The Catholic World, Vol. 08, October, 1868, to March, 1869.

by Various

Porter's Human Intellect.

[Footnote 272]

[Footnote 272: The Human Intellect; with an Introduction upon Psychology and the Soul. By Noah Porter, D.D., Clark Professor of Moral Philosophy and Metaphysics in Yale College. New-York: Scribner & Co. 1868. 8vo, pp. 673.]

This formidable volume is, unless we except Professor Hickok's work on Rational Psychology, the most considerable attempt that has been made among us to construct a philosophy of the human understanding. Professor Porter is able, patient, industrious, and learned. He knows the literature of his subject, and has no little facility and fairness in seizing and setting forth the commanding points in the views and theories of others; but, while he shows great familiarity with metaphysical and psychological questions, and some justness and delicacy as an analyzer of facts, he seems to us to lack the true philosophical instinct, and that synthetic grasp of thought which seizes facts in their principles and genetic relations, and reduces them to a dialectic whole, without which one cannot be a philosopher.

The professor's book is a hard, book for us to read, and still harder for us to understand. Its mechanical aspect, with three or four different sizes of type on the same page, is repulsive to us, and prejudices us against it. It is not absolutely dull, but it is rather heavy, and it requires resolution to read it. It has nothing attractive or enlivening, and it deals so much with particulars and details that it is difficult for the reader to carry what he reads along in his memory. Even when we have in our minds what the author actually says, it is not easy to understand it, or determine which of several possible meanings he adopts. Not that his language, though seldom exact or precise, and disfigured occasionally by needless barbarisms, and a terminology which we hope is not yet in good usage, is not clear enough for any one accustomed to philosophical studies, nor is it that his sentences are involved and hard to be construed, or that his statements, taken as isolated statements, are not intelligible; but it is hard to determine their meaning and value from his point of view, and in relation to his system as a whole. His book is composed of particulars, of minute and not seldom commonplace observations, without any perceptible scientific reduction to the principle which generates, co-ordinates, and explains them.

It is but fair to the professor to say, in the outset, that his book belongs to a class of books which we seldom read and heartily detest. It is not a work of philosophy, or an attempt even to give us a science of things in their principles and causes, their progress and destiny, but merely a Wissenschaftslehre, or science of knowing. Its problem is not what is or what exists; but what is knowing, how do I know, and how do I know that I know? With all deference to the Fichteans, we venture to assert that there is and can be no science of knowing separate from the science of things, distinct from and independent of the subject knowing. We know, says all that, we know that we know, says. He who knows, knows that he knows; and if one were to doubt that knowing is knowing, we must let him doubt, for we have only knowing with which to prove that knowing is knowing.

We can by no possible anatomical dissection of the eye, or physiological description of its functions, explain the secret of external vision. We are told that we see not external objects themselves, but their pictures painted by the light on the retina, and it is only by them that we apprehend visible objects. But suppose it so, it brings us no nearer to the secret of vision. How do we see the picture? How by means of the picture apprehend the external object? Yet the man who sees knows he sees, and all that can be said is, that to elicit the visual act there must be the visible subject, the visible object, and the light which mediates between them and illuminates them both. So is it with intellectual vision. We may ascertain some of the conditions under which we know, but the knowing itself is to us an inexplicable mystery. No dissection or possible inspection of the soul can explain it, or throw the least light on it. All that can be said is, that to the fact of knowledge, whatever its degree or its region, there must be the intellective subject, the intelligible object, and the intellectual light which places them in mutual relation and illumines alike both subject and object. Having said this, we have said all that can be said. Hence works intended to construct the science of science, or knowledge, are not only useless, but worse than useless; for, dealing with abstractions which have no existence in nature, and treating them as if real, they mislead and perplex the student, and render obscure and doubtful what without them is clear and certain.

