LEWES’S PROBLEMS OF LIFE AND MIND. The latter portion of this essay was published in The Nation, June 11, 1874; the introductory part is now first printed from the author's manuscript. ⁵¹ “Problems of Life and Mind. By George Henry Lewes. First series. The Foundations of a Creed. Vol. I.” 1874. 8vo, pp. 434. ⁵²

In one of the few passages of Aristotle’s voluminous writings which contain a direct reference to himself he declares that in his logical discoveries and inventions he had no help and no precursors. He says: “The syllogism as a system and theory, with precepts founded on that theory for demonstration and dialectic, has originated with me. Mine is the first step, and therefore a small one, though worked out with much thought and hard labor; it must be looked at as a first step and judged with indulgence. You, my readers, or hearers of my lectures, if you think I have done as much as can fairly be required for an initiatory start, compared with other more advanced departments of theory, will acknowledge what I have achieved and pardon what I have left others to accomplish.” “In such modest terms does Aristotle speak,” says Stuart Mill, “of what he had done for a theory which in the judgment even of so distant an age as the present, he did not as he himself says, merely commence, but completed,—so far as completeness can be affirmed of a scientific doctrine.” Such unconsciousness of self as identified with a great work, such an estimate of the work accomplished as compared to what was undertaken or hoped for, is characteristic of the world’s greatest thinkers. Newton’s indifference to the world’s estimate of what had been to him merely a diversion on the shores of the great unexplored ocean of truth before him, did not rise from an underestimate of the value of his work compared to that of his precursors, since it was not with this that *

he habitually compared it. Self-assurance of ability in thought gained from such a comparison as a remedy to self-distrust is, however, apt to be eagerly sought by thinkers of an inferior rank. Hence, independently of any criticism of the work of these thinkers there is that in the mere personality of style which enables the world to estimate the rank of a thinker, and to recognize its greatest minds. If it were not for this quality in style wisdom could hardly be distinguished from orthodoxy by any but the wise themselves, that is, by the few; or would be only a happy utterance of the opinions and expressed judgments of its admirers.

Among the many problems, now outgrown, which engaged the speculation of the ancient world was one which this quality of wisdom thus manifested and recognized without being fully known, forced upon the attention of philosophers. Sophia was the name, perhaps for this reason, given by Aristotle to the science afterwards called his metaphysics, which treats of the most abstract relations, and the first principles of the special science or philosophy separated from them though derived, according to him, from their foundations in experience, and from their special object matters. His issue with Plato was that Sophia is not eternal in a world of ideas, and is not bom in the man except as a greater power of observation, induction, and clear thought making the most of its means and opportunities. Though his first philosophy was also called ontology, since it dealt with the relations of things merely as things, or with what was common to all objects of scientific comprehension, yet he gave no warrant for the meanings which the terms ontology and metaphysics afterwards acquired, and which they now have in relation to sources of knowledge, supposed to be distinct from proper scientific evidences. These terms have become so far identified with the doctrine of transcendentalism, the modern form of Platonism, that is, with supposed or supra-sensible grounds of valid belief, that they have been discarded by many modern thinkers as tending from their acquired meanings to associate in the mind falsely the objects of legitimate speculation in the most abstruse problems with that solution of them which is by no

means accepted or acceptable to the clearest thinkers. Comte not only rejected, these terms with others like Cause and Substance, from philosophy, because they had come to connote a false doctrine, but because, as he thought, they were hopelessly tainted with a disposition of the mind in the use of language to attach the notion of reality, or of being like a thing, to every familiar abstraction, and especially to such as show a marked contrast in their apparent simplicity in the familiar though merely symbolic employment of them with their really complex and ill-understood signification. As in the crudest forms of speculative imagination things and efficient causes are personified, or, more properly, are undistinguished from the more familiar natures of persons and volitions, so Comte regarded the tendency to “realize abstractions,” or to consider them divided, just as things are divided, as a crude mode of thought relative to the positive stage which some modern sciences have entered. And to hasten the progress of the scientific mode of thought he proposed to discard certain terms, or to substitute others for them less liable to this infection.

Aristotle was not fully aware of this source of error, though he knew well enough what transcendentalism means. He rejected the latter error as a doctrine of evidence, though he was not free from the tendency to realize abstractions. Mr. Lewes, though for so many years a student and expounder of Comte, is much nearer to Aristotle than to his modern master in this respect.

