cause personal agency—and by the dark shades of guilt in which a portion, at least, of that created personal agency is involved. Of mysteries like these we cannot rid ourselves. They rise in a thousand forms, and in them all knowledge merges. The question here reverts to deep-thinking minds, How are we to deal with them, and what place is to be assigned to them? We may still "report deficient" the Philosophia Prima of Bacon; but with the instructive lesson of the extravagancies of Continental speculation before our eyes, and the sober Christian discipline of the Scottish mind for an additional sedative, we may yet become better prepared for the calm discussion and settlement (as far as man can settle them) of these lofty questions, and for an encounter with the hydra of a perverted speculation, which already shews signs of being within our borders, in the distorted theology of would-be metaphysical theologians, and in the atheism and socialism of our corrupted masses.
We fear we may not have succeeded in rendering very intelligible, and far less in rendering attractive, the nature and scope of the most comprehensive question in philosophy. After any attempted statement of it, the consequent experience of the insufficiency of the words of ordinary language for these refined purposes, must invest with interest the splendid project by Leibnitz himself of a universal language, of which the alphabet should indicate the few original ideas with which all the rest of our knowledge is connected; while overlooking, perhaps, the wide difference of the matter of metaphysical and mathematical science, he held that out of
