itself to the old Alexandrian thinkers was so utterly different from the
popular conception of it in modern England, that one may very likely be
able to tell what little one knows about it, almost without mentioning a
single doctrine which now influences the religious world.
But far greater is my fear, that to a modern British auditory, trained
in the school of Locke, much of ancient thought, heathen as well as
Christian, may seem so utterly the product of the imagination, so
utterly without any corresponding reality in the universe, as to look
like mere unintelligible madness. Still, I must try; only entreating my
hearers to consider, that how much soever we may honour Locke and his
great Scotch followers, we are not bound to believe them either
infallible, or altogether world-embracing; that there have been other
methods than theirs of conceiving the Unseen; that the common ground
from which both Christian and heathen Alexandrians start, is not merely
a private vagary of their own, but one which has been accepted
undoubtingly, under so many various forms, by so many different races,
as to give something of an inductive probability that it is not a mere
dream, but may be a right and true instinct of the human mind. I mean
the belief that the things which we see--nature and all her phenomena--
are temporal, and born only to die; mere shadows of some unseen
realities, from whom their laws and life are derived; while the eternal
things which subsist without growth, decay, or change, the only real,
only truly existing things, in short, are certain things which are not
seen; inappreciable by sense, or understanding, or imagination,
perceived only by the conscience and the reason. And that, again, the
problem of philosophy, the highest good for man, that for the sake of
which death were a gain, without which life is worthless, a drudgery, a
degradation, a failure, and a ruin, is to discover what those unseen
eternal things are, to know them, possess them, be in harmony with them,
and thereby alone to rise to any real and solid power, or safety, or
nobleness. It is a strange dream. But you will see that it is one
which does not bear much upon "points of controversy," any more than on
"Locke's philosophy;" nevertheless, when we find this same strange dream
arising, apparently without intercommunion of thought, among the old
Hindoos, among the Greeks, among the Jews; and lastly, when we see it
springing again in the Middle Age, in the mind of the almost forgotten
author of the "Deutsche Theologie," and so becoming the parent, not
merely of Luther's deepest belief, or of the German mystic schools of
the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but of the great German
Philosophy itself as developed by Kant, and Fichte, and Schelling, and
Hegel, we must at least confess it to be a popular delusion, if nothing
better, vast enough and common enough to be worth a little patient
investigation, wheresoever we may find it stirring the human mind.
But I have hope, still, that I may find sympathy and comprehension among
some, at least, of my audience, as I proceed to examine the ancient
realist schools of Alexandria, on account of their knowledge of the
modern realist schools of Germany. For I cannot but see, that a
revulsion is taking place in the thoughts of our nation upon metaphysic
subjects, and that Scotland, as usual, is taking the lead therein. That
most illustrious Scotchman, Mr. Thomas Carlyle, first vindicated the
great German Realists from the vulgar misconceptions about them which
were so common at the beginning of this century, and brought the minds
of studious men to a more just appreciation of the philosophic severity,
the moral grandeur, of such thinkers as Emmanuel Kant, and Gottlieb
Fichte. To another Scotch gentleman, who, I believe, has honoured me by