Professor Porter is a psychologist, and places all the activity in the fact of knowledge on the side of the soul, even in the intuition of principles, without which the soul can neither exist, nor think, nor feel. His purpose in his Introduction is to establish the unity and immateriality—spirituality, he says, of the soul against the materialists—and to vindicate psychology not only as a science, but as an inductive science. With regard to the unity and immateriality of the soul, we hold with the professor, though they are not provable or demonstrable by his method; and we recognize great truth and force in his criticisms on materialism, of which we have to deplore in the scientific world, and even in popular literature, the recrudescence. That psychology is, in a secondary sense, a science, we do not deny; but we do deny that it is either "the prima philosophia" as the professor asserts, or an inductive science, as he endeavors to prove.

All the inductive sciences are secondary sciences, and presuppose a first science, which is strictly the science of the sciences. Induction, the professor himself maintains, has need of certain first principles, or a priori assumptions, which precede and validate it. How can psychology be the prima philosophia, or first philosophy, when it can be constructed only by borrowing its principles from a higher or prior science? Or how can it be the first philosophy, when that would suppose that the principles which the inductive sciences demand to validate the inductive process are contained in and derived from the soul? Is the professor prepared to maintain that the soul is the first principle of all the sciences? That would imply that she is the first principle of things, of reality itself; for science is of the real, not of the unreal. But this were pure Fichteism, and would put the soul in the place of God. The professor would shrink from this. He, then, must have made the assertion that psychology is the prima philosophia somewhat hastily, and without due reflection; unless indeed he distinguishes between the first principles of science and the first principles of things.

The inductive sciences are constructed by induction from the observation and analysis of facts which the soul has the appropriate organs for observing. But psychology is the science of the soul, its nature, powers or faculties, and operations; and if an inductive science, it must be constructed by induction from psychical facts observed and analyzed in the soul by the soul herself. The theory is very simple. The soul, by the external senses, observes and analyzes the facts of the external world, and constructs by induction the physical sciences; by her internal sense, called consciousness, she observes and analyzes the world within herself, and by way of induction from the facts or phenomena she observes, constructs psychology, or the science of herself. Unhappily for the psychologue, things do not go so simply. To this theory there are two grave objections: First, the soul has no internal sense by which she can observe herself, her acts or states in herself; and second, there are no purely psychical facts to be observed.

The professor finds the soul's faculty of observing the facts of the internal world in consciousness, which he defines to be "the power by which the soul knows its own acts and states." But consciousness is not a power or faculty, but an act of knowing, and is simply the recognition of the soul by the soul herself as the subject acting. We perceive always, and all that is before us within the range of our percipient powers; but we do not always distinguish and note each object perceived, or recognize the fact that it is we who are the subject perceiving. The fact of consciousness is precisely in the simple perception being so intensified and prolonged that the soul not only apprehends the object, but recognizes itself as the subject apprehending it. It is not, as the professor maintains at great length in Part I., a presentative power; for it is always a reflex act, and demands something of memory. But the recognition by the soul in her acts as the subject acting is something very different from the soul observing and analyzing in herself her own powers and faculties.

The soul never knows herself in herself; she only recognizes herself under the relation of subject in her acts. Recognizing herself only as subject, she can never cognize herself as object, and stand, as it were, face to face with herself. She is never her own object in the act of knowing; for she is all on the side of the subject. She cannot be on one side subject, and on the other object. Only God can be his own object; and his contemplating of himself as object, theologians show us, is the Eternal Generation of the Son, or the Word. Man, St. Thomas tells us, is not intelligible in himself; for he is not intelligens in himself. If the soul could know herself in herself, she could be her own object; if her own object, she would suffice for herself; then she would be real, necessary, self-existent, independent being; that is to say, the soul would be God.

