a lover of sophistry or false reasoning, in contradiction to philosopher, who is a lover of sound reasoning, true science, and practical wisdom.

CRITICAL PHILOSOPHY.

Critical Philosophy, is the appellation given to a system of science, of which the founder is Immanuel Kant, regius professor of logic and metaphysics in the university of Koenigberg. Of this system, which is very generally admired in Germany, we promised, in our Prospectus, to gratify our speculative readers with a short view; and that promise we are enabled to fulfil, by the kind communication of an illustrious foreigner, who, after acting a conspicuous part on the theatre of the world, and striving in vain to stem the torrent of democratic innovation, is now living an exile from his wretched country, and cultivating the sciences and the arts of peace.

"To explain (says he) the philosophy of Kant in Oldenbourg all its details, would require a long and a painful study, of its language, without producing any real advantage to the reader. The language of the author is equally obscure, and his reasonings equally subtle, with those of the commentators of Aristotle in the 15th century."

The truth of this assertion will be denied by none, who who have endeavoured to make themselves matters of the works of Willich and Nisbet on the critical philosophy; and the source of this obscurity seems to be sufficiently obvious. Besides employing a vast number of words of his own invention, derived from the Greek language, Kant uses expressions which have long been familiar to metaphysicians, in a sense different from that in which they are generally received; and hence a large portion of time is requisite to enable the most sagacious mind to ascertain with precision the import of his phraseology.

The difficulty of comprehending this philosophy has contributed, we believe, more than any thing else, to bring it into vogue, and to raise the fame of its author. Men are ashamed, after so laborious and fatiguing a study, to acknowledge that all their labour has been thrown away; and vanity prompts almost every man to raise the importance of that branch of science which is understood but by a few, and in which he is conscious that his own attainments have been great. We acknowledge, however, that in the system of Kant there is displayed much genius, combination, and systematic arrangement; but this only affords one of the many reasons which it presents, for our regretting that the author has not directed his mind to more useful researches, and that he has wasted the strength of his genius in rendering uncertain the most comfortable truths, and in giving the appearance of novelty to opinions for the most part taught long before his day.

The following analysis, we believe, will sufficiently enable any one, at all conversant with metaphysical science, to form a judgment of this celebrated system; and our correspondent, on whose word the reader may rely, affirms us, that, in detailing the principles of Kant, he has taken special care to exhibit them with the utmost possible exactness, having several times preferred the obscurity of the author's reasonings and language, to the danger of a false, though more perspicuous interpretation.

Kant divides all our knowledge into that which is a priori, and that which is a posteriori. Knowledge a priori is conferred upon us by our nature. Knowledge a posteriori is derived from our sensations, or from experience; and is by our author denominated empiric. One would at first be induced, by this account of the origin of human knowledge, to believe that Kant intended to revive the system of innate ideas; but we very quickly discover that such is not his system. He considers all our knowledge as acquired. He maintains, that experience is the occasion cause or producive of all our knowledge; and that without it we could not have a single idea. Our ideas a priori, he says, are produced with experience, and could not be produced without it; but they are not produced by it, or do not proceed from it. They exist in the mind; they are the forms of the mind. They are distinguished from other ideas by two marks, which are easily discerned; i.e.,

(a) In the language of Locke abstract ideas. (b) In our correspondent's manuscript, this sentence runs thus: "It is our knowledge a priori, or that knowledge which entirely precedes experience as to its origin, which experience renders possible;" but here must be some mistake, either by the translator or by the amanuensis. Kant's philosophy is abundantly obscure and paradoxical; but it surely never entered into his head to represent the effect as prior in its origin to the very cause which alone renders it possible. The context, too, seems to us to agree better with the meaning of the sentence as we have printed it in the text. He adds also to these properties of the four principal forms of the understanding; a table of categories, or fundamental ideas a priori.

"Quantity, gives unity, plurality, totality. Quality, Categories, gives reality, negation, limitation. Relation, gives inference, subsistence, cause, dependence, community, reciprocity. Modality, gives possibility, impossibility, existence, nothing, necessity, accident." These categories can only be applied to experience. When, in the consideration of an object, we abstract all that regards sensation, there remain only the pure ideas of the understanding, or the categories, by which a thing is conceived as a thing.

