The reader may very advantageously carry along with him the above quoted just remarks, if he has occasion to travel into Hume's sceptical writings. Respecting these, where every feature of the author's character appears with intensified distinctness of expression, it is not too much to say that their influence, which had suffered suspended animation,[10] is now felt in almost every cultivated circle in Europe. Checked for a time under the empire of Kant and his successors, it has been revived by the German Darwinists (so-called), who are bent on evolving all that can be got from the theory of Evolution. Comte speaks of Hume as his own master--an intellectual debt all the more readily acknowledged, because Hume's treatment of most subjects leans towards the French, rather than the Teutonic, side of English speculation. The master's influence over numbers who, without being Comte's disciples, are addicted to thinking Positively upon questions connected with Mind and Morality, was never greater than at present. Here, therefore, the disciplined inquirer will obtain a prolific field of discovery, if he wishes to convince himself how little originality pervades the set of opinions just now in fashion. But the student of Hume ought surely to be a disciplined inquirer. Many senior residents at our Universities will, therefore, join me in regretting that his sceptical treatises should be so commonly found in the hands of very young men. So far as such readers are concerned, it does not much signify whether Hume's fallacies are due to onesidedness of intellect or (as has been said by a critic, once himself a doubter) whether he was influenced "by vanity, appetite, and the ambition of forming a sect of _arguescents_." An opinion scarcely libellous, considering what Hume has said respecting the validity of his own paradoxes. However this may appear, the fallacies remain fallacies, and are less easy of detection than they would have been were their author a systematic thinker, instead of a philosophical _dilletante_. Under any circumstances, it is not every aspirant to the "Round Table" for whom the quest after secret spells is fitted. The youthful knight has his own ward to keep, and needs help--not hindrance, much less betrayal--inasmuch as:-- "Tis his to struggle with that perilous age Which claims for manhood's vice the privilege Of boyhood;--when young Dionysus seems All glorious as he burst upon the east, A jocund and a welcome conqueror; And Aphrodite, sweet as from the sea She rose and floated in her pearly shell, A laughing girl;--when lawless will erects Honour's gay temple on the mount of God, And meek obedience bears the coward's brand; While Satan, in celestial panoply, With Sin, his lady, smiling by his side, Defies all heaven to arms!" _Hartley Coleridge's Poems_, Vol. II., p. 202. D.--ON THE METHOD EMPLOYED IN THIS ESSAY.