in France, subsequently to Des Cartes, was adorned and elevated by some of the noblest and worthiest spirits of modern times. Besides the lives of Malebranche and Fénelon, those of Pascal, and Arnauld, and Nicole, and the other recluses of Port-Royal, give to the Cartesian a more sacred interest than can be attached to any other modern school of Philosophy. Although this peculiar feature of its history is marred by that mystic quietism which the monastic genius of the Catholic Church tends to foster, it is encouraging to find even this imperfect illustration of the manner in which Christianity may be allied to general speculation.
But Germany was thenceforward to be the European focus of Idealism, and of abstract thinking of every kind. In that country, previously to the rise of the Leibnitzian philosophy, there had been no manifestation of the new spirit of reform. The labours of Leibnitz virtually mark the commencement of the extraordinary course which metaphysic has since run in the native country of that celebrated thinker. Since then, the principle which at first separated the schools of Locke and Leibnitz has modified the currents of thought in Britain and Germany, and is thus connected with many of those characteristics by which the British is signally distinguished from the Continental mind. Since then, too, Germany has been the centre of European speculation, and has exhibited some of the most extraordinary phenomena in the history of human thought. There, amid the successive revolutions of more than a hundred years, every abstract question has been debated that the mind of man can