We deny not that the soul can know herself as manifested in her acts, but that she can know herself in herself, and be the object of her own thought. I can not look into my own eyes, yet I can see my face as reflected in the glass. So the soul knows herself, and her powers and faculties; but only as reflected from, or mirrored in, the objects in conjunction with which she acts. Hence the powers and faculties are not learned by any observation of the soul herself, but from the object. The soul is a unit, and acts always as a unit; but, though acting always in her unity, she can act in different directions, and in relation to different objects, and it is in this fact that originates the distinction of powers and faculties. The distinction is not in the soul herself, for she is a unit, but in the object, and hence the schoolmen teach us that it is the object that determines the faculty.

It is not the soul in herself that we must study in order to ascertain the faculties, but the soul in her operations, or the objects in relation with which she acts. We know the soul has the power to know, by knowing, to will, by willing, to feel, by feeling. While, then, the soul has power to know herself so far as mirrored by the objects, she has no power to observe and analyze herself in herself, and therefore no power of direct observation and analysis of the facts from which psychology, as an inductive science, must be constructed.

But there are no such facts as is assumed to be observed and analyzed. The author speaks of objects which are purely psychical, which have no existence out of the soul herself; but there are and can be no facts, or acts, produced by the soul's own energy alone. The soul, for the best of all possible reasons, never acts alone, for she does not exist alone. "Thought," says Cousin, "is a fact that is composed of three simultaneous and indissoluble elements, the subject, the object, and the form. The subject is always the soul, [le Moi,] the object is something not the soul, [le non-Moi,] and the form is always the relation of the two." The object is inseparable from the subject as an element of the thought, but it exists distinct from and independent of the soul, and when it is not thought as well as when it is; otherwise it could not be object, since the soul is all on the side of the subject. The soul acts only in conjunction with the object, because she is not sufficient for herself, and therefore cannot suffice for her own activity. The object, if passive, is as if it were not, and can afford no aid to the fact of thought. It must, therefore, be active, and then the thought will be the joint product of the two activities. It is a grave mistake, then, to suppose that the activity in thought is all on the side of the soul. The soul cannot think without the concurrent activity of that which is not the soul. There is no product possible in any order without two factors placed in relation with each other. God, from the plenitude of his being, contains both factors in his own essence; but in creatures they are distinct from and independent of each other.

We do not forget the intellectus agens of St. Thomas, but it is not quite certain what he meant by it. The holy doctor does not assert it as a faculty of the soul, and represent its activity as purely psychical. Or if it be insisted that he does, he at least nowhere asserts, implies, or intimates that it is active without the concurrence of the object: for he even goes so far as to maintain that the lower acts only as put in motion by the higher, and the terrestrial by the celestial. Hence the praemotio physica of the Thomists, and the necessity in conversion of praevenient grace—gratia praeveniens.

But even granting that there is the class of facts alleged, and that we have the power to observe and analyze them, as, in the language of Cousin, "they pass over the field of consciousness," we cannot by induction attain to their principle and causes; for induction itself, without the first principles of all science, not supplied by it, can give us only a classification, generalization, an hypothesis, or an abstract theory, void of all reality. The universal cannot be concluded, by way of induction, from particulars, any more than particulars can be concluded, by way of deduction, from the universal. Till validated in the prima philosophia, or referred to the first principles, without which the soul can neither act nor exist, the classifications and generalizations attained to by induction are only facts, only particulars, from which no general conclusion can be drawn. Science is knowledge indeed; but the term is generally used in English to express the reduction of facts and particulars to their principles and causes. But in all the secondary sciences the principles and causes are themselves only facts, till carried up to the first principles and causes of all the real and all the knowable. Not without reason, then, has theology been called the queen of the sciences, nor without warrant that men, who do not hold that all change is progress, maintain that the displacement, in modern times, of this queen from her throne has had a deleterious effect on science, and tended to dissipate and enfeeble the human mind itself. We have no philosophers nowadays of the nerve of Plato and Aristotle, the great Christian fathers, or the mediaeval doctors, none of whom ever dreamed of separating theology and philosophy. Even the men of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries had a grasp of thought, a robust vigor of mind, and a philosophic insight into the truth of things and their higher relations that you look in vain for in the philosophers of the eighteenth century and of our own. But this by the way. When things are at the worst, they sometimes mend.

