We have seen reverend doctors of divinity present no very dignified spectacle when they have suddenly bethought them of paying their somewhat late devotions to philosophy. Accustomed to receive, as their due, a profound respect from others, they assume with easy confidence the cloak of the philosopher; and while they are thinking only how to arrange its folds with classic grace, they are unconsciously winding round their sturdy limbs what will sadly entangle their feet, and bring them, with shame and sore contusions, to the ground. Some will parade an ancient theory of morals, and introduce to us with all the pride of fresh discovery what now looks "as pale and hollow as a ghost." Others explain the beautiful; and with a charming audacity, a courage that is quite exhilarating, propound some theoretic fancy which has the same relation to philosophy that Quarle's Emblems bear to that pictorial art they especially delight to descant upon. But the greater number of these belated wanderers in the paths of philosophy, enter through the portals of religion. How could it be otherwise? Religion and philosophy touch at so many points--have so many problems in common--that the first moment the good man bethinks him he will be profound, sees him plunged in all the darkest enigmas of speculative thought, there to lose himself in we know not what heretical delusions. Therefore, there is no one thing on which we are more disposed to congratulate Scotland than on her chairs of philosophy. Occupied by her most distinguished men, and teaching a sound system of psychology, they early train her youth to the severest and most useful discipline of thought. They have given its tone and its strength to the intellect of Scotland. They teach it to face all difficulties manfully, and to turn with equal manliness from vain and presumptuous speculations, which, under a boastful show of profundity, conceal invariably an arrant dogmatism. We turn with hearty satisfaction from the tissue of false subtleties which the German professor lays before his youth, to the careful and modest analysis of mental phenomena by which a professor in our northern universities at once enlightens and fortifies the mind. Scotland, may well be proud of the position she has now long held in the philosophical world. Her oscillations of error she, too, has no doubt exhibited--a necessary condition this of vitality and progress--but nowhere has a body of philosophers so systematically adhered to the sound canons of reasoning and research, and that upon a subject where there is the greatest facility and temptation to depart from them.