"Pure reason is the faculty of tracing our knowledge a priori, to subject it to principles, to trace it from its necessary conditions, till it be entirely without condition, and in complete unity. This pure reason has certain fundamental rules, after which the necessary connection of our ideas is taken for the determination of the objects in themselves—a illusion which we cannot avoid, even when we are acquainted with it. We can conclude from what we know to what we do not know; and we give an objective reality to these conclusions from an appearance which leads us on.

"The writings of Kant are multifarious; but it is in his work entitled the Critique of Pure Reason that he has chiefly expounded his system. This work is a treatise on a pretended science, of which Kant's scholars consider him as the founder, and which has for its objects the natural forces, the limits of our reason, as the source of our pure knowledge a priori, the principles of all truth. Kant does not propose to give even an exposition of these branches of knowledge, but merely to examine their origin; not to extend them, but to prevent the bad use of them, and to guard us against error. He designates this science transcendental criticism; because he calls all knowledge, of which the object is not furnished by the senses, and which concerns the kind and origin of our ideas, transcendental knowledge. The Criticism of Pure Reason, which gives only the fundamental ideas and maxims a priori, without explaining the ideas which are derived from them, can lead (says Kant) to a complete system of pure knowledge, which ought to be denominated transcendental philosophy, of which it (the Criticism, &c.) pretends the architectonic plan, i.e., the plan regular and well disposed.

"The work entitled The Critique of Pure Reason, is divided into several parts or sections, under the ridiculous titles of Aesthetic transcendental; of transcendental logic; of the pure ideas of the understanding; of the transcendental judgment; of the paralogism of pure reason; of the ideal transcendental; of the criticism of speculative theologies; of the discipline of pure reason, &c.

"But to proceed with our abstract of the system. We know objects only by the manner in which they affect us; and as the impressions which they make upon us are only certain apparitions or phenomena, it is impossible for us to know what an object is in itself. In consequence of this assertion, some have supposed that Kant is an idealist like Berkeley and so many others, who have thought that sensations are only appearances,

(c) This is wonderful jargon; but the reader will reflect that it is not ours. and that there is no truth but in our reason; but such is not the opinion of Kant (n). According to him, our understanding, when it considers the apparitions or phenomena, acknowledges the existence of the objects in themselves, inasmuch as they serve for the bases of those apparitions; though we know nothing of their reality, and though we can have no certitude but in experience.

"When we apply the forms of our understanding, such as unity, totality, sufficiency, causality, existence, to certain ideas which have no object in space and time, we make a fallacious and arbitrary application. All these forms can bear only on sensible objects, and not on the world of things in itself, of which we can think, but which we can never know. Beyond things sensible we can only have opinions or a belief of our reason.

"The motives to consider a proposition as true, are either objective, i.e., taken from an external object, so that each man shall be obliged to acknowledge them; and then there is a truth evident and susceptible of demonstration, and it may be said that we are convinced; or the motives are subjective, i.e., they exist only in the mind of him who judges, and he is persuaded.

"Truth, then, consists in the agreement of our actions with the objects, in such a manner as that all men are obliged to form the same judgment; belief consists in holding a thing for true in a subjective manner, in consequence of a persuasion which is entirely personal, and has not its basis in an object submitted to experience.

"There is a belief of doctrine, of which Kant gives, as an example, this affirmation—there are inhabitants in the planets.' We must acknowledge (he adds) that the ordinary mode of teaching the existence of God belongs to the belief of doctrine, and that it is the same with the immortality of the soul. The belief of doctrine (he continues) has in itself something flagrant; but it is not the same with moral belief. In moral belief there is something necessary; it is (says he), that I should obey the law of morality in all its parts. The end is strongly established; and I can perceive only one condition, by means of which this end may be in accord with all the other ends, i.e., that there is a God. I am certain that no man knows any other condition which can conduct to the same unity of end under the moral law; which law is a law of my reason. I will consequently believe certainly the existence of God, and a future life; because this persuasion renders immoveable my moral principles—principles which I cannot reject without rendering myself contemptible in my own eyes. I wish for happiness, but I do not wish for it without morality; and as it depends on nature, I cannot wish it with this condition, except by believing that nature depends on a Being who causes this connection between morality and happiness. This supposition is founded on the cause (or necessity) of my reason, and not on my duty.

"We have, however, no certainty (says Kant) in our knowledge of God, because certainty cannot exist except when it is founded on an object of experience. The philosopher acknowledges, that pure reason is too weak to prove the existence of a being beyond the reach of our senses. The necessity of believing in God is therefore only subjective, although necessary and general for all those beings who conform to their duty. This is not knowledge, but only a belief of reason, which supplies the place of a knowledge which is impossible (e).

