While, therefore, the mind may view, with a sort of admiration, the achievements of a magnanimous soldier, it turns with indignation from the atrocities of a military tyrant: and at the same time that it may be induced to contemplate even with complacency, at the first view, the plausible, yet groundless speculations of ingenious theorists, in matters of science,—still the fallacy of their systems, when developed by experience, strips them of all their tinseled glare of merit. Thus, too, the applause which the world justly attaches to the character of a patriot-hero, deserts the unprincipled ruffian-warrior, however valiant and successful he may prove: In like manner, reason and experience expose to the censure of the good and the derision of the wise, the deleterious doctrines of metaphysical statesmen and philosophers.[2] Such estimable qualities as they may possess, in either character, are merged in the mischievous or base ones, with which they are combined: thus, infamy or contempt eventually become the merited portion of crime or of folly, as either one or the other may prevail. A Cæsar,[3] a Cromwell and a Robespierre, with other scourges of mankind, of like character, will therefore be viewed as objects of execration by posterity, while the memories of an Alfred, a Nassau, and a Washington—a Chatham, a Burke, and an Ames,—will be venerated, to the latest posterity. ----- Footnote 2: The miserable consequences which have resulted to the civilized world, from the mode of reasoning _abstractly_, and from the mere _synthetical_ plan of philosophising, are too apparent to need much comment. Even some _geometricians_ of great name have been seduced, by such means, into monstrous absurdities in physics; and into the maintenance of doctrines, alike subversive of religion and morals, as destructive of the foundations of civil society. Such were Descartes, Leibnitz and Spinoza, of the seventeenth century: and such have been, and even now are, too many of that class of modern philosophers, as well in this country as on the continent of Europe,—whose metaphysical notions of religion and government, (although some of them may, perhaps, be pretty correct on the subject of physics, alone,) have been the means of inundating the world with scepticism; and, after overturning regular, orderly, and peaceable states, of establishing despotism and misery on the ruins of rational government, in many of the fairest portions of the old world.