubtedly supposes a very violent contest between factions—an important political struggle between hostile sects, and a mighty revolution in the intellectual world. At the same time, too, a favourite of this tyrannical prince introduced a new system of writing, which has led to the greatest confusion, even in subsequent ages. Such an intellectual revolution is doubtless evident on the introduction of the Indian religion of Buddha, or Fo (according to the Chinese appellation), which took place precisely three-and-thirty years after the foundation of Christianity. The conquest of China by the Moguls, under Zingis Khan, occurred at the same time that their expeditions towards the opposite quarter of Europe spread terror and desolation over Russia and Poland, as far as the confines of Silesia. This conquest produced a re-action, and a popular revolution, conducted by a common citizen of China, by name Chow, restored the Empire; this citizen afterwards ascended the throne, and became the founder of a new Chinese dynasty. The Emperors of the present dynasty of Mantchou Tartars, that has now governed China since the middle of the 17th century, are distinguished for their attachment to the old customs and institutions of China, and even to its language and science; and their elevation to the throne has given rise to many great scientific enterprises, and has been singularly favourable to the investigations of those European scholars whose object it is to make us better acquainted with China. But at the moment I am speaking, a great rebellion has broken out in the northern part of the kingdom, and in the opposite extremity the Christians are exposed to a more than ordinary persecution.

These few leading incidents in Chinese history may suffice to make known the principal epochs in the intellectual progress and civilization of this people. As the constitution and development of the human mind are in each of those ancient nations closely connected with the nature of their language, and even sometimes (as in the case of the Chinese) with their system of writing, the language of the latter people, being on account of its amazing copiousness less fit for conversation than for writing, I shall now make a few remarks on the very artificial mode of Chinese writing, which is perfectly unique in its kind; but I shall confine my observations to its general character, and shall forbear entering into the vast labyrinth of the 80,000 cipher-signs of speech, and all the problems and difficulties which they involve. The Chinese writing was undoubtedly in its origin symbolical; though the rude marks of those primitive symbols can now scarcely be discerned in the enigmatical abbreviations, and in the complex combinations of the characters at present in use. It is no slight problem even for the learned of China to reduce with any degree of certainty the boundless quantity of their written characters to their simple elements and primitive roots; in this, however, they have succeeded, and have shown that all these elements are to be found in the 214 symbols, or keys of writing as they call them. The Chinese characters of the primitive ages comprise only such representations indicated by a few rude strokes, of those first simple objects which surround man while living in the most simple state of society—such as the sun and moon, the most familiar animals, the common plants, the instruments of human labour, weapons, and the different parts of human dwellings. This is the same rude symbolical writing which we find among other uncivilized nations, the Americans for example, and among these, the Mexicans in particular.

The celebrated French orientalist, Abel Remusat, who in our times has infused a new life into the study of Chinese literature, and especially thrown on the whole subject a much greater degree of clearness than originally belonged to it, has, in his examination of this first very meagre outline of the infant civilization of China, wherein he discovers the then very contracted circle of Chinese ideas, passed many intellectual observations, and drawn many historical deductions. And if, as he conjectures, the discovery of Chinese writing must date its origin from four thousand years back, this would bring it within three or four generations from the Deluge, according to the vulgar era—an estimate which certainly is not exaggerated. If this European scholar, intimately conversant as he is with Chinese antiquities and science, is at a loss adequately to describe his astonishment at the extreme poverty of these first symbols of Chinese writing, so no one, doubtless, possesses in a higher degree than himself all the necessary attainments to enable him to appreciate the immeasurable distance between this first extreme jejuneness of ideas and the boundless wealth displayed in the later, artificial and complex writing of the Chinese.