"The proofs of natural theology (says our philosopher) taken from the order and beauty of the universe, &c., are proofs only in appearance. They resolve themselves into a bias of our reason to suppose an infinite intelligence as the author of all that is possible; but from this bias it does not follow that there really is such an Author. To say that whatever exists must have a cause, is indeed a maxim a priori; but it is a maxim applicable only to experience, for one knows not how to subject to the laws of our perceptions that which is absolutely independent of them. It is as if we were to say, that whatever exists in experience must have an experience; but the world, taken as a whole, is without experience as well as its cause. It is much better to draw the proof of the existence of God from morality, than to weaken it by such reasoning. This proof is relative. It is impossible to know that God exists; but we can comprehend how it is possible to act morally on the supposition of the existence (although incomprehensible) of an intelligent Creator—an existence which practical reason forces theoretical reason to adopt. This proof not only persuades, but even acts on the conviction, in proportion as the motives of our actions are conformable to the law of morality.

"Religion ought to be the means of virtue and not its object. Man has not in himself the idea of religion as he has that of virtue. The latter has its principle in the mind; it exists in itself, and not as the means of happiness; and it may be taught without the idea of a God, for the pure law of morality is a priori.

"He who does good by inclination does not act morally. The converse of the principle of morality is to make personal happiness the basis (f) of the will. There are compassionate minds which feel an internal pleasure in communicating joy around them, and who thus enjoy the satisfaction of others; but their actions, however just, however good, have no moral merit, and may be compared to other inclinations; to that of honour.

(n) We must request the reader to observe that this is the language of our correspondent. We have shewn elsewhere, that Berkeley did not deny the reality of sensations; and we hope to show by and bye, that Kant is as much an idealist as he was, if this be a fair view of the Critical Philosophy.

(e) We have here again taken the liberty to alter the language of our correspondent. He makes Kant say, "It is not this knowledge, but a belief of reason, &c.;" but this is surely not the author's meaning. From the context, it is apparent that Kant means to say, that we have not, and cannot have, what can be properly called a knowledge of the existence of God, but only such a belief of his existence as supplies the place of this impossible knowledge.

(f) This is a very absurd phrase. We suppose Kant's meaning to be, that the principles of him whose actions and volitions are influenced by the prospect of personal happiness, are the reverse of the pure principles of morality. honour (for example), which, whilst it meets with that which is just and useful, is worthy of praise and encouragement, but not of any high degree of esteem. According to Kant, we ought not even to do good, either for the pleasure we feel in doing it, or in order to be happy, or to render others happy; for any one of these additions (perhaps motives) would be empiric, and injure the purity of our morals. A reasonable being ought to desire to be exempted from all inclinations, and never to do his duty but for his duty's sake.

"We ought to act after the maxims derived a priori from the faculty of knowledge, which carry with them the idea of necessity, and are independent of all experience; after the maxims which, it is to be wished, could be erected into general laws for all beings endowed with reason."

If this be a correct view of the object and the results of the critical philosophy, and the character of him from whom we received it permits us not to doubt of its being nearly correct, we confess ourselves unable to discover any motive which should induce our countrymen, in their researches after truth, to prefer the dark lantern of Kant to the luminous torch of Bacon. The metaphysical reader will perceive, that, in this abstract, there is little which is new except the phraseology; and that what is new is either unintelligible or untenable.

The distinction between knowledge a priori and knowledge a posteriori is as old as speculation itself; and the mode in which Kant illustrates that distinction differs not from the illustrations of Aristotle on the same subject. The Stagyrite talked of general forms, or formal causes, in the mind, as well as the professor at Königsberg; and he or his disciples (for we quote from memory) compared them to the form of the statue in the rough block of marble. As that form is brought into the view of the spectator by the chisel of the stonemason, so, said the peripatetics, are the general forms in the mind brought into the view of consciousness by sensation and experience.