Psychology, not psychologism, is a science, though not an inductive science, nor a science that can be attained to by the study of the soul and her phenomena in the bosom of consciousness. The psychologists—those, we mean, who adopt the psychological method, a method seldom adopted before the famous cogito, ergo sum of Descartes—seem incapable of comprehending that only the real is cognizable, and that abstractions are not real but unreal; and therefore that the first principles of science must be real, not abstract, and the first principles of things. Thus Professor Porter appears to see no real connection between them. True, he says, (p. 64,) "Knowledge and being are correlatives. There must be being in order that there may be knowledge. There can be no knowledge which is not the knowledge of being. Subjectively viewed, to know implies certainty; objectively, it requires reality. An act of knowing in which there is no certainty in the agent, and no reality in the object, is impossible in conception and in fact." This would seem to assert that only being can be known, or that whatever is known is real being, which is going too far and falling into ontologism. Only being is intelligible per se; but existences which are from being and participate of being, though not intelligible in or by themselves, since they do not exist in and by themselves, may yet be really known by the light of being which creates them. We know by being, as well as being itself.

But be not alarmed. The professor's being, the only object of knowledge, his reality without which there is no cognizable object, is nothing very formidable; for he tells us, in smaller type, on the same page, that "we must distinguish different kinds of objects and different kinds of reality. They may be formed by the mind, and exist [only] for the mind that forms them, or they may exist in fact and space for all minds, and yet in each case they are equally objects. Their reality may be mental and internal, or material and external, but in each case it is equally a reality. The thought that darts into the fancy and is gone as soon, the illusion that crosses the brain of the lunatic, the vision that frightens the ghost-seer, the spectrum which the camera paints on the screen, the reddened landscape seen through a colored lens, the yellow objects which the jaundiced eye cannot avoid beholding, each as really exists as does the matter of the solid earth, or the eternal forces of the cosmical system." The "eternal forces" of the cosmical system can be only God, who only is eternal. So the illusions of fancy, the hallucinations of the lunatic, and the eternal, self-existent, necessary being whom we call God, and who names himself I AM THAT AM, SUM QUI SUM, are alike being, and equally real!

The learned author tells us elsewhere that we call by the name being beings of very different kinds and sorts, owing to the poverty of our language, which supplies but one name for them. He will permit us to say that we suspect the poverty is not in the language. We have in the language two words which serve us to mark the precise difference between that which is in, from, and by itself alone, and that which exists in, from, and by being. The first is being, the other is existence. Being is properly applied only to God, who is, not Supreme Being, as is often said, but the one only being, the only one that can say, I AM THAT AM, or QUI EST; and it shows how strictly language represents the real order that in no tongue can we make an assertion without the verb TO BE, that is, only by being, that is, again, only by God himself. Existence explains itself. Existences are not being, but, as the ex implies, are from being, that is, from him in whom is their being, as Saint Paul says, "For in him we live, and move, and are," "vivimus, et movemur, et sumus." Reality includes being and all that is from and by being, or simply being and existences. Nothing else is real or conceivable; for, apart from God and what he creates, or besides God and his creatures, there is nothing, and nothing is nothing, and nothing is not intelligible or cognizable.