But when, among other things, he calls our attention to the fact that, in this primitive writing, even the sign or symbol of a priest is wanting,—a symbol which together with the class itself must exist among the very rudest nations—I cannot concur in the truth of the remark; for he himself adduces, among other characters, one which must represent a magician. Now among the heathen nations of the primitive age, the one personage was certainly identical with the other, as even among the Cainites was very probably the case. Even the combination of several of those simple characters, which generally serves to denote the more abstract ideas, seems often, or at least originally not to have been regulated by any profound principle of symbolism, but to have arisen merely out of the vulgar perceptions or impressions of every-day life. For instance, the character denoting happiness is composed of two signs, of which one represents an open mouth, and the other a hand full of rice, or rice by itself. Here we see no allusion is made to any very lofty or chimerical idea of happiness, or to any mystic or spiritual conception of the same subject; but, as this written-character well evinces, the Chinese notion of happiness is simply represented by a mouth filled and saturated with good rice. Another example of nearly the same kind is given by Remusat with something of shyness and reserve;—the character designating woman, when doubled, signifies strife and contention, and when tripled, immoral and disorderly conduct. How widely removed are all these coarse and trivial combinations of ideas from an exquisite sense—a deep symbolism of Nature—from those spiritual emblems in the Egyptian hieroglyphics, so far as they have been deciphered; although these emblems may have been, and were in fact applied to the purpose of alphabetic usage. In the hieroglyphics there is, beside the bare literal meaning, a high symbolical inspiration, like a soul of life—like the breathing of a high in-dwelling spirit,—a deeply felt significancy—a lofty and beautiful design apparent through the dead character denoting any particular name or fact.[44]

But independently of this boundless chaos of written-characters, the Chinese undoubtedly possess a system of scientific symbols, and symbolical signs, which constitute the purport of the most ancient of their sacred books—the I—King—which signifies the book of unity, or, as others explain it, the book of changes; and either name will agree with the meaning of those symbols which, when rightly understood, and conceived in the spirit of early antiquity, will appear to be of a very remarkable and scientific nature. There are only two primary figures or lines, from which proceed originally the four symbols and the eight koua or combinations representing nature, which form the basis of the high Chinese philosophy. These first two primary principles are a straight, unbroken line, and a line broken or divided into two. If these first simple elements are doubled: namely—two straight lines put under each other like our arithmetical sign of equation, and two broken or divided lines also put together, the different lines are formed. According as one broken line occupies the upper or the lower place, there are two possible variations—when put together, there are four possible variations; and these constitute the four symbols. But if three lines of these two kinds, the straight and the broken, are united or placed under each other, so, according to the number or the upper, middle or lower place of either species of line, there are eight possible combinations, and these are the eight koua, which, together with the four symbols, refer to the natural elements, and to the primary principles of all things, and serve as the symbolical expression, or scientific designation, of these.

What is now the real sense and the proper signification of those scientific primary lines among the Chinese, which exert an influence over the whole of their ancient literature, and upon which they themselves have written an incredible number of learned commentaries? Leibnitz supposed them to contain a reference to the modern algebraical discoveries, and especially to the binary calculation. Other writers, especially among the English, drawing their observations more from real life, remark on the other hand, that this ancient system of mystical lines serves at present the purpose of a sort of oracular play of questions, like the turning up of cards among Europeans, and is converted to many superstitious uses, especially for making pretended discoveries in alchymy, to which the Chinese are very much addicted. But this is only an abuse of modern times, which no longer understand this primitive system of symbolical signs and lines. The high antiquity of these lines and of the eight koua can be the less a matter of doubt as even mythology has ascribed them to the primitive Patriarch of the Chinese—Fohi, who is represented as having espied these lines on the back of a tortoise, and having thence deduced the written characters; which many of the learned Chinese wish to derive from these eight koua or combinations of the first symbolical lines. But the French scholar, whom I have more than once had occasion to name, and who is well able to form a competent opinion on the subject, is most decidedly opposed to this Chinese derivation of all the written characters from the eight koua; and it would appear, indeed, that the latter differ totally from the common system of Chinese writing, and must be looked upon as of a distinct scientific nature.

