than an opposition of the reason itself to some other principle equally valid and extensive. The principal, or, rather, only way which foreign philosophy took in this pursuit, was to reduce every thing to sensation as opposed to reason, and to derive every thing from it alone, so as to make the reason itself merely a secondary faculty, no original and independent power, and ultimately nothing else than a sort of chemical precipitate and residuum from the material impressions.[3] But however much may be conceded to these and to the external senses, and however great a share they may justly claim in the whole inner property of the thinking man, still it is evident that the perception of these sensuous impressions, the inner coherence--in short, the unity of the consciousness in which they are collected--can never, as indeed it has often been objected on the other side, have come into the mind from without. This was not, however, the end which this doctrine had exclusively, or even principally, in view. The ultimate result to which they hoped to come by the aid of this premise was simply the negation of the suprasensible. Whatever in any degree transcends the material impression, or sensuous experience, as well as all possible knowledge of, and faith therein, not merely in respect to a positive religion, but absolutely whatever is noble, beautiful, and great--whatever can lead the mind to, or can be referred to a something suprasensible and divine--all this, wherever it may be found, whether in life or thought, in history or in nature--ay, even in art itself--it was the ultimate object of this foreign philosophy to decry, to involve in doubt, to attack and to overthrow, and to bring down to the level of the common and material, or to plunge it into the skeptical abyss of absolute unbelief. The first step in this system was a seeming subordination of reason to sensation, as a derivative of it--a mere slough which it throws off in its transformations. Afterward, however, the warfare against the suprasensible was waged entirely with the arms of reason itself. The reason, indeed, which supplied these weapons was not one scientifically cultivated and morally regulated, but thoroughly sophistical and wholly perverted, which, however, put into requisition all the weapons of a brilliant but skeptical wit, and moved in the ever-varied turnings of a most ingenious and attractive style. Here, where the question was no longer the abrogation of any single dogma of positive religion, but where the opposition to the divine had become the ruling tendency of philosophy, it is not easy to refrain from characterizing it as atheistical--what, indeed, in its inmost spirit it really was, and also historically proved itself by its results.