On the other hand, the systems of Bacon and Leibnitz were two different foundations laid in that age for a higher and a better philosophy--systems which by a more extensive developement and harmonious combination of their parts might have been moulded into a frame of phylosophy thoroughly Christian. Almost all the scientific labours of Leibnitz were directed to this point, namely, the demonstration, confirmation, and exemplification of the truths of Christianity, by the aid of science. The vast system of spiritualism, exalted far above all ideas of nature, which was propounded, or rather sketched out by Leibnitz, (with the exception of some peculiar opinions and mere hypotheses,) agrees perfectly with that purer Platonism which all the Christian writers and fathers of the first ages inculcated. And the fundamental principles of such a philosophy, if exposed in their native clearness and simplicity and without adventitious alloy, are the same which in their general spirit are to be clearly traced, or are tacitly implied in the sacred Scriptures, whose lofty purposes, however, rise far above the narrow forms and limited sphere of philosophic investigation. How well Leibnitz understood and appreciated, and how far he subscribed to the truth of the Catholic religion, has been brought to light in a singular manner in our own days;[12] and if we except some oversights, very pardonable under all circumstances, his philosophic sketch of the Catholic system of theology, is in its masterly brevity one of the boldest and happiest expositions of that religion, at least for the general purposes of the world. The other great celebrated philosophical system of modern times, was based in the principles of the philosophy of experience--a system which has tended to enlarge almost immeasurably the field of natural discoveries. As the founder of the philosophy of experience--Bacon had conceived it, that philosophy, if we except some particular defects and individual errors, is by no means at variance with the Christian philosophy of Revelation; for the latter is in itself a philosophy of experience, though of another, higher, and spiritual kind. And it is the more necessary to keep this in view, as otherwise the ordinary abyss of rationalism can scarcely be avoided. The case is widely different when the principles of the empirical philosophy, as in Locke and his followers, are directed against everything exalted, supernatural and spiritual in man and his consciousness. By this important distinction, Bacon is an European philosopher, like Leibnitz; but Locke is a mere English philosopher; as it was in England this Protestant philosophy sprang up and kept pace with the Protestantism of state, engendered and nurtured by the Constitution of 1688. However, in England, the Protestant philosophy, true to its character, kept within the limits of a mitigated scepticism, and did not plunge into the same wild, revolutionary