It must not be supposed, however, that this confusion of differences in the abstract with concrete divisions in our knowledge is one purposely committed by any modern thinker of note, or is done consciously and formally as it was by some of the realist schoolmen. Nevertheless the tendency is so strong in all who are not empiricists by practice as well as in doctrine, that writers in whom we should a priori least expect it still give most marked indications of the tendency. It is a vice more common with the disciples and commentators of philosophy than with great original thinkers. It is what naturally happens when we become familiar with a name and

with fragments, as it were, of its meaning, long before the whole signification is set before us, or where there is no definite connotation, but rather a very vague and complex one, in the name itself, as in the words civilization, gentleman, or honor, which correspond to different notions, or complex sets of notions, in different minds according to the scope of their experience. Investigators in modern science not especially distinguished for philosophical acumen yet often have the skill to exert toward the objects of their pursuit the logical function of giving valid names, or tying things together in new bundles. This skill, so far as it goes, gives to the scientific empiricist in practice a power which is shown in the higher philosophy only by the most original thinkers. Every student of science is thus within his own province of practical empiricism a positivist: though beyond this province he may be a believer in a priori or transcendental evidence, and will almost certainly be more or less of a realist unconsciously, if not avowedly. He may even be such with respect to the more abstruse portions of his own science or to portions in which he is a learner or disciple rather than an investigator. The disposition to give a unity in thought to the meaning of a single name whose connotation is not fully known or is a vague and complex set of attributes or relations, is an always present temptation to speculate a priori or on transcendental grounds of naming: or to suppose that the empirical attributes connoted by the name are collected around a central and essential, but transcendental, condition of their co-existence, that brings them all together. The metaphysical effort is to “seize” upon this condition; but the definiteness in thought thus gained is rather in the emphasis of the seizure than in the palpable nature of its object, and the metaphysical grasp, though often vigorous, is too often empty. Aristotle was, for instance, in Logic a positivist, and was opposed to transcendentalism in philosophy, though not free, as we have said, from realism. ⁵³ Realism as a vice of thought, and transcendentalism as a doctrine of evidence, things very distinct in meaning, are closely allied in fact.

A distinction in existing terms is called an abstract one, and is often called, with a certain degree of propriety, a metaphysical distinction when it is considered in itself, and, though clearly defined, is not considered with reference to its classificatory value, or in reference to its coincidence with other distinctions which together with it serve to mark out concrete objects or distinguish them as real classes or kinds.

The classifications of natural history and chemistry afford more valuable principles of criticism on metaphysical systems

than any doctrines of method among metaphysicians themselves, either ancient or modern. This modern addition to principles of method in philosophy is of the very greatest value. Every naturalist is now familiar with the fact that empirical choice is necessarily made between characters and distinctions with reference to their value in classification. A division of animals into aqueous and terrestrial, for instance, or into air- -breathing and water-breathing, is not faulty merely because there are amphibious animals. Indeed, in a restricted sense, when it refers to the co-existence of lungs and gills the term amphibious is a more useful one in natural history than any terms referring simply to the animal’s external relations. Such terms of distinction are not found to coincide with the numerous other and less conspicuous distinctions which together determine real kinds. A division of animals into vertebrates and invertebrates, or into warm-blooded and cold-blooded, is much more fundamental, and valuable in discriminating real kinds, yet no metaphysical insight ever excogitated this value in it. The absence of any canon of method in metaphysics for discovering the relative values of its numerous distinctions is the one great vice of its systems, and is a more characteristic mark than either the doctrine of transcendentalism in any of its forms, or the tendency to vagueness and the confusion of distinctions in abstractions with differences in things. These are indeed consequences of the fatal want of method in all ancient philosophy, and in the modern so far as it is a lineal descendant from the ancient. Though many modern writers like Mr. Herbert Spencer, M. Taine (on Intelligence) and Mr. Lewes condemn transcendentalism, their works are very properly regarded as metaphysical since they continue to pursue abstractions with as little reference to their empirically determined value in classification as ever the ancients did. Analogical generalization rather than transcendentalism is the characteristic method of the system-building modern English school of metaphysics. While a naturalist or a chemist would be ready in conformity to widening knowledge of facts to remodel or revolutionize his divisions or even his nomenclature, metaphysical systems aim at the same end by allowing unlimited expansions to the meanings of terms. Vagueness in them is even claimed as a merit when it is perceived. ⁵⁴ The history of such terms as “matter and form,” as, from Aristotle downwards, they gradually came to be applied more and more widely or with vaguer and vaguer meanings until they ceased to have any meaning at all in their universal application, except that the one meant all the other did not mean; the endless disputes as to how studies should be arranged in the assumed division into arts and sciences; as to whether, for example, Logic was a science or an art; such cases illustrate the essential character of metaphysical speculation.