Dr. Porter understands by reality or being only what is an object of knowledge, or of the mind in knowing, though it may have no existence out of the mind, or, as say the schoolmen, a parte rei. Hence, though the soul is certain that the object exists relatively to her act of knowing, she is not certain that it is something existing in nature. How, then, prove that there is anything to correspond to the mental object, idea, or conception? In his Second Part, which treats of the representative power, he tells us that the objects represented and cognized in the representation are purely psychical, and exist only in the soul and for the soul alone. These, then, do not exist in nature; they are, in the ordinary use of the term, unreal, illusory, and chimerical, as the author himself confesses. If the object of knowledge can be in any instance unreal, chimerical, illusory, or with no existence except in and for the soul itself, why may it not be so in every instance, and all our knowledge be an illusion? How prove that in any fact of knowledge there is cognition of an object that exists distinct from and independent of the subject? Here is the pons asinorum of exclusive psychologists. There is no crossing the bridge from the subjective to the objective, for there is no bridge there, and subject and object must both be given simultaneously in one and the same act, or neither is given.

Dr. Porter, indeed, gives the subjective and what he calls the objective, together, in one and the same thought; but he leaves the way open for the question, whether the object does or does not exist distinct from and independent of the subject. This is the difficulty one has with Locke's Essay on the Understanding. Locke makes ideas the immediate object of the cognitive act; for he defines them to be "that with which the mind is immediately conversant." If the soul can elicit the cognitive act with these ideas, which it is not pretended are things, how prove that there is any real world beyond them? It has never been done, and never can be done; for we have only the soul, for whose activity the idea or concept suffices, with which to do it, and hence the importance to psychologists of the question, How do we know that we know? and which they can answer only by a paralogism, or assuming the reality of knowledge with which to prove knowledge real.

For the philosopher there is no such question, and nothing detracts so much from the philosophical genius of the illustrious Balmes as his assertion that all philosophy turns on the question of certainty. The philosopher, holding that to know is to know, has, after knowing, or having thought the object, no question of certainty to ask or to answer. The certainty that the object exists in nature is in the fact that the soul thinks it. The object is always a force or activity distinct from and independent of the subject, and since it is an activity it must be either real being or real existence.

The error of the author, as of all psychologers, is not in assuming that the soul cannot think without the concurrence of the object, or that the object is not really object in relation to the soul's cognitive power, but in supposing that the soul can find the object in that which has no real existence. He assumes that abstractions or mental conceptions, which have no real existence aside from the concrete or reality from which the mind forms them, may be real objects of the soul in the fact of knowledge. But no abstractions or conceptions exist a parte rei. There are white things and round things, but no such existence as whiteness or roundness. These and other abstractions are formed by the mind operating on the concretes, and taking them under one aspect, or generalizing a quality they have in common with all concretes of their class, and paying no heed to anything else in the concrete object. But these abstractions or general conceptions are cognizable and apprehended by the mind only in the apprehension of their concretes, white or round things. They are, as abstracted from white things or round things, no more objects of thought or of thought-knowledge than of sensible perception. We speak of abstractions which are simply nullities, not of genera and species, or universals proper, which are not abstractions but real; yet even these do not exist apart from the individual. They and their individuals subsist always together in a synthetic relation, and though distinguishable are never separable. The species is not a mere name, a mere mental conception or generalization; it is real, but exists and is known only as individualized.

The unreal is unintelligible, and, like all negation, is intelligible only in the reality denied. The soul, then, can think or know only the real, only real being, or real existences by the light of real being. If the soul can know only the real, she can know things only in their real order, and consequently the order of the real and of the knowable is the same, and the principles of the real are the principles of science. The soul is an intelligent existence, and the principles, causes, and conditions of her existence are the principles, causes, and conditions of her intelligence, and therefore of her actual knowledge. We have, then, only to ascertain the principles of the real to determine the principles of science. The principles of the real are given us in the first verse of Genesis: "In the beginning God created heaven and earth," and in the first article of the Creed, "I believe in one God, maker of heaven and earth, and all things visible and invisible." Or, as stated in strictly scientific terms, as affirmed in intuition, Being creates existences. The real and necessary being given in the scientific formula or intuition is indeed God; but this is not intuitively known, and can be known only discursively or by contemplation and reflection. We must not, then, in stating the first principles of the real, and of knowledge as given in intuition, use the term God, but being. We know by intuition being, but do not by intuition know that being is God. Hence the mistake of those who say we have intuition of God, or know by intuition that God is. We have intuition of that which is God, but not that what is given is God. Ontology is a most essential part of philosophy; but exclusive ontologists are as much sophists as are exclusive psychologists.

