earnest in the defence and development of the theory of human knowledge, as well as in the endeavour to reconcile intelligence with practice, and to maintain for man the possibility of sciences, relative and limited, yet solid and suited to his circumstances. It is when regarded in relation to a specimen in one department, of the manner in which the war against this scepticism is to be maintained in all, that the question respecting a presentative or representative knowledge of the external world is likely to be studied with most seriousness, and that it connects itself most nearly with our natural feelings and desires.
The science of metaphysics—in its polemical aspect, the controversy with the Pyrrhonists—is a region into which those are forced who seek the ultimate answers that can be given to the inquiry, as to how much man is capable of knowing in any of the sciences. “Reasoning,” says Pascal, “confounds the dogmatist, and nature the sceptic.” It is the aim of the metaphysician to compose this difference—a task which the philosophy of Common Sense accomplishes in the only manner in which it can be effected by man. That philosophy seeks for, and renders prominent the inexplicable feelings, judgments, and notions in which reasoning and nature meet; and in doing this, it ascends to the highest elevation that the human mind can reach, so long, at least, as man is constituted as he is. It is here that man gains the most comprehensive survey of the sciences, and were it not that the elevation is likely to dim his vision of the separate objects of which the panorama is composed, it is
