murmur while his most characteristic doctrines were attributed to a French writer of fifty years’ later date, in whose dreary and verbose pages we miss alike the vigor of thought and the exquisite clearness of style of the man whom I make bold to term the most acute thinker of the eighteenth century—even though that century produced Kant.” Of the doctrines themselves which are alluded to here, I shall say nothing now; but of much else that is said, there is only to be expressed a hearty and even gratified approval. I demur, to be sure, to the exaltation of Hume over Kant—high as I place the former. Hume, with infinite fertility, surprised us, it may be said, perhaps, into attention on a great variety of points which had hitherto passed unquestioned; but, even on these points, his success was of an interrupted, scattered and inconclusive nature. He set the world adrift, but he set man too, reeling and miserable, adrift with it. Kant, again, with gravity and reverence, desired to refix, but in purity and truth, all those relations and institutions which alone give value to existence—which alone _are_ humanity, in fact—but which Hume, with levity and mockery, had approached to shake. Kant built up again an entire new world for us of knowledge and duty, and, in a certain way, even belief; whereas Hume had sought to dispossess us of every support that man as man could hope to cling to. In a word, with _at least_ equal fertility, Kant was, as compared with Hume, a graver, deeper, and, so to speak, a more consecutive, more comprehensive spirit. Graces there were indeed, or even, it may be said, subtleties, in which Hume had the advantage perhaps. He is still in England an unsurpassed master of expression—this, certainly, in his History, if in his Essays he somewhat baffles his own self by a certain labored breadth of conscious fine writing, often singularly inexact and infelicitous. Still Kant, with reference to his products, must be allowed much the greater importance. In the history of philosophy he will probably always command as influential a place in the modern world as Socrates in the ancient; while, as probably, Hume will occupy at best some such position as that of Heraclitus or Protagoras. Hume, nevertheless, if equal to Kant, must, in view at once of his own subjective ability and his enormous influence, be pronounced one of the most important of writers. It would be difficult to rate too high the value of his French predecessors and contemporaries as regards purification of their oppressed and corrupt country; and Hume must be allowed, though with less call, to have subserved some such function in the land we live in. In preferring Kant, indeed, I must be acquitted of an undue partiality; for all that appertains to personal bias was naturally, and by reason of early and numerous associations, on the side of my countryman.