The first principles of reality are being, existence, and the creative act of being, whence the ideal formula or judgment, Being creates existences. This is the primum in the real order. All that is real and not necessary and self-sufficing being must be from being; for without real uncreated being there can be nothing, and existences are something only in so far as they participate of being. Things can exist from being, or hold from it, only by virtue of its creative act, which produces them by its own energy from nothing, and sustains them as existent. There is only the creative act by which existences can proceed from being. Emanation, generation, evolution, which have been asserted as the mode of procession of existences, give nothing really or substantially distinguishable from being. Existences, then, can really proceed from being only by the creative act, and, indeed, only by the free creative act of being; for necessary creation is no creation at all, and can be only a development or evolution of being itself. In theological language, then, God and creation include all the real; what is not God is creature or existence, and what is not creature or existence is God. There is no reality which is neither God nor creature, no tertium quid between being and existence, or between existence and nothing. The primum of the real is, then, the ideal formula or divine judgment, Ens creat existentias, for it affirms in their principle and their real relation all that is and all that exists. This formula is a proper judgment, for it has all the terms and relations of a judgment, subject, predicate, and copula. Being is the subject, existences is the predicate, and the creative act the copula, which at once unites the predicate to the subject and distinguishes it from it. It is divine, because it is a priori, the primum of the real; and as only the real is intelligible or knowable, it must precede as its principle, type, and condition, every judgment that can be formed by an existence or creature, and therefore can be only the judgment of God affirming his own being and creating the universe and all things, visible and invisible, therein.

Now, as the soul can only know the real, this divine judgment must be not only the primum of the real, but of the knowable; and since the soul can know only as she exists, in the real relations in which she stands, and knows only by the aid of the object on which she depends for her existence and activity, it follows that this judgment is the primum scientificum, or the principle of all real or possible science.

Is it asked, How is this known or proved, if not by psychological observation and analysis? The answer is, by the analysis of thought, which discloses the divine judgment as its idea, or necessary and apodictic element. This is not psychologism nor the adoption of the psychological method. Psychologism starts from the assumption that thought, as to the activity that produces it, whatever may or may not be its object, is purely psychical, and that the ontological, if obtainable at all, is so by an induction from psychological facts. The first assumption is disproved by the fact just shown, that thought is not produced or producible by the psychical activity alone, but by the joint action of the two factors subject and object, in which both are affirmed. The other assumption is disposed of by the fact that what is found in the analysis of thought is not particular facts or phenomena from which the first principles are concluded by way of induction, which could give us only a generalization or abstraction, but the first principles themselves intuitively given.