Mr. Lewes has, in overlooking this fact, illustrated it anew. Dissenting from Comte’s opinion that the term metaphysics is no longer of any use, and may be discarded along with the names of several allied subjects, and with terms that have a metaphysical taint and for which better terms may be substituted: holding, on the contrary, that the latter have valid meanings in experiential or positive philosophy, and that not only logic and psychology, but even metaphysics deserve a distinct place in the classification of the sciences, he discards important features of Comtism by making in metaphysics a metaphysical distinction. He divides it into valid metaphysics, amenable to the methods of science, and a branch which he calls metempirics. As a move in the tactics of philosophical debate this invention might be good. Modern transcendentalism has given formal assent to the validity and importance of modern principles of scientific method, as it had before to various precepts in philosophical method; but for itself it openly repudiates allegiance to the special methods of scientific research, and takes refuge from criticism in assumed a priori grounds of knowledge, under the guidance of Kant. It has gone, it supposes, beyond the jurisdiction of the principles of method to which science is subjected. What has it to do with the rules and instruments of induction if its evidence is not inductive? To dislodge metaphysics from this fortress by effecting a diversion and a division of its forces; to claim for science all the rational problems of metaphysics; to claim the name metaphysics for the rational solutions of them in which numbers can agree, and, for this purpose, to invent a name happily (or unhappily) adapted to

bear the odium of all the follies and errors for which metaphysics has been condemned; namely, the word metempirics— ill-fated at birth—such appears to be our author’s purpose. But in this he has assumed that metaphysics is characterized by the doctrine of transcendentalism; that it is the doctrine of innate ideas.

It would be difficult, if not impossible, to assign to the name metaphysics its meaning in modern usage, or to distinguish it from general philosophy and the abstruser parts of the sciences by proper definition; and especially, so far as its method is concerned, to distinguish it from the precepts of method common to all well-conducted speculations. A lack of method, or of many well-grounded canons of research and criticism, appears to be all that truly characterizes it, independently of an enumeration of the special topics and doctrines to which the name is usually given. Its method at any particular epoch in the history of philosophy appears to have been little else than the application of some principal doctrine in it to subsidiary topics, the defense of which against sceptical criticisms, or against other principles of method, has generally been the most distinctive part it has played in the history of philosophy. What is called the “method” of metaphysics is really an essential part of it, considered as a scientific doctrine. For example, the realism of Plato, and the forms of the doctrine held by the Scotist and Thomist schoolmen; Plato’s doctrine, that all real knowledge is a kind of reminiscence, with the modern doctrines of innate, transcendental, a priori, or intuitive elements in knowledge; Descartes’s egoistic basis of philosophical demonstration, and the more recent developments of idealism, are at once parts of metaphysics and principles of method in its procedures. On the other hand, Plato’s contributions to the principles of method, in his doctrine of definition and his examples of dialectic art; Aristotle’s objections to Plato’s realism, which were the foundations of scholastic nominalism, and the ontological or universal axioms on which Aristotle based his theory and precepts of syllogism; his defense of induction as the basis of axioms and the ultimate ground of all truths; and the various precepts of philosophical procedure proposed

by Descartes, Bacon, Leibnitz, and by Locke, Newton, and their modern followers, all belong to the general doctrine of method, which, so far from being peculiar to what is now called metaphysics, is really more characteristic of the modern sciences and of the Positive philosophy.

