to say as little as possible, whether of the voῦs of Anaxagoras, or of the Natural Theology of anybody else. In regard to time and space, we had strong evidence of their very peculiar nature on many hands, even on the part of Reid, at once the sworn foe of idealism, and equally the sworn friend of common sense. After vacillation, Kant's final opinion was such as we find expressed in these words of his own (Text-Book to K. p. 157): "Were our subject abstracted from, or simply the subjective constitution of our senses, all the qualities and all the relations of objects in space and time-nay, space and time themselves would disappear: for all these are, as mere appearances to sense, incapable of existing in themselves, but only in us." And if such was the doctrine of Kant, it cannot be said, on the whole, that his immediate successors differed from it at least as regards the general ideal quality of space and time. Fichte, for example, laboriously deduces, in his dialectical manner, the construction and setting out of time and space in the imagination. Schelling, again, while simply taking his material from the hands of Fichte, and as Fichte himself gave it him, remained, all through his life, sufficiently an idealist to believe in the ideality of space and time. In a writing, dated 1804 (vi. 223), he will be found saying, "Space, purely as such, is, even for the geometrician, nothing real;" and again, "independently of the particular things, space is nothing." In his Transcendental Idealism of 1800, which, however, is little more than a réchauffé of Fichte's Wissenschaftslehre, he had already said (iii. 470): "Time is only inner sense becoming to its own self object; space is outer sense becoming object to inner sense."

We referred then to the same belief on the part of Carlyle. In that magnificent chapter of the Sartor Resartus which bears the title of "Natural Supernaturalism," he

CARLYLE, THE SARTOR.

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will be found, on a considerable canvass, to speak both fully and grandly on this special topic. Carlyle himself calls this section of his work a "stupendous section;" and it is a stupendous section, - I suppose the very first word of a higher philosophy that had been as yet spoken in Great Britain, I suppose the very first English word towards the restoration and rehabilitation of the dethroned upper powers, which, for all that, I fear, under our present profound views in religion and philosophy, remain still dethroned. Here it is, as the words are, that the

Hitherto he has been phantasms," super

professor first becomes a seer." struggling with all manner of annuated symbols, and what not;" but now he has "looked fixedly on existence, till, one after the other, its earthly hulls and garnitures," time and space themselves, "have all melted away," and to "his rapt vision, the celestial Holy of Holies lies at last disclosed." As intimated, it is especially the stripping off of these two "world-enveloping phantasms," space and time, that has enabled him to attain to such grand consummation and blissful fruition. The "deepest of all illusory appearances," he exclaims, they are "for hiding wonder," the wonder of this universe. They hide what is past and they hide what is to come; but yet, as he exclaims again, Yesterday and to-morrow both are:" "with God as it is a universal here, so is it an everlasting now." As Carlyle himself says, it is in this chapter that he attains to "Transcendentalism," and to a sight at last of "the promised land, where Palingenesia, in all senses, may be considered as beginning." And certainly, as I say, Sartor Resartus itself was a first attempt to reconstruct and revindicate those substantial truths of existence, which are the enduring, firm, fast, fixed, ineradicable foundations of humanity as humanity, -humanity in the individual, humanity in the kind.

"

F

However much the general testimony of Emerson be in this vein of Carlyle, it is not in my recollection that I can quote him specially in regard to time and space. He does say in that reference, "Therefore is Space, and therefore Time, that man may know that things are not huddled and lumped, but sundered and individual:" that is, time and space are there for "the perception of differences;" but they must disappear, as beams and joists of the mere outward, into his general idealism. Emerson regards "nature as a phenomenon, not a substance." He attributes necessary existence to spirit," but esteems nature only as an accident and an effect." He says once, "Even the materialist Condillac, perhaps the most logical expounder of materialism, was constrained to say, 'Though we should soar into the heavens, though we should sink into the abyss, we never go out of ourselves; it is always our own thought that we perceive." The quotation in itself is excellent; but it is strange that Emerson should attribute to Condillac, what is so prominent in David Hume; not but that Condillac may have paraphrased Hume, whom Emerson, like most students of his day, under the influence of Coleridge possibly, openly depreciated and disparaged. It is a later series of Kantian studies that has brought up Hume again. Emerson is probably happier when he attributes to a French philosopher the saying that "material objects are necessarily kinds of scoriae of the substantial thoughts of the Creator." It is Emerson himself who says, and it is one of the most beautiful things that ever has been said,