Such was the doctrine of Aristotle and his disciples, and such seems to be the doctrine of Kant and his followers; but it is either a false doctrine, or, if it be true, a doctrine foolishly expressed. A block of marble is capable of being cut into any form that the stonemason pleases; into the form of a man, a horse, an ox, an ass, a fish, or a serpent. Not one of these forms therefore can be inherent in it, or essential to it, in opposition to the rest; and a general form, including all the animals under it, is inconceivable and impossible. In like manner, the human mind is capable of having the ideas of a circle, a triangle, a square, of black, white, red, of four, sweet, bitter, of the odour of a rose, and the stench of a dunghill, of proportion, of musical sounds, and of a thousand other things. None of these ideas therefore can be essential to the mind in opposition to the rest; and every man, who is not an absolute stranger to the operations of his own intellect, knows well that he cannot think of a thousand things at once; or, to use the language of philosophers, have in his mind a general idea, comprehending under it a thousand things to discordant as colours and sounds, figures, and smells. If therefore Kant means to affirm, with Plato, that, previous to all experience, there are actually in the mind general forms, or general ideas, to which sensation, or experience, gives an opportunity of coming into view, he affirms what all men of reflection know to be false. If he means only to affirm, what seems to have been the meaning of Aristotle, that particular sensations give occasion to the intellect to form general ideas, he expresses himself indeed very strangely; but his doctrine on this subject differs not essentially from that of Locke and Reid, and many other eminent metaphysicians of modern times. Of abstraction and general ideas we have given our own opinion elsewhere (See Metaphysics, Encyclop. Part I. Chap. iv.), and shall not here resume the subject.

But when Kant says that his ideas a priori are universal and necessary, and that their converse is impossible, we believe he means by the word idea to mean what more accurate writers express by the term proposition. There are indeed two kinds of propositions, of which both may be true, though the one kind expresses necessary and universal truths, and the other such truths as are contingent and particular. (See Metaphysics, Encyclop. Part I. Chapter vi.) Propositions directly contrary to those which express particular and contingent truths may be easily conceived; whilst such as are contrary to necessary and universal truths are inconceivable and impossible; but we doubt whether any idea, in the proper sense of the word, has a contrary or, as he expresses it, a converse. Nothing is not contrary to fulness, nor black contrary to white, nor four contrary to five, nor an inch contrary to an ell. Nothing is the negation of fulness, and black the negation of white; four is different from five, and an inch is less than an ell; but between these different ideas we perceive no contradiction.

That Kant uses the term idea instead of proposition, or some word of similar import, is farther evident from his instances of the house on fire, and the manner in which we learn that any two bodies added to any two other bodies will certainly make the sum of four bodies. If it be his will to use the terms a priori and a posteriori in the sense in which other metaphysicians use the terms necessary and contingent, we can make no other objection to his distinction between these two propositions, but that it is expressed in very improper language. The house might certainly be on fire or not on fire; but twice two bodies may always make the sum of four bodies, and cannot possibly make any other sum.

The truth of this last proposition (he says) we cannot have learned from experience, because experience, being always limited, cannot possibly teach us what is necessary and universal. But this is egregious trifling. The experience employed here is not limited. A child unquestionably learns the import of the terms of numeration, as he learns the import of all other terms, by experience. By putting two little balls to two little balls, he learns to call the sum four balls. After two or three lessons of this kind with different bodies, his own reflection suggests to him, that the sum four has no dependence upon the shape or consistence of the bodies, but merely upon the individuality of each or their numerical difference; and individuality, or numerical difference, is as completely exemplified in two bodies of any kind as in two thousand.

All the truths of pure mathematics (says Kant) are a priori. If he means that they are all necessary, and consequently that the contrary of any one of them is inconceivable, quiescent, he affirms nothing but what is true, and has been known. to all mathematicians these two thousand years. But, if he means that they are innate truths, not discovered by induction or ideal measurement, his meaning is demonstrably false. (See Induction in this Supplement.) When he says, that it is not experience which discovers to us that we shall always have the surface of the pyramid, by multiplying its base by the third part of its height, he is right; if by experience he means the actual measurement of all possible pyramids; but surely he cannot mean that the truth of this measurement is innate in the mind, for it is in fact not a true but a false measurement (a). The base of a pyramid multiplied by the third part of its height gives, not the surface, but the solid contents of the pyramid; and he who understands the proposition on which this truth is immediately built, knows perfectly that Euclid proved it by a series of ideal measurements of those particulars in which all pyramids necessarily agree.

