FRANCE. THEORY invented, PARTICULARITY.* PALPABILITY. Tendency to individualize, embody, insulate, ex. gr. the vitreous and the resinous fluids instead of the positive and negative forces of the power of electricity. Thus too, it was not sufficient that oxygen was the principal, and with one exception, the only then known acidifying substance; the power and principle of acidification must be embodied and as it were impersonated and hyposta, sized in this gas. Hence the idolism of the French, here expressed in one of its results, viz. palpability. Ideas are out of the question; but whatever is admitted to be conceivable must be imageable, and the imageable must be fancied tangible-the non-apparency of either or both being accounted for by the disproportion of our senses, not by the nature of the conceptions. Lastly, we might exhibit the same qualities in their moral, religious, and political manifestations in the cosmopolitism of Germany, the contemptuous nationality of the Englishman, and the ostentatious and boastful nationality of the Frenchman. The craving of sympathy marks the German: inward pride the Englishman: vanity the Frenchman. So again, en thusiasm, visionariness seems the tendency of the German zeal, zealotry of the English: fanaticism of the French. But the thoughtful reader will find these and many other characteristic points contained in, and deducible from the relations in which the mind of the three countries bears to TIME. GERMANY. PAST and FUTURE. ENGLAND. PAST and PRESENT. FRANCE. THE PRESENT. A whimsical friend of mine, of more genius than discretion, characterizes the Scotchman of literature (confining his remark, however, to the period since the Union) as a dull Frenchman and a superficial German. But when I recollect the splendid exceptions of HUME, ROBERTSON, SMOLLETT, REID, THOMSON (if this last instance be not objected to as savouring of geographical pedantry, that truly amiable man and genuine poet having been born but a few furlongs from the English border), DUGALD STEWART, BURNS, WALTER SCOTT, HOG and CAMPBELL-not to mention the very numerous physicians and prominent dissenting ministers, born and bred beyond the Tweed—I hesitate in recording so wild an opinion, which derives its plausibility, chiefly from the circumstance so honorable to our northern sister, that Scotchmen generally have more, and a more learned, education than the same ranks in other countries, below the first class; but in part likewise, from the common mistake of confounding the general character of an emigrant, whose objects are in one place and his best affections in another, with the particular character of a Scotchman: to which we may add, perhaps, the clannish spirit of provincial literature, fostered undoubtedly by the peculiar relations of Scotland, and of which therefore its metropolis may be a striking, but is far from being a soltary, instance. ESSAY II. Η ὅδος κατώ. The road downward. HERACLIT. Fragment. AMOUR de moi même; mais bien calculè: was the motto and maxim of a French philosopher. Our fancy inspirited by the more imaginative powers of hope and fear enables us to present to ourselves the future as the present and thence to accept a scheme of self-love for a system of morality. And doubtless, an enlightened self-interest would recommend the same course of outward conduct, as the sense of duty would do; even though the motives in the former case had respect to this life exclusively. But to show the desirableness of an object, or the contrary, is one thing to excite the desire, to constitute the aversion, is another: the one being to the other as a common guide-post to the "chariot instinct with spirit," which at once directs and conveys, or (to use a more trivial image) as the hand, and hour-plate, or at the utmost the regulator, of a watch to the spring and wheelwork, or rather to the whole watch. Nay, where the sufficiency and exclusive validity of the former are adopted as the maxim (regula maxima) of the moral sense, it would be a fairer and fuller comparison to say, that it is to the latter as the dial to the sun, indicating its path by intercepting its radiance. But let it be granted, that in certain individuals from a happy evenness of nature, formed into a habit by the strength of education, the influence of example, and by favorable circumstances in general, the actions diverging from self-love as their center should be precisely the same as those produced from the Christian principle, which requires of us that we should place our self and our neighbor at an equi-distance, and love both alike as modes in which we realize and exhibit the love of God above all: wherein would the difference be then? I answer boldly: even in that, for |