Perhaps we may find a natural explanation of the true, and not very hidden sense of these signs, by comparing the fundamental doctrines in the elder Greek philosophy and science of nature. Thus, in the writings of Plato, mention is often made of the one and of the other, or of unity and duality, as the original elements of nature and first principles of all existence. By this is meant the doctrine of the first opposition and of the many oppositions derived from the first; and also of the possible, and conceivable, or required adjustment and compromise between the two, and of the restoration of the first unity and eternal equality anterior to all opposition, and which terminates and absorbs in itself all discord. Thus these eight koua, and mathematical signs or symbolical lines of ancient China, would comprise nothing more than a dry outline of all dynamical speculation and science. And it is therefore quite consistent that the old sacred book which contains these principles of Chinese science should be termed either the book of unity, or the book of changes; for doubtless this title refers to the doctrine of an absolute unity, as the fundamental principle of all things, and to the doctrine of differences, or oppositions or changes springing out of that first unity. This doctrine of an opposition in all things, in thought as in nature—will become more apparent if we reflect on the new and brilliant discoveries in natural philosophy. For as in this science, the oxygen and hydrogen parts in the chemistry of metals, or the positive and negative end of electrical phenomena, in the attracting and repelling pole of magnetism, reveal such an opposition and dynamic play of living powers in nature; so in this philosophy of China, the abstract doctrine of this opposition and dynamical change of existence seems to be laid down with a sort of mathematical generality, as the basis of all future science. In our higher natural philosophy, indeed, all this has been proved from facts and experience; and, besides, this dynamic life forms but the one element, and the one branch of the science to be acquired; and a philosophy founded entirely on this dynamical law of existence, without any regard to the other and higher principle of internal experience and moral life, intellectual intuition and divine revelation, would be at best a very partial system, and by no means of general application; or if a general application of such a system were made, it must lead to endless mistakes, errors and contradictions. That such a system of dynamical speculation and science, if extended to objects where it cannot be corroborated by facts—to all things divine and human, real, possible, or impossible, will undoubtedly lead to such a chaotic confusion of ideas; we have had a memorable experience in the German "Philosophy of Nature" of the last generation;[45] a philosophy which consisted in a fanciful play of thought with Polarities, and oppositions, and points of indifference between them, but which has been long appreciated in its true worth and real nature, and consigned to its proper limits.

Thus this outline of the old Chinese symbols of thought, which have a purely metaphysical import, would lay before us the most recent error clothed in the most antique form—but the Chinese system is in itself very remarkable and important. The fundamental text of the old sacred book on this doctrine of unity and oppositions, and which may now be easily comprehended, runs thus, according to Remusat's literal translation: "The great first Principle has engendered or produced two equations and differences, or primary rules of existence; but the two primary rules or two oppositions, namely Yn and Yang, or repose and motion (the affirmative and negative as we might otherwise call them) have produced four signs or symbols; and the four symbols have produced the eight koua, or further combinations." These eight koua are kien or ether, kui or pure water, li or pure fire, tchin or thunder, siun, the wind, kan, common water, ken, a mountain, and kuen, the earth.

On this ancient basis of Chinese philosophy, proceeding from indifference to differences, was afterwards founded the rationalist system of Lao-tseu, whose name occurs somewhat earlier than that of Confucius. The Taosse, or disciples of Reason, as the followers of this philosopher entitle themselves, have very much degenerated, and have become a complete atheistical sect; though the guilt of this must be attributed, not to the founder, but to his disciples only. It is however acknowledged that the atheistical principles of this dead science of reason, have been very widely diffused throughout the Chinese empire, and for a certain period were almost generally prevalent.

As it is necessary to keep in view a certain chronological order, in our investigations of the progressive development of Chinese intellect, I may here observe that, as far as European research has been able to ascertain, we may distinguish three principal and successive epochs in the history both of the religion and science of China. The first epoch is that of sacred tradition, and of the old constitution of the Chinese empire, and discloses those primitive views, and that primitive system of ethics, on which the empire was founded. The second, which we may fix about six centuries before our era, is the period of scientific philosophy, that pursued two opposite paths of enquiry. Confucius applied his attention entirely to the more practical study of ethics, with which, indeed, the old constitution, history and sacred traditions of the Chinese were very intimately connected; and the pure morality of Confucius which was the first branch of Chinese philosophy known in Europe, excited to a high degree the enthusiasm of many European scholars, who, by their too exclusive admiration, were prevented from forming a right estimate of the general character of Chinese philosophy.

Another system of philosophy, purely speculative and widely different from the practical and ethical doctrine of Confucius, was the system of Lao-tseu and his school, whence issued the above-mentioned rationalist sect of Taosse that has at last fallen into atheism. As to the question whether Lao-tseu travelled into the remote West, or in case he came only as far as Western Asia, whether he derived his system from the Persian or Egyptian doctrines or mediately from the Greek philosophy—this question I shall not here stop to discuss; for the matter is very doubtful in itself, and, were it even proved, still all the doctrines borrowed from the West were invested in a form purely Chinese, and clothed in quite a native garb. Those signs in the I—King, we have already spoken of, evidently comprise the germ of such an absolute, negative, and consequently atheistic rationalism—a mechanical play of idle abstractions. The third epoch in the progress of Chinese opinions is formed by the introduction of the Indian religion of Buddha or of Fo. The great revolution which had previously occurred in the old doctrines and manners of China; and the ruling spirit of that false and absolute rationalism, had already paved the way for the foreign religion of Buddha, which, of all the Pagan imitations of truth, occupies the lowest grade.