Kant seems often to confound sensation with experience; and if by experience he means sensation, when he says that pure knowledge, a priori, is that which is absolutely without any mixture of experience, he talks nonsense; for the most spiritual notions which men can form are derived from the operations of the mind on ideas of sensation. To the rest of the paragraph, respecting pure knowledge, we have hardly any objection to make. Locke, the great enemy of innate ideas, taught, before Kant was born, that our knowledge depends upon our organization and the faculties of our minds, as much as upon impressions made on the senses ab extra; that if our organs of sense were different from what they are, the taste of sugar might be bitter, and that of wormwood sweet; and that if we had not memory, and could not modify and arrange our ideas, all progress in knowledge would be impossible.

When our author talks of time and space as the two essential forms of the mind, we are not sure that we understand him. We have shown elsewhere, that a conscious intelligence may be conceived which has no ideas either of space or of time (see Metaphysics, Encyclop. n° 182, &c. and 209, &c.); and he who can affirm, that if extension were known to us only by experience, it would be possible to conceive sensible objects without space, has never attended to the force of what philosophers call the affection of ideas in the mind. But what is here meant by sensible objects? Are they objects of touch, taste, or smell? Objects of touch cannot indeed be conceived without space; but what extent of space is suggested by the taste of sugar or the odour of a rose?

When Kant talks of the form space enabling us to attribute to external objects impenetrability, mobility, &c., he talks at random; and another man may, with as much propriety, and perhaps more truth, affirm the converse of his propositions, and say, that it is the impenetrability and mobility, &c. of external objects that enable us to form the idea called space, and the succession of some objects, compared with the permanence of others, that enables us to form the notion or mode called time.

On the two or three next paragraphs it is not worth while to detain the reader with many remarks. They abound with the same uncouth and obscure phraseology, and the same idle distinctions between ideas a priori and a posteriori. In n° 11, he affirms, that the three following propositions (a body is heavy, wood is combustible, and the three angles of a triangle are equal to two right angles) are all necessary judgments. In one sense this affirmation is true, and in another it is false. We cannot, without speaking unintelligibly, give the name body to any substance which is not heavy; and we are not acquainted with any kind of wood which is not combustible; but surely it is not impossible to conceive a substance extended and divisible, and yet not heavy, to which the name body might be given without absurdity, or to conceive wood as incombinable as the mineral called agate. That the three angles, however, of a plane triangle can be either more or less than equal to two right angles, is obviously impossible, and must be perceived to be so by every intelligence from the Supreme down to the human. The three propositions, therefore, are not of the same kind, and should not have been classed under the same genus of necessary synthetic judgments.

In the critique of pure reason, Kant seems to teach that all demonstrative science must proceed from general principles to particular truths. Hence his forms of the understandings, and his categories, which, according to one of his pupils*, "lie in our understanding as Dr. W. pure notions a priori, or the foundation of all our knowledge. They are necessary forms, radical notions, of which all our knowledge must be compounded." But this is directly contrary to the progress of the human mind, which, as we have shown in the article Induction, already referred to, proceeds, in the acquisition of every kind of knowledge, from particular truths to general principles. This transcendental philosophy of Kant's, therefore, inverts the order of nature, and is as little calculated to promote the progress of science as the tylographic system of Aristotle, which was likewise built on categories or general forms. His transcendental aesthetic, which, according to Dr. Willich, is the knowledge a priori of the rules of sensation, seems to be a contradictory expression, as it implies that a man may know the laws of sensation, without paying the smallest attention to the organs of sense.

That we know objects only by the manner in which they affect us, and not as they are in themselves, is a truth admitted, we believe, by all philosophers, and certainly by Locke and Reid; but when Kant says that we know nothing of the reality of the objects which affect our senses, he seems to be singularly paradoxical. Berkeley himself, the most ingenious idealist perhaps that ever wrote, contends strenuously for the existence of a cause of our sensations distinct from our own minds; and because he thinks inert matter a cause inadequate

(a) This may look like cavilling; as the blunder may be either Kant's or our correspondent's, though neither of them can be supposed ignorant of the method of measuring the surface of a pyramid. We assure the reader, however, that we do not mean to cavil. We admit that both Kant and our correspondent knew perfectly well how to measure the surface of a pyramid; but had that knowledge been innate in their minds, we cannot conceive the possibility of their falling into the blunder. The blunder, therefore, though the offspring of mere inadvertence, seems to be a complete confutation of the doctrine. inadequate to this effect, he concludes, that every sensation of which we are conscious is a proof of the immediate agency of the Deity. But Kant, as we shall perceive by and bye, makes the existence of God and of matter equally problematical. Indeed he says expressly, that beyond things sensible we can only have opinions or beliefs; but things sensible, as every one knows, are nothing more than the qualities of objects.