That vague and ill-defined body of doctrine which is none the less distinctly felt by all modern students of philosophy to be in a sort of antagonism to the spirit of the modern sciences and to the Positive philosophy, cannot, therefore, be clearly distinguished by a marked difference of method. Its distinction is really more fundamental, and relates to original motives rather than to differences of method in research. Yet it is true that this distinction of motives affects method very materially, and results in marked differences in modes of thought. Modern metaphysics disregards many points of method deemed essential in the Positive philosophy, not because it is ignorant of them, but because they are seen or felt to be opposed to the vital interests of the main purposes for which metaphysics is studied. When schools of philosophy differ, as they do in the fundamental division of them, in respect to the motives of their questionings or the purposes of their researches, their differences can be rationally accounted for only by recognizing their origins in differences of character in philosophers. Though it may not be strictly true that men are born either Platonists or Aristotelians, it is certain that those who take the most active part in the philosophical discussions of their day have enlisted early in life in one or the other of the two great schools, inspired predominately by one or the other of two distinct sets of philosophical motives, which we may characterize briefly as motives of defense in questioned sentiments, and motives of scientific or utilitarian inquisitiveness. The points of method or doctrine which suit either attitude of mind are those it adopts and pursues; and in modern times the notion has come in vogue, and received the sanction of metaphysics, that there are really two independent methods of equal generality, and applicable to two distinct departments of human thought.

It would be futile to classify systems of thought by this distinction in motives, since both sets of motives come into play

in every thinker whose doctrines are historical, or the outgrowth of the mutual criticisms of contending sects in the past. Thinkers not uncommonly hold and even advocate, as Mr. Lewes has done, as a Positivist, for many years (in writings which therefore appear in marked contrast to his present work), doctrines derived from the school opposed to that in which they had become really enlisted, either by native character or early influences. This attitude having also the appearance of a judicial one, or manifesting a disposition to find the truth between extreme views, is often consciously assumed, though thinkers arrive at it from opposite positions, and unconsciously bring to it opposite motives of research. These motives would determine, therefore, grounds of division between thinkers who really differ less in fundamental positions, either of doctrine or method, than in modes of thought

Mr. Lewes, in his plea for the higher speculative studies, is so far a metaphysician, or so far retains the effects, in his mode of thought, of the early influences of the Scottish school, that he fails to distinguish the special causes or exigencies of metaphysics from what he generously calls its “method”; though he qualifies it as “irrational.” His account of this “method” is extremely vague. Comte had identified the doctrines of metaphysics with the once leading dogmas of realism; the assimilation of abstractions to things, or to self-existent and permanent beings, either material or spiritual, being the common point of departure in these scholastic speculations. But he did so because he believed these dogmas to take their rise from an erroneous but natural tendency of the mind in its earliest use of abstract terms and meanings, or from a vice of language, to which the mind is always prone, and against which the positive or scientific modes of thought and criticism are the only safeguards. With this understanding of the term he rejected metaphysics, both name and thing, from his system of rational studies; and with metaphysics he also condemned the allied studies of logic and psychology, choosing to connect what he valued in them with the general science of method, and with that of sociology. The English followers of Comte did not accept the latter reforms of positivism. Logic and psychology still hold their place in English

thought, though the decline of strictly logical studies (which began long before Comte) had made itself distinctly felt in the deterioration of British philosophy, and is still very noticeable, notwithstanding the wide and beneficial effect of the publication of Mill’s “Logic” thirty years ago. The rehabilitation of metaphysics, both name and thing, now proposed by Mr. Lewes, appears to him a step in the same direction. He wishes to restore what is valuable and rational in the doctrines and problems of metaphysics to the rank of a distinct science, to which he would give its ancient and honored name.

But, to do this in the interests of true science, it is necessary to exclude from metaphysics the doctrines and problems which are due to its “irrational method”; and he separates these, at least in name, by calling them “metempirics.” All that we have to do, he says, is to exclude from the problems of metaphysics the metempirical elements, the questions which in their very form demand more knowledge than experience can furnish—all questions of transcendental origins and conditions— in short, all arbitrary questionings, to which gratuitous assumptions only can be given in answer, and we have left principles and problems that may be properly collected and studied under the name “metaphysics.” To these he gives the taking title of “Problems of Life and Mind,” a title which tacitly appeals to both of the two sets of motives, scientific inquisitiveness and the sentimental interests, which have hitherto divided the speculative world. .

“Speculative minds cannot,” he says, “resist the fascination of metaphysics, even when forced to admit that its inquiries are hopeless. This fact must be taken into account, since it makes refutation powerless. Indeed, one may say, generally, that no deeply-rooted tendency was ever extirpated by adverse argument. . . . Contempt, ridicule, argument are all in vain against tendencies toward metaphysical speculation. There is but one effective mode of displacing an error, and that is to replace it by a conception which, while readily adjusting itself to conceptions firmly held on other points, is seen to explain the facts more completely.”