Philosophers generally assert that certain conditions precedent, or certain ideas a priori, are necessary to every fact of experience or actual cognition. Kant, in his masterly Critik der reinen Vernunft, calls them sometimes cognitions, sometimes synthetic judgments, a priori, but fails to identify them with the divine judgment, and holds them to be necessary forms of the subject. Cousin asserts them and calls them necessary and absolute ideas, but fails to identify them with the real, and even denies that they can be so identified. Reid recognized them, and called them the first principles of human belief, sometimes the principles of common sense, after Father Bouffier, which all our actual knowledge presupposes and must take for granted. Professor Porter also recognizes them, holds them to be intuitively given, calls them certain necessary assumptions, first truths or principles without which no science is possible, but fails to identify them with the divine judgment, and seems to regard them as abstract principles or ideas, as if abstractions could subsist without their concretes, or principles ever be abstract. We deny that they are abstract ideas, necessary assumptions, or necessary forms of the understanding or cognitive faculty, and hold them to be the principles of things, alike of the real and the knowable, without which no fact exists and no act of knowledge is possible. They cannot be created by the mind, nor formed by the mind operating on the concrete objects of existence, nor in any manner obtained by our own mental activity; for without them there is no mind, no mental activity, no experience. Dr. Porter, after Reid, Kant, Cousin, and others, has clearly seen this, and conclusively proved it—no philosopher more conclusively—and it is one of the merits of his book. He therefore justly calls them intuitions, or principles intuitively given; yet either we do not understand him, or he regards them as abstract truths or abstract principles. But truths and principles are never abstract, and only the concrete or real can be intuitively given. Those intuitions, then, must be either real being or contingent existences; not the latter, for they all bear the marks of necessity and universality; then they must be the real and necessary being, and therefore the principles of things, and not simply principles of science. Dr. Porter makes them real principles in relation to the mental act; but we do not find that he identifies them with the principles of the real. He doubtless holds that they represent independent truths, and truths which are the principles of things; but that he holds them, as present to the mind, to be the principles themselves, we do not find.

Dr. Porter's error in his Part IV., in which he discusses and defines intuitions, and which must be interpreted by the foregoing parts of his work, appears to us to be precisely in his taking principle to mean the starting-point of the soul in the fact of knowledge, and distinguishing it from the principle of the real order. He distinguishes between the object in mente and the object in re, and holds that the former is by no means identical with the latter. He thus supposes a difference between the scientific order and the real, and therefore that the principle of the one is not necessarily the principle of the other. This is to leave the question still open, whether there is any real order to respond to the scientific order, and to cast a doubt on the objective validity of all our knowledge. The divine judgment, or ideal formula, we have shown, is alike the primum raale and the primum scientificum, and therefore asserts that the principles of the two orders are identical, and that the scientific must follow the real, for only the real is knowable. Hence science is and must be objectively certain.

The intuitive affirmation of the formula, being creates existences, creates, places the soul, and constitutes her intelligent existence. The author rightly says every thought is a judgment. There is no judgment without the copula, and the only real copula is the copula of the divine judgment or intuition, that is, the creative act of being. Being creating the soul is the principle of her existence; and as we have shown that she can act only as she exists, the principle of her existence is the principle of her acts, and therefore of her knowing, or the fact of knowledge. There is, then, no thought or judgment without the creative act for its copula. The two orders, then, are united and made identical in principle by the creative act of being. The creative act unites the acts of the soul, as the soul itself, to being.

The difficulty some minds feel in accepting this conclusion grows out of a misapprehension of the creative act, which they look upon as a past instead of a present act. The author holds that what is past has ceased to exist, and that the objects we recall in memory are "created a second time." He evidently misapprehends the real character of space and time. These are not existences, entities, as say the scholastics, but simple relations, with no existence, no reality, apart from the relata, or the related. Things do not exist in space and time; for space and time simply mark their relation to one another of coexistence and succession. Past and future are relations that subsist in or among creatures, and have their origin in the fact that creatures as second causes and in relation to their own acts are progressive. On the side of God, there is no past, no future; for his act has no progression, and is never in potentia ad actum. It is a complete act, and in it all creatures are completed, consummated, in their beginning, and hence the past and the future are as really existent as what we call the present. The Creator is not a causa transiens, that creates the effect and leaves it standing alone, but a causa manens, ever present in the effect and creating it.

Creation is not in space and time, but originates the relations so-called. The creative act, therefore, can never be a past or a future act, an act that has produced or that will produce the effect, but an act that produces it always here and now. The act of conservation, as theologians teach, is identically the act of creation. God preserves or upholds us in existence by creating us at each instant of our lives. The universe, with all it contains, is a present creation. In relation to our acts as our acts or our progressiveness toward our final cause or last end, the universe was created and will remain as long as the Creator wills; but in relation to God it is created here and now, and as newly created at this moment as when the sons of the morning sang together over its production, by the divine energy alone, from nothing; and the song ceases not; they are now singing it. There is nothing but this present creative act that stands between existences and nothing. The continuity of our existence is in the fact that God creates and does not cease to create us.

