feeling, much varnishing of vice and beautifying of corruption, is true; but then it contains much more to purify and exalt; to give us knowledge and power; to infuse into our souls a thirst to promote human liberty and happiness; to make us feel the holiness of disinterested affection; to kindle in our hearts a passionate love for all that is beautiful and good; to lift our thoughts into serener regions of existence than actual life furnishes; to fill our imaginations with images of loveliness and grandeur, which shall solace disappointment and people solitude; to enable us to interpret aright the sublime language, written all over the universe, in which nature teaches her lessons of wisdom and power; and to penetrate our whole being with an intense enthusiasm for virtue and truth, which shall bear the soul bravely up amid the coldness and baseness of the world, and inspire it with a lofty confidence in those eternal realities, before which all the world's games and gauds shrivel into ashes.

VAGARIES OF VOLITION.

SINCE Socrates succeeded in bringing down Philosophy from heaven to earth, certain philosophers have played queer games of coquetry with the goddess, making her utter strange things in stranger jargon, and stand responsible for doctrines she could hardly have learned in her original home. Every thing in thought or conduct opposed to common sense and moral sense, struts about under the name of philosophy. The ingenuity of the individual intellect has been exercised to frame a system by which dust is raised to deity. The mind, in its mad pranks in the cloud-land, has come to prattle very prettily on universal laws, to reduce creation to a little corner of man's brain, and to exalt itself to the throne of things. Now if Philosophy emigrated from the skies to teach men the deification of Self, it becomes a question whether that emigration was not accelerated in a way similar to that recorded of a certain great philosopher, who was nine days falling from the empyrean, and has since never been in high repute among some people, owing to a prejudice against a peculiarity in his foot.

The egotistic system, indeed, which makes the individual mind the originator of every thing, and denies the objective existence of things, is probably the greatest joke of metaphysics--the finest instance of Hermes playing into the hands of Momus-the only system in which that demure dame, Philosophy, can be caught giggling, with a sly squint in her blue eye. There is a philosopher who carries the system to its legitimate consequences, and never mourns in

He it is that

The subtlest

cold weather, because he considers himself personally responsible for the obliquity of the earth's axis. thunders, lightens, rains, snows and shines. intellect in New England is wedded to this theory, though we have never heard that he is troubled with that responsibility in respect to the axis of the earth, which distresses his worthy contemporary. The best statement of the whole matter is found in a couple of his short sharp sentences. "The world is mind precipitated, and the volatile essence is forever escaping again into the state of free thought. Man imprisoned, man crystallized, man vegetative, speaks to man impersonated." In this way we can account for that relationship between nature and human nature, which has formed the theme of poetry. We see ourselves in outward things in a variety of quaint shapes. The small potato we tread upon, the humble turnip we eat, are chips of our block -brothers transmigrated from our brains, and dungeoned in inferior forms. Man is every thing, and every thing is man -stars, snakes, clouds, wind, hail, soils, rocks, beer, thunder, lightning, and the rest. Such a system of nature as this, like many other remarkable revelations, is certainly important if true. Are we not cannibals, to eat, drink, and wear ourselves? Coleridge in his Biographia Literaria has a rhyming. statement of the "Fichtean Egoismus," which makes the whole system intelligible to all capacities.

"Eu! Dei vices gerens, ipse Divus,

(Speak English, Friend!) the God Imperativus,
Here on this market-cross aloud I cry ;

I, I, I! itself, I !

The form and the substance, the what and the why,
The when and the where, and the low and the high,
The inside and outside, the earth and the sky;

I, you, and he, and he, you, and I,

All souls and all bodies are I itself I!

All I itself I!

(Fools, a truce with this startling!)

All my I! all my I!

He's a heretic dog who but adds Betty Martin !

Thus cried the God with high imperial tone:
In robe of stiffest state, that scoff'd at beauty,
A pronoun-verb imperative he shone-
Then substantive and plural singular grown,
He thus spake on: Behold in I alone
(For ethics boast a syntax of their own,)
Or if in ye, yet as I doth depute ye,
In O! I, you, the vocative of duty!

I of the world's whole lexicon the root!

Of the whole universe of touch, sound, sight,

The genitive and ablative to boot :

The accusative of wrong, the nom'native of right,
And in all cases the case absolute !
Self-construed, I all other moods decline;
Imperative, from nothing we derive us ;
Yet as a super-postulate of mine,
Unconstrued antecedence I assign

To X, Y, Z, the God infinitivus.”

This spider's-web of the world, which we spin out of our own brains, without knowing it, is a rare place to catch flies. The house that we thus make, is at once a good habitation for the I, and a prison for the Not I, which Not I—or, as it has been corrupted, naughty-we catch and eat. Philosophy has done great things for humanity.

The original apple which tempted Eve seems to grow still in a good many orchards. "Ye shall be as Gods," gives a fascinating flavor to the old fruit. But it must be confessed that few are able to bear their apotheosis gracefully, after they have effected their object. We must judge these self-asserted divinities by their works; and thus judged, few will stand the trial. They would be Jupiters; but they snivel instead of thunder, and darken instead of lighten.

They command the mountain to assume the shape of their thought, but the mountain very properly declines, believing probably that the change would not be for the better. Nature, very well contented as she is, refuses to rush into hazardous speculations. They are thus thwarted in their ambition at the outset. They are monarchs without subjects and without a domain. The only thing left for them is to write books stating their claims, and asserting with inconceivable assurance that the external world has acknowledged them. The truth, however, leaks out, in spite of their hardy assertions. The public turns a deaf ear to their complaints. The trunk-makers make sad havoc with their printed sheets. Nature not only will not be theirs, but grudges them the smallest portion of her corn and potatoes. The ox looks at them in the fields, and wonders if they had a steak in the country. The calf grows mutinous at the idea of being killed for the purpose of giving business to their digestive powers. If they look upwards, the clouds growl out sarcasms on their pretensions, or mockingly mimic their writings in an extemporary drizzle of mist. The stars treat them with even more provoking nonchalance, keeping up an incessant and malicious winking, which says more plainly than words could express," You think, poor thing, that you can mould us, do ye?" There is hardly an object in creation which does not have a fling at them in some way, from the musquito which tipples in their blood, to the horse which declines their company by giving them a throw into the mud. Nature will not be bullied by philosophy. Hard words and impudent pretensions butter none of her parsnips. It would be a curious investigation for botanists, to discover if the flowers, celebrated in some verses as exponents of the writer's thoughts, felt at all flattered by being thus patronized; or if a rumored insurrection in the vegetable kingdom, arising from a rage at perversions of their qualities in certain straw