We entirely agree with Mr. Lewes that it is idle to argue against “tendencies,” even tendencies to error; for this would be to argue against human nature itself. It is to specific errors that we ought to address our arguments; and we ought, by dividing

the tendencies—the erroneous or misdirected from the true, to expose the false ones in their consequences, and thus conquer them. The true and false, or the well and ill directed, are naturally mixed in the speculative tendencies of the mind. To condemn all that has been or is now called metaphysics would, therefore, be on the face of it a rash procedure. But to invent a new name merely as a name for the errors or the misdirections in speculation which are involved in its questions, and for the sake only of retaining metaphysics as the name of scientific principles and problems that have been or may hereafter be included in the higher philosophy, is too much in accordance with older metaphysical principles of nomenclature; or, rather, is too much like the older and crude practice of metaphysicians, to be cordially received as a scientific reform. Botanists, zoölogists, and chemists have made it evident that a distinction, however clearly defined, is not of value in classification unless it is something more than a distinction. It must coincide with and be of use as a sign of other distinctions— that is, be a mark of the things distinguished by it, in order to have real value in classification.

Mr. Lewes is so far from recognizing, in the rules of philosophizing followed by him, this important modern addition to scientific method, the disregard of which is a chief cause of futile hair-splittings and aberrations, both in science and metaphysics, that he shows in many parts of his book a noticeable lack of familiarity with it. We do not believe that metempirics will ever become a scientific name, and we are quite sure it will not be acceptable to metaphysicians. As a literary invention it is not without merits; and, indeed, the literary merits of the whole book are by far its greatest. “Metempiric” is a good retort to the reproach of the term “empiric,1” and, as a ruse de guerre, not a bad device for dividing the enemy’s forces. Divide et impera is good strategy; and there is practically much satisfaction in a name. It is upon the associations involved in the term “metaphysics” that the larger division of modern speculative thinkers mainly subsist. To deprive them of their name would, if practicable, take away the apparent defensibleness of their last positions, namely, that their “method” is peculiar

to their problems; and that the doctrines they maintain, or defend, are safely intrenched in the transcendental mystery of the mind’s birth, and are exempt from scientific criticism. “Experience,” however, has also come to be a name so much respected that these thinkers, anticipating the movements which would appropriate their title to respectability, have already for some time made a counter movement, and come to hold that the evidence they contend for as ultimate still lies within the province of experience, or is not known beforehand, at least in actual consciousness; and to hold that it is not gathered from any but the sources of particular experiences; but that intuitive universal truths are, nevertheless, not generalizations of experience, and are not even to be tested and ultimately evinced as such. Induction is allowed only a limited range. Intuition is held to be another and an independent form of experience. This adoption of the word “experience” is in accordance with the time-honored practice in metaphysics of annexing troublesome neighbors, giving a vague and metaphysical expansion to the meanings of hostile words, and thus destroying their critical powers.

The sense in which induction was used by Aristotle and by the best of England’s thinkers in the past, as the basis both of the intuitive and the discursive operations of thought, or as being involved in sensible perception and in reflective intuitions, or in rapid, habitual, and instinctive judgments generally, quite as essentially as in formal and consciously guarded or tested generalizations, is the sense in which these metaphysical thinkers reject induction as the real basis of all truths; and Mr. Lewes, as well as Mr. Spencer, M. Taine, and other late eclectics, weakly and confusedly go along with them—confusedly, on account of the present great deterioration of philosophical language in reference to the questions common to the present time and the old logicians, which the latter treated with a precision of philosophical language unfortunately wanting in the conceptulastic terms and phraseology of the present day. We have grounds of hope, however, that the present phase of vague speculation will soon pass away, and that a generation of thinkers will succeed, trained in so much of the

refined and effective terminology and mode of thought of the nominalist logicians as Mill’s “Logic” has rescued from oblivion; thinkers who will be able to understand without confusion the nature of axioms.

