it may, besides, make us advantageously familiar with some of the properties of that atmosphere in which has been gathered the cloud that has darkened subsequent German speculations, and rendered metaphysical science, in one aspect of it, retrograde in that country.
Des Cartes, the reviver and reformer of Speculative Philosophy in modern times, commenced his philosophical career with the practice of universal doubt, as the means of reaching the elements of knowledge. Thus set loose in the microcosm of thought, he found the consciousness of self-existence inseparable from the act of thinking. "Cogito, ergo sum" was accordingly his first principle. Involved in the rudiments of self-consciousness, he found the idea of an all-perfect Being, whose attributes require the certainty of all that is clearly and distinctly recognised by us. With the help of these assumptions, he thought himself prepared to defend knowledge against the assaults of scepticism. But the supposed foundation was too narrow. The tests proposed for its extension were too vague. The effects soon became apparent. The disciples and admirers of Des Cartes maintained doctrines the most various. Malebranche could not, without the infallible Church, retain an external world. The Egoists, whose existence as a sect is, however, somewhat problematical, having declared their inability to rise beyond the first axiom of their master, rested there amid the fluctuations of a merely subjective universe. Spinoza, unable to defend, by reasoning, our faith in finite substances, absorbed mind and matter in one all-pervading Existence. Des Cartes had, in truth,