It should seem that the greater number of wonders which Kant has found in our primitive knowledge and in the faculties of our mind, the greater number of proofs ought he to have found of the existence and attributes of one First Cause; but so far is this from being the case, that we have seen him resting the evidence of this most important of all truths, either upon the moral sense, which our passions and appetites so easily alter, or upon the intuitive perception of abstract moral rectitude; a perception which thousands, as virtuous and as profound as he, have considered as impossible. Our philosopher's proof of a God is nothing more than his persuasion that happiness is connected with virtue by a Being upon whom nature depends; and he says expressly, that this proof carries conviction to the mind in proportion as the motives of a man's actions are conformable to the law of morality. This being the case, the reader cannot be much surprized, when he is informed that several of Kant's disciples on the continent have avowed themselves Atheists or Spinozists. We have elsewhere (see Illuminati, n° 37.) mentioned one of those gentlemen who was lately dismissed from his professorial chair in the university of Jena, for making God nothing more than an abstract idea, derived from our relations with the moral world. His successor, a Kantist likewise, when it was told in his presence, that during one of the massacres in Paris, David the Painter sat with his pencil in his hand, enjoying the sufferings of the unfortunate wretches, and trying to paint the expressions of their agonies, exclaimed—"What force of character! What sublimity of soul!" That this wretch must be an Atheist, likewise, follows of course from Kant's principles; for it is not conceivable that he perceives any connection between happiness and virtue.

That Kant is an atheist himself, we have not learned, though his doctrine leads thus naturally to atheism, and though in his work called Tugend Lehre, page 186, he makes the following strange observation upon oaths: "As it would be absurd to swear that God exists, it is still a question to be determined, whether an oath would be possible and obligatory if one were to make it thus—I swear on the supposition that God exists." It is extremely probable (says he), that all sincere oaths, taken with reflection, have been taken in no other sense!

It is not our intention to plunge deeper into this mine of atheism, or to enter into a formal confutation of the detestable doctrines which have been dragged from its bottom. Enough has been said elsewhere to convince the theoretical reason of the sound minds of our countrymen of the existence of one omnipotent, infinitely wise, and perfectly good Being, the author and upholder of all things (See Encycl. Metaphysics, Part III. Chap. vii. and Theology, Part I. Sect. i.). It may not, however, be altogether useless to point out to the reader how completely Kant confutes himself, even in the short abstract that we have given of his system.

Among his categories, or fundamental ideas, which Kant considers necessarily formed in the mind, he expressly reckons cause and effect; but in various articles of this work, it has been proved beyond the possibility of contradiction, that no sensible object is the true metaphysical cause of any event in nature; and indeed Kant himself is at much pains to show that his categories or ideas a priori are not ideas of sensation. There must therefore, upon his own principles, be causes which are not the objects of sense or experience; and by tracing these causes backwards, if there be a succession of them, we must arrive at one self-existent cause, by a demonstration as complete as that by which Euclid proves the equality of the three angles of a plane triangle to two right angles. We have no other evidence for the truth of geometrical axioms than the laws of human thought, which compel us to perceive the impossibility of such propositions being false. According to our philosopher, we have the very same evidence for the reality of causes and effects which are not the objects of sense. The consequence is obvious.

Kant's political opinions are said to be tolerably moderate, though he betrays, what we must think, an absurd confidence in the unlimited perfectibility of the human mind. On his morality our valued correspondent has bestowed a much larger share of his approbation than we can allow it of ours. Kant seems to contend, that the actions of men should be directed to no end whatever; for he expressly condemns, as an end of action, the pursuit either of our own happiness or of the happiness of others, whether temporal or eternal; but actions performed for no purpose are surely indications of the very essence of folly. Such actions are indeed impossible to beings endowed with reason, passions, and appetites; for if there be that beauty in abstract virtue, for which Kant and the Stoics contend, it cannot be but that the virtuous man must feel an internal pleasure when he performs a virtuous action, or reflects upon his past conduct. He who makes his temporal interest the sole rule of his conduct, has indeed no pretensions to the character of a virtuous man; but as the morality of the gospel has always appeared to us sufficiently pure and disinterested, we think a man may, without deviating into vice, have respect unto "the recompence of future reward."