The fact that axioms are capable of clear, distinct, and adequate statement in language, and are not consciously based on remembered or recorded particulars of experience, but are intuitive, or habitual and rapid, interpretations of valid meanings in terms; the fact that an axiom may at first be merely one among a thousand early and spontaneous generalizations of the mind; that of these the great majority are overthrown by subsequent experience, while the one which becomes an axiom, meeting with no counter experience, but, coinciding with all subsequent experience, survives, is strengthened, and becomes habitual; that it becomes so elementary and so fundamental a habit that no other habit or power of thought can oppose it; that it has thus determined our powers of conception as well as our beliefs through experience—these facts are in strict accordance with the Aristotelian doctrine that axioms are based upon inductions, although they are not the results of a formal and consciously guarded procedure in accordance with the canons of inductive logic. In their primary signification and in this connection the terms “induction” and “inductive” refer directly to evidences, and not to any special means and processes of collating and interpreting them. Writers of the sort we have characterized continually confound these two meanings. So, also, they confound the meanings, one valid and the other not so, in the terms “intuition” and “intuitive.” Mr. Lewes, after having distinctly contrasted (pp. 342-348) intuitive and discursive judgments, and characterized the former as rapid or habitual inferences, adds shortly afterwards (p. 356) that he does “not wish to be understood as adopting the view that axioms are founded on induction; on the contrary,” he says, “I hold them to be founded on intuition. They are founded on experience, because intuition is empirical.”

Intuition in its proper meaning of rapid, instinctive judgment, whether in the objective sensible perception of relatively concrete matters, or in the most abstract, differs equally from inductive

and deductive processes of conscious inference. But there is no contrast or alternative between intuition and induction in reference to ultimate grounds of. belief, except in the spurious metaphysical meaning of “intuition”; which Mr. Lewes has, it therefore appears, confusedly adopted, while seeming to hold his former positions as a positivist. Induction in one of its meanings, as a process of conscious generalization, and intuition, as another form of judgment, are only contrasted as judgments; the one consciously and the other unconsciously determined, on the occasion of making the judgment, by past particulars of experience. If Mr. Lewes had been a purist in philosophy he might, perhaps, escape from this objection, on the ground that what is meant by the phrase, “grounds of a belief,” is not the unconscious but the conscious causes of it; the facts or reasons from which we infer it. What is properly meant, however, by affirming particulars of experience to be the ground of belief in axioms, is not that these particulars are present individually in memory on every occasion of making such a judgment; but only that they are the proper tests of validity in an ultimate philosophical examination of axiomatic truths; and are, as they occur, the actual and conscious causes of the judgments, and of their growing certitude, and of the growing precision of meaning in the terms by which they are expressed; though individually they are not retained or recalled in memory.

So far, however, are our author’s statements from being entitled to careful consideration on the ground of precision in the use of philosophical terms, that by far the greater part of what we should have to say about his book, if we had space to say it, would relate to obscurities growing out of his inattention to ambiguities and vagueness in philosophical language. Thus, he follows a bad late use of the term a priori; which properly, and in Kant, means a logical ground or cause of knowledge; and he applies the term to inherited, organized, or instinctive tendencies to the association of particulars in experience, or to “aptitudes for thought”; to which Kant properly refuses the name a priori (p. 410). Again, from not seeing an ambiguity in the word knowledge, he discovers (p. 405) what appears to him a contradiction in Kant’s doctrine; which seems

to assert that “all knowledge begins with experience” a posteriori, and yet asserts that “some knowledge is antecedent to and independent of experience.” Our author surely cannot have failed to meet in his extensive studies with the distinction in metaphysics between the commencement or introduction, and the source (exordium et origo), of knowledge; as well as the distinction of actual or present knowledge and that which we are said to possess in memory, although we are not at the time thinking of it. Yet he seems to have forgotten these distinctions. All that Kant maintains is that a knowledge like that of memory, a knowledge in posse, of which, as he thinks, experience cannot be the source, is involved, and may be recognized, in the actual judgments of experience; but is not recognized before experience; or except as a form given to the matter of experience—a doctrine vague enough, we admit, in meaning, and doubtless gratuitous in fact, but not self- -contradictory. In short, Mr. Lewes’s book is full of illustrations of the importance of improving metaphysics, not as a positive science, but as a dialectic art; an art allied both to logic and to lexicography. There are, indeed, such treatises in existence, which are much less interesting than Mr. Lewes’s book. Such treatises are generally, and ought to be, as dry as a dictionary, but do not the less deserve attention, as correctives of the current loose thinking on the most abstract subjects.