MR. HENRY JAMES, the author of "Moralism and Christianity," must certainly be regarded by all who come into his fit audience as one of the greatest living masters of metaphysics. Mr. James has never been mentioned in the _North American Review_; but then, that peculiarly national work has not in all its seventy volumes an article upon Jonathan Edwards, whom Robert Hall, Dr. Chalmers, Dugald Stuart, Sir James Mackintosh, Kant, Cousin, and a hundred others scarcely less famous, have regarded as the chief glory in our intellectual firmament; it has never let its light shine upon the pages of Legare; it has preserved the most profound silence respecting Henry Carey, William R. Williams, and Addison Alexander; so that it must not be considered altogether conclusive as to Mr. James's merits that he has not had the seal of the _North American's_ approval. We regard him as one of the great metaphysicians of the time, not because, like Comte, he has evolved with irresistible power and majestic order any grand and complete system, but because he has brought to the discussion of the few questions he has attempted, so independent a spirit, so pure a method, such expansive humanity, and such ample resources of learning, as separately claim admiration, and combined, constitute a teacher of the most dignified rank, who can and will influence the world. We do not altogether agree with Mr. James; on the contrary, we have been regarded as particularly grim in our conservatism; but we are none the less sensible of Mr. James's surpassing merits as a writer upon the philosophy of society. We dedicate this paragraph to him on account of the series of lectures he has just delivered in New-York, upon "The Symbolism of Property," "Democracy and its Issues," "The Harmony of Nature and Revelation," "The Past and Future Churches," &c. We understand that these splendid dissertations will be given to the public in the more acceptable form of a volume. The popular lecture is not a suitable medium for such discussions, or certainly not for such thinking: one of Mr. James's sentences, diluted to the lecture standard, would serve for an entire discourse, which by those who should understand it, would be deemed of a singularly compact body, as compared with the average of such performances. * * * * * PROFESSOR TORREY, of the University of Vermont, is one of the few contemporary scholars, whose names are likely to survive with those of the great teachers of past ages. He has translated Schilling's Discourse on Fine Arts, and other shorter compositions from the German; but his chief labor in this way is, a most laborious and admirably executed version of Neander's History of the Christian Religion and Church, published in Boston, and now being republished in London, by Bonn, with Notes, &c., by the Rev. A. T. W. Morison, of Trinity College, Cambridge.