It must be admitted that Cousin’s system did not long hold its ground. After the first surprise was over, the metaphysicians _par eminence_ began to attack him with great fury, and gave him some blows from which he has never recovered; and the public, who had been carried away by his eloquence, forgot him as soon as another novelty appeared. The result has been, that of late he has not been estimated according to his real merits. He most certainly has not done what he pretended to do. He has not reconciled the philosophers or the philosophies; he has hardly formed a school; his disciples have expired, recanted, or left the inclusive for some more satisfactory exclusive system. But he is still a metaphysician of uncommon power, acuteness, insight, genius; his works are full of important truths and principles, which stimulate the mind to independent thought; his information is immense; and he is the most brilliant, comprehensible and readable of all the historians of philosophy. He is to metaphysical history what Macaulay is to civil history; and we do not see why the present work is not as capable of holding the pleased and breathless attention of the intelligent reader as the “History of the Revolution of 1688.” There is in both writers the same confident manner of settling controversies about which centuries of disputants have wrangled; and, on the first blush, it seems impossible to resist the statements of either of them, as both drive directly at the common sense of men; are clear and brilliant, while their opponents are obscure and dull; and never leave the impression of an undefined something outside of the limits of their respective systems, to puzzle and torture their readers with a latent doubt. “I wish,” said Lord Melbourne, “that I knew any thing as well as Tom Macaulay knows every thing.” This “I know,” and “I am sure,” this absence of self-distrust, is as characteristic of Cousin as Macaulay; and the mischief is that after reading either, we are apt to be as satisfied as they are themselves, and think we have thoroughly mastered the matter.