possessing. We promise that on our part no flagging shall be found, if our subscribers continue to us the same kindly countenance as heretofore. The arrangements we have made and are making to secure novelty, variety, and sterling merit in the contributions of the succeeding year, we are confident will give complete satisfaction. All that conscientious solicitude can effect, we shall accomplish; and we know that our friends,-readers and contributors combined, will spare no effort to widen our circulation, and extend our usefulness. It is true that this year has not been without its shades; but ever and anonThe words of cheer and blessing fell Like silence on our fears. Far from resting contented with the past-though to that we can point with justifiable congratulation-we are determined to press on still with unwearied energy. There is work enough before us: "For the structure that we raise, Time is with materials filled; Our to-days and yesterdays Are the blocks with which we build." To the expression of free thought, impartially exhibited in debate but yet subordinated to the highest and holiest influences which can operate on life, we are pledged. This field we occupy alone. Since our first issues were, in fear and hope, committed to the public eye, many periodicals have had "their rise and their forgetting;" we have, though not without a struggle, been placed in the fore-van of periodical literature. The applauding smiles of our friends flash mystic hints of greater success; whether it comes or no, we shall at least endeavour to be worthy of it. May we in conclusion once more call the attention of our readers to the im portant series of leading articles to be commenced with our new volume, by Mr. Samuel Neil, entitled "EPOCH MEN;" the very title is suggestive of those who by their lives have made their age famous, "And dying left behind them Footprints on the sands of time." We think from the plan exhibited by the author in our last number, that this series bids fair to be of great interest and permanent utility, especially with such an audience as the readers of the British Controversialist. Dear friends, we must make our exit with the time-honoured, genial, and seasonable gratulation, "A MERRY CHRISTMAS, AND A HAPPY NEW YEAR." THE BRITISH CONTROVERSIALIST. European Philosophy. BY SAMUEL NEIL, Author of" The Art of Reasoning," " Elements of Rhetoric," &c. XENOPHANES. FROM a few far-scattered and disjointed fragments,-each, taken by itself, crude and inexplicit,-to shape out even an approximation to the real form of any ancient theoretic system of thought, is no easy matter. "Here a little and there a little," in varied connections, we may have the opinions of one of the olden worthies of the world alluded to, or even the very expressions he employed cited; but the links of ordination are wanting, the logical sequence of the ideas is lost, the organic coherence of thought with thought has disappeared from among the traditions of men. In these circumstances, it is the duty of the historian of the progress of philosophic thought to take a full view of the thinker's era, to hold in remembrance all the philosophic influences which could, with any degree of probability, operate upon him, and then to give the individual whose doctrines are under consideration the credit of the fairest possible interpretation of which they are susceptible, such an interpretation, namely, as shall "fit in" his system to those of his predecessors, his cotemporaries, and his successors. Truths do not arise fortuitously, as the clouds seem to form themselves out of the invisible mists, but by a fixed process of organic growth, of spontaneous yet inevitable evolution and development. The grand and glorious attribute of thought is its continuousness. It is never complete and final, and yet "it hath a springing and germinant accomplishment through many ages." It is a process of causative propagation. VOL. 11. B "Throw in the water now a stone; And right anon thou shalt see well And that the third, and so forth, brother, Much wider than himselfen was." Even so philosophy constantly tends to move the multitudinous mass of inertitude on which it impinges, and strives to produce a wider range of thought; yet each circle is receptive of power from that which antecedes it, and emanant of causative energy to that which follows. Thoroughly to know one circle of thought necessitates some acquaintance with all others, and to expound, in any continuous, logically sequent order, the thought-system of any great thinker, and especially one of whose opinions little else is known than a few fragmental, semi-oracular sentences, or some disconnected and somewhat ambiguous allusions,-requires that the whole shall be viewed in relation to the age in which he lived, and the state of thought at the time in which it was elaborated. These difficulties we have encountered in our course before, and have been, to a certain extent, enabled to overcome them. We shall endeavour, with similar aim, to present such an abstract of the Xenophanian tenets as shall show his true, relative place among those whom fame "Is lavish to attest the lords of mind." If we fail, we shall do no more than others who have preceded us; if we succeed, we shall thank their failures for showing us the way we should avoid, and thus inciting us to essay "a new departure," which we do now,— "With watch as circumspect as seamen keep, EXPOSITION. "Are there not * * Two points