goal; but, after the first burst of joy, they find themselves in intolerable division, in fearful pressure."

And all this time in England men were satisfying themselves with the dregs of Locke, or with the unveiled eudæmonism of Paley! How small they appear in the comparison! Then came the storm of the French Revolution, and England passed through it harmless, and " Germany, with all her lettered schools," sank at the foot of the Conqueror. Which was best, practice without speculation, or thought without life? It was our happiness to have preserved in our institutions, in our household manners, and in the mainspring of our public greatness, unlimited political activity in the individual, the realization of those truths which were denied in our books and our sermons. The dull pressure of continental despotism had forced the life out of the forms of society, and taught men to look for embodied truths only as future possibilities. Believing in conscience, and freedom, and law, they could find no better means of applying them to reality, than by arbitrary associations in the place of states, and secret symbols to supply to the imagination the want of habitual affections. It was better to try such experiments than to acquiesce in despair; but it was well for us that we had no occasion to try them. We were better than our principles, but we must have been gradually corrupted by their influence; and we ought to acknowledge our gratitude to that profound race of thinkers, who, in circumstances unworthy of their principles, worked out the great truths, of which we are now enjoying the advantage.

Erhard appears about this time to have been infected with the fashion of secret associations, set by the illuminati and freemasons of the day. He formed a scheme for a league of women to restore their equality with the dominant sex, and one for a union of all good men for the education of the rest. "What a pity it is," said his father's friend, Rector (of the Latin school?) Lederer, "what a pity that I do not know a single person whom I could propose as a member." A judicious observation, which suggested to Erhard the equally judicious reflection, that, for the production of true good, virtue is the only bond of union necessary. Yet he was very

melancholy when he considered how impossible it was for him to do any thing in the world. He came sometimes to the brink of suicide, and might have yielded to the temptation, if his affections had not still given him a taste for life; besides, he had formerly satisfied himself of the criminality of the act, and he had made it his rule, and a good rule it was, in all conflicts of passion, to observe the results of previous enquiries as unconditional commands. "It is a practical rule," he proceeds, "for every man" -we must, however, strenuously protest against the latter part of it to direct his course absolutely according to the earlier results of his enquiries; but, if there are none such, to follow his inclinations without further reasoning about it (vernünfteln), for he can then only injure himself or others (which, indeed, is a danger hardly worth considering), and he may make compensation afterwards, if he has violated justice or prudence." From which it seems to follow, that if Mr Greenacre had never deliberated on the propriety of killing and cutting up middle-aged women, he was justified in doing so when he felt inclined; though the act was both imprudent and injurious in some degree to Mrs Greenacre. The reason of the rule is plausible: " If he tries to enquire, while his inclinations are urging him, they are sure to trample upon his judgment; and he is in danger, instead of having done a bad action, of becoming a bad man." The fallacy consists in a tacit assumption, that there is no established rule to command the inclinations in such cases. Doubtful actions are forbidden actions, and the results of voluntary ignorance are voluntary violations of duty.

The task which we proposed to ourselves is nearly accomplished with the completion of Erhard's education, and we shall pass briefly over the remaining events of his life. He selected medicine as his profession; and, in the year 1788, proceeded to the University of Würzburg to study it. In 1790 he went to see the coronation of the Emperor Leopold at Frankfort, and derived, as he says, from his journey, the advantage" of losing all taste for such costly ceremonies in future." We, who are not by nature speculative machines, confess that we came to much the same conclusion

at the great spectacle of her most gracious Majesty's coronation last year. At the completion of his academic course he took a longer journey, preceded by a winter spent at Jena, where he formed the acquaintance of Reinhold, Schiller, and Wieland, and of a Baron Herbert, who formed a close friendship with him, and afterwards rendered him the most essential services. From Jena he proceeded by Goettingen, Hamburg, and Kiel, to Copenhagen, and thence by sea to Memel and Koenigsberg, where he attained the great object of his travels, personal knowledge of his great teacher, Kant. "He seemed surprised at my mode of speaking of his works to him. I asked no explanations; but merely thanked him for the pleasure they had afforded me, without another word of compliment. The facility of understanding him, which this implied, seemed to make him doubt at first whether I had read them, but we soon came to an understanding, and found our society suitable to each other." After his return to Nuremberg, Kant wrote to him in terms of which he is justly proud. "Of all men whom I have learned to know well, I should like no one for daily intercourse better than you." In fact, the respect and regard which Erhard through life received from others, is his best claim to our esteem. We only know half a man's character if we read how he thought and acted, without knowing how he was thought of and dealt by. The proofs of attachment which Erhard received from his immediate friends, and the notice which he received from the great men of his time, may counterbalance many of the foibles which he unintentionally or indifferently discloses.