Infancy is the perpetual Messiah, which comes into the arms of fallen men, and pleads with them to return to paradise."

Before leaving the consideration that we have here, it may be pointed out that there are views in Plato and Aristotle relatively, which are not essentially different.

Apart from the general philosophy of Plato, there is a reference to Time in the Timaeus (37 E-38 A) which is manifestly of an ideal import. The parts of time there, the was and the will be, are called but phenomenal forms, which we wrongly transfer to what is noumenally eternal; "for we say, in a time reference namely, it was, it is, it will be; whereas of what truly is, we can only say it is." As regards Aristotle again, what he has to say in this connection would of itself constitute an excellent introduction to metaphysic proper, for it is full of the subtlest turns possible, and requires the intellect that would follow them to have sharpened itself, at least for the nonce, to the fineness of a razor. The mention of one or two of them, however, must here suffice. As regards space, for example, it is enough to point out that to Aristotle it cannot demand for itself a place, so to speak, whether in heaven or in hell. Of the two known elements, that is, it is without a claim upon either. It cannot pretend to mind or soul; for its extension excludes it: and just as little can it profess itself corporeal; for it has got no body. The prestidigitation, or jugglery, that time exacts, is subtler and more irritating still. All other things, for example, consist of parts that are; and, on that necessity, time itself cannot be, for, in view of the past and the future, it consists of parts that are not. But leaving all such finenesses aside, we may limit ourselves to the distinct avowal on Aristotle's part, in the last chapter of the fourth book of the Physics, that, as to how time is, when viewed in reference to a mind, "one might doubt whether, if there were no mind, time would be or would not be."

Now, the purpose of all this that concerns time and space is to suggest that the constitution of them may be somewhat in the way of the constitution of a universal beginning or a universal end, as postulated by science.

Till the world began, there was, conceivably, neither time nor space; and when the world ends, it is equally conceivable that neither will remain. In short, ideal considerations must be allowed to interfere with all such materialistic conclusions as, excluding νοῦς, intelligence, from any rôle, part, place, or share in the composition of the universe, would summarily truncate all pretensions of a so-called Natural Theology, and concisely close this lecturer's vocation.

But now, again, what was all that about black wolves' throats, and palls, and graves, and Erebus', and what not? How is that to be brought home to us, and what is the lesson that is to be pointed? Well, in a word, all that is just this:-kill us all off, and the likes of us, wherever to be found-kill us all off in the universe, I say, and from that moment all is dark, and all is silent as the grave. The in and out, and round about, of all the stars in the firmament, of Arcturus and Aldebaran, of Vega, Spica, and Capella, of Alamak, Alpharat, and Scheat, of Ophiuchus and Fomalhaut, and every myriad spark and sparkle in the Milky Way may go on ceaselessly still, by day, by night, but henceforth in a silence absolutein a darkness dense, impenetrable. That, let move what move may; that, indeed, will be all-a solid soundlessness, a substantial black! What, you will say, will there not be Charles's Wain still circling in the north, and Cassiopeia's Chair, like a swarm of busy bees, and the glorious constellation of Orion, with his grand belt of three, and in his surpassing brightness Sirius, and the Pleiades in their pallor? Or simply, as regards this earth of ours, do you mean to say that the thunder will no longer roll nor the lightning flash or just to reduce and confine it to a single point, do you mean to say that, though there were not a single life in the whole solar system, the sun would not continue to shine? Well, now