in the adventure of the diver? There are these two moments also in the life of each great thinker-the moment when the method of any course of specu lative thought is suggested and determined on, and that in which the results are all converged to one central crystallinely clear thought, the pearl of price, for which all the labour had been undertaken. To know the object at which any thinker aimed, and the result obtained in the endeavour to accomplish it, is, therefore, the all needful condition of a correct appreciation of his method and doctrine. Xenophanes existed in the midst of philosophic influences, vital and effective, and must have been strongly moved and excited by them. Their potency was everywhere operative on the minds of men of thoughtful mood; and though calculated to give a certain amount of quietness to the soul, full of thronging thoughts, yet, as they appeared to him fraught with much error, resistance became his duty. The deities of Homer and Hesiod were full of presentative grace; they gratified the imagination, and gave a dogmatic answer to the queries of the reason-a solution to the difficulties under which the mind "groaned and was weary." The Ionic School, in its tendencies at least, at this time, divided the material, the atom-composed, the actual universe, from the formative, i. e., the deific power. The Italic School endowed the primal Monad with perpetual emanence and endogeneity-the capability, the desire, and the active exercise of self-development. The theories in each case rise high up out of and beyond the phenomena in which they received their occasions, and each claims to satisfy some craving need which the intellect feels. Shall we not come nearer to the truth, if we interrogate the soul as to its real wants, those claimant desires, with whose excitements it continually throbs and palpitates, and for the satisfying of which it incessantly labours? If it is allotted to humanity to know truth, there must be in it some criterion of what constitutes truth, some ground on which it must believe that it has found truth, i. e., repose of soul. The external varieties of things, ever changing and fluctuating, cannot be rested in as the whole truth of things; neither can the mathematic relations of ideas, be held as those alone which operate in thought and thought-endowed being. There must be that in the soul itself which, indicating its wants, shall shadow forth the satisfactory, which must be to man the true. Not the phenomenal, nor yet the mathematical, can be the trustworthy method of attaining knowledge; but the logical, i. c., the principle that unfolds the conditions upon which any idea may be regarded as proven or certain. It is thus that the necessities of the reason-the logic of thought-become the prime elements of philosophy, and that their externalization takes the fore rank in every investigative process, i. e., the à priori constructive capacities of the soul are recognized as the presagers, the prophets, and the interpreters of phenomenal truth. True science is the product of reason, not of sense. The reason, therefore, is not only the suggestor, the originator, and the revealer, but also the ultimate judge of the True. Logic is the lawgiver of philosophy. The strict formalism of thought, by which Xenophanes guided his investigations, is not more remarkable than the deep religious earnestness of his nature. Hence we find him seeking in God the One grand fundamental idea of philosophy. "For whereso I my thoughts direct, They always return to the One, the Changeless; all becomes, This One, how much has it been misconceived and misinterpreted! By anthropomorphic and polytheistic errors, men have beguiled themselves, and, even to their own hurt," have changed the Theic idea "into a lie.” 66 "There is one God, indeed, the greatest of gods and of mortals, Of like shape to that in which they themselves are forth formed.” Even so have men conformed their ideas of the Deity to the foolish imaginations of their own hearts; and, in the vain attempt to anthropomorphize all thought,— "Such things of the gods are narrated by Hesiod and Homer, As would be held as shame and abiding reproach among mankind- It is, indeed, true, that the impotence of human reason is such, that absolute truth is incognoscible by man. Phenomism, the belief in the apparent, imprisons him, and the finitude of his nature limits his power of beholding the infinite amplitude of truth. Incomplete knowledge is error, inasmuch as it does not encompass and contain the whole truth. In this limited sense, the saying of Sotion is right, that Xenophanes was the first to assert that all things are incomprehensible, i. e., are unable to be contained in the finite thought of humanity; for, "Certainly no mortal e'er knew, and ne'er shall there be one Knowing well both the gods and the All, whose nature we speak of; In consequence of these defects, man is hindered from attaining true knowledge; nevertheless, as he widens his thoughts by patient study, he learns more and more, and the gods favour the diligent inquirer into the mystic marvels with which man's life is environed, and of which he is a great part. *See, for all those passages of Xenophanian doctrine, and extracts relative thereto, marked in the text by inverted commas, Karsten's "Philosophorum Græcorum Veterum Reliquiæ," Amsterdam, 1830; Brandis' Commentationum Eleaticarum," Altona, 1813; Cousin's "Fragments Philosophiques," vol. i., Paris, 1847. |