From Koenigsberg he travelled with his friend Herbert to Klagenfurt, and afterwards through the north of Italy and the Tyrol to Nuremberg, when he proceeded with little eclat to his doctor's degree, though, from a knowledge or belief of his unpopularity there, he had determined to practise in some other locality. About this time he married, and employed himself in periodical writing on subjects connected with the principles of jurisprudence. He wished in vain to obtain some university position, and thought of removing to Poland, when he met with a man named William Pearce, who represented himself as an American

colonel, and offered him an appointment as regimental surgeon in that service. His father-in-law advanced money for this purpose; but the colonel turned out a swindler, and Erhard was ruined. He speaks of this blow with great bitterness. His fortunes however, began, not long afterwards, to improve. In the year 1795 he gained an introduction to the wellknown minister, Baron von Hardenberg, who at the time presided over the administration of the Franconian principalities; and after being employed by him to write, for a handsome stipend, in defence of the claims of the House of Brandenburg, was recommended by him to settle as a physician in Berlin, where he finally took up his residence, and was admitted to practise in the year 1800. His reputation gradually increased, and brought him his share of the polysyllabic honours so dear to his countrymen. He was successively a member of the Medicinal-Upper-Examination-Commission, and Upper-Medicinal-Councillor, and from the King of the Netherlands he received the order of the Belgian Lion. In 1827 he died, “with the consolation," says Varnhagen, " of the just. Devotion to the will of the Supreme had always accompanied him on his way."

In many of the events of his life, Erhard exemplifies the distinguishing virtue of the national intellect, appreciation of principles, and its great defect, disregard of empirical rules. Germans are often so deeply impressed by their intuition of the unity of truth, that they consider the actual variety of its manifestations as an obstacle to be removed or disregarded, and not as its condition and counterpart. They reject an action, or class of actions, as limited and fragmentary, in favour of an arbitrary symbol of some general law, as Erhard regarded not his ownership of the house, but the fire-lighting which represented to him abstract ownership; and within the limits of that law they seek to produce corresponding unity of outward things, or, if that is impossible, an emblematic unity which may satisfy the imagination; wherein they are in reality breaking up the one great law into many, while they deceive themselves by the substitution of larger component units for smaller, of secondary generalizations for individual objects and actions. Yet every action is, as Fichte

taught of every particle of matter, but the point of intersection of a thousand laws, each of which is severally satisfied and realized in it for that place and time, while their co-existence and necessary reciprocal action makes an entire empirical realization of any one impossible; for the perfect fulfilment of an independent law is at once a negation of the unity of the supreme law. If a political course of conduct, or an individual rule of life, fails to correspond in itself to our ideal of the state or of personal character, it may nevertheless be required of us, if it tends to the practice of some general rule which experience has suggested as tending to the production of the ideal of a still higher law; not that one can contradict the other, but that our perception of one may be enlight ened by our clearer perception of the other. The great philosopher whom we have just quoted, fell into the error of seeking unity short of universality. In his Geschlossener Handelstaat, (close-trading state,) he lays down the conditions under which the economic relations of a state may be subordinated to perfect legislation. The perfect government must have absolute power, and dealings with foreigners must be partially independent; therefore, let all dealings with foreigners be prohibited, except to the government itself for the supply of necessary imports to its subjects. The deduction is irrefragable, but the major of the implied syllogism, the hypothetical assertion of the existence of a perfect government in a portion of the earth, is false. The existence of neighbours is the limit of its power, and therefore of its perfection. The problem of the practical reason is the perfect subordination of all existence to law, as the aim of the speculative reason is to see the coincidence of formal law with reality. Formal law is but a shadow, to represent its realization to the mind, and those who leap past the difficulties and obstacles of the universe which is to be subjected to it, or select a portion to take the place of the whole, have only avoided the task of which they might have performed a part, by mistaking its nature and meaning. They reject the discrepancies which they are called upon to harmonize. "Solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant."

The haste to realize laws which Fichte displayed in political economy, Erhard carried into life; and the re

sult is an occasional appearance of singular contradiction between his principles and his actions-appearance we are convinced it was; but men who will not use the means which nature provided them, by supplying rules to mediate between the particular and universal-who try to make watches by the laws of motion, and to buy a horse according to the eternal principles of justice, must expect to make errors in their subsumptions of facts so very small, to classes so very large, and must bear with the incredulity of the world, if it fails to perceive the attempt to subsume them.

