No doubt M. Cousin, and several other eminent teachers of youth, to whose office it belongs to expound received metaphysics, have comprised First Principles in their course of philosophy; but as I have barely met with any of their writings, I must confess such an ignorance of them, as not even to know how far I am either adopting, or evading their phraseology, in discussing the same subjects. Mine, however, cannot be wrong, since the term "first principles," that I have chosen, is one of familiar popular use; so that were this mode of speech, as indeed it is, peculiarly liable to ambiguity, it would, for that very reason, be preferable to any other, till such time as that ambiguity should have been explained, and the wrong thinking, of which it might have been the source, exposed and obviated. Not till this had been done would it be time to inquire whether the current metaphysics had invented any intrinsically better ways of speaking on these topics, for though the veriest tyro in such investigations would be justified in objecting to some of its technicalities, such as the invention of the word free-will, for instance, for the same reason that a beginner in zoology might object, were such an attempt ever made, to the introduction of the word sphynx or griffin into that branch of inquiry, there can be no doubt that other of its speculations are more happily conceived. Hence I suppose it would be a decided mistake to imagine, for example, that no trouve whatever is to be elicited from the obscurities of Kant, but on the other hand, one must as much take care to entertain sober conjectures of the possible value of such unsunned treasures, as to keep in mind that quackery may be not unqualified with some merit, and I might surmise that it was perhaps in virtue of his fabulous expectations in this direction, that Coleridge could not execute his long-meditated plan of elucidating that writer; or rather, perhaps--to speak more curtly--a spirit more differing from that which compounded the amalgam, was necessary to resolve and detect it. According to this estimate of the value of our achieved studies, it would be expectable, in regard to my present topic, that almost all the materials for right conclusions on it must be extant somewhere or other in our books, no great amount of ability being required to turn them to proper account: an easily suppliable desideratum being thus left unsupplied, the public indifference manifested thereby would seem to bear the ascription of our unsatisfactory metaphysics to the fault, however apportioned between the many and the few, not of the intellect, but of the reason.