We suspect Erhard neither of peculiar selfishness, nor of want of filial affection; but we may compare his prolix discussions on his infantine musical propensities, with his account of the death of his mother:-" After long indisposition, I found her one morning with an eruption on her head and face like St Anthony's fire, in bed, without recollection, and my efforts to recall it were vain-she died the same day." Now for the son's reflections:" I have never seen a patient in the same state, and therefore I cannot say whether I took the right steps or not. I tried leeches, blisters," &c.

"Physician art thou? one all eyes? Philosopher? a fingering slaveOne who would peep and botanize Upon his mother's grave? Yes, and anatomize, too, if the interests of science required it yet was Erhard no fingering slave.

We have the authority of his biographer, and the fact of his reputation, in favour of the belief that his professional talents and attainments were considerable; yet he met with difficulties in passing the examinations,first for his Doctor's degree at Altorf, and afterwards for admission to practice at Berlin. At the latter place, the board required him to re-write the anatomical essay which he had delivered to them, "because much important and necessary matter belonging to the subject is not brought forward; much is said that is untrue, and, on the other hand, many things irrelevant to the essay are entered into." How he was likely to receive this reproof, we may judge from his modest remarks on a similar rebuke from the Doctors at Altorf. "I can only," he says, "attribute to my melancholy

state of mind at the time, which prevented me from reflecting on circumstances calmly, the fact, that I derived less instruction from my examination, than from my dispute with my grandmother about the ghosts; and that it was only lately" (query, at the Berlin examination?)" that I learned that, as superstition is not to be overcome by experience, so the vanity of learning is not to be defeated by sound criticism of the pretended experience which it brings forward."

We wish some divine had drawn a similar rebuke upon himself, by criticising, as in the Eigendünkel der Gelehrsamkeit he might perhaps have been tempted to do, a plan which he formed in conjunction with Goeschen, a bookseller, during a pedestrian journey from Jena to Würzburg, "of a translation of the Bible as a popular book (Toilettenbuch). The translation was divided between us, and we saw in the spirit the fruits of this our undertaking to communicate this history more widely to mankind-fruits which this book produces not so much through the narrations, as through the manner of narration, and the comprehensive representation of all situations into which man, as a being of nature, must come." We had thought that "this book" had been translated into some two hundred languages, and, amongst others, into the mother tongue of one Martin Luther. We had even supposed the manner of narration had been tolerably preserved, and that it was the "toilettenbuch" of every toilet table from Berlin to the Sandwich Islands; but in this new and wonderworking publication, we recognise one remarkable element ;-one of the translators certainly, and the other probably, was profoundly ignorant of the original. Erhard, who knew only Latin enough to read modern works of science, had little or no Greek; and of Hebrew, he had, for all that appears, never so much as heard. What of that?" The road was made by these thoughts as pleasant as a road to everlasting blessedness. Nothing, indeed, has come of the proposal, but it was sufficiently rewarded by the pleasure it gave us at the time.'

We might quote other instances of oddity; such as his complaining by letter to Washington of the pseudocolonel who cheated him, or the treatise which he, a republican from infancy, wrote to prove that absolute

monarchy may satisfy all the wants of the moral man; but we have given sufficient proofs of his total want of that common sense, accompanied with latent humour, which is happily to Englishmen a national Socratic da óvov, cui plerumque parent, nunquam impellenti sæpe revocanti. He tells us, indeed, that his unpopularity at Nuremberg originated in the exercise of a certain humorous disposition which he derived from his father, and we will not deny him the faculty, though we should scarcely have discovered its existence. Still less would we say that his countrymen in general are without humour. We know that some of their writers possess it in a high degree; but in their common literature, it rather concerns itself with the oppositions of custom and reason, than with those of caprice or ignorance and custom, so that they direct the laugh against the rule which violates a principle, and we against the individual who, in pursuit of a supposed principle, breaks through the rule.

After all, men who are not afraid of being laughed at, and have no tribunal of humoristic conscience within themselves, are most likely to possess that self-confidence, which is the first, second, and third requisite for success in life. We have seen the prosperous course which Erhard's fortunes took in the latter half of his life, and it is but fair to show, in the words of his biographer, how he deserved and how he bore them.

"On his personal character, one voice prevails from all who knew him. As the foundation of all his views, of his exertion and action, we must point out the strictest morality, to which he referred every thing. All his thoughts and his conduct continued, under all circumstances, to be devoted, in the first instance, to truth and justice, combined with the purest philanthropy, which he felt and displayed kindly and disinterestedly, but without any hypocritical affectation, for all his brethren-thousands of whom honoured in him not only the skilful physician, but also the tried friend and counsellor, the generous benefactor.

His great understanding, his inexhaustible learning, his kindly, unpretending, and yet one might say, proud character, made his society as instructive as it was attractive."

And so, with much regard and respect, we bid him farewell.