We have only to eliminate from our minds the conceptions that transport the relations of space and time to the Creator, or represent them as relations between Creator and creature, where the only relation is that of cause and effect, and to regard the creative act as having no relations of space and time, to be able to understand how the divine judgment, intuitively affirmed, is at once the principle of the real and of the scientific, and the creative act, the copula of being and existence, is the copula of every judgment or thought, as is proved by the fact already noted, that in no language can an assertion be made without the verb to be, that is, without God.

Dr. Porter, engaged in constructing not the science of things, but a science of knowing—a Wissenschaftslehre—has apparently been content with the intuitions as principles or laws of science, without seeking to identify them with the real. He is a doctor of divinity, and cannot intend to deny, with Sir William Hamilton and the Positivists, that ontology can be any part of human science. The Positivists, with whom, in this respect, Sir William Hamilton, who has finished the Scottish school, fully agrees, assert that the whole field of science is restricted to positive facts and the induction of their laws, and that their principles and causes, the ontological truths, if such there be, belong to the unknowable, thus reducing, with Sir William Hamilton, science to nescience. But though Dr. Porter probably holds that there is an ontological reality, and knows perfectly well that it cannot be concluded from psychical phenomena, either by way of induction or of deduction, he yet seems unable or unwilling to say that the mind has in intuition direct and immediate apprehension of it. The first and necessary truths, or the necessary assumptions, as he calls them, which the mind is compelled to make in knowing particulars, such as "what is, is," "the same thing cannot both be and not be at the same time," "whatever begins to exist must have a cause," etc., are, in his doctrine, abstract ideas, which, though they may represent a reality beyond themselves—and he tries to prove that they do—are yet not that reality itself. These ideas he states, indeed, in an abstract form, in which they are not real; but they are all identified in the ideal formula, or divine judgment, which is not an abstract but a real, concrete judgment. He holds them to be intuitions, indeed; but intuition, in his view, simply stands opposed to discursion, and he makes it an act of the soul immediately affirming the object, not the act of the object immediately affirming itself by its own creative act. Till being, in its creative act, affirms itself, the soul does not exist; and the intuitive act is that which creates it, and creates it intelligent. The intuition cannot, then, be the act of the soul, unless you suppose the soul can act without existing, or know without intelligence. If we make intuition the act of the soul, and suppose the necessary truths intuitively given are abstractions or representative ideas, how can we know that there is any reality represented by them? The old question again: How pass from the subjective to the objective?—from the scientific to the real?

The doctrine of representative ideas comes from the scholastics, and most probably from the misapprehension of their philosophy. Plato maintained that we know by similitude, which similitude he called idea. No doubt, Plato often means by idea something else; but this is one of the senses in which he uses the term. This idea, with the peripatetics, becomes in sensibles the phantasm, in intelligibles the intelligible species. The intelligible species was assumed as something mediating between the soul and the intelligible object. But though they asserted it as a medium, they never made it the object cognized. In their language, it was the objectum quo, not the objectum quod; and St. Thomas teaches expressly that the mind does not terminate in the species, but attains the intelligible object itself. In this magazine for May, 1867, in an article entitled "An Old Quarrel," we showed that what the scholastics probably had in mind when they spoke of the intelligible species, is adequately expressed by what we, after the analogy of external vision, call the light, which illuminates at once the subject and object, and renders the one cognitive and the other cognizable. This light is not furnished by the mind, but by being itself light, and the source of all light, present in every fact of knowledge in the creative act.

The Scottish school has made away with the phantasms, and proved that, in what our author calls sense-perception, we perceive not a phantasm, but the real external object itself; but in the intelligible or supersensible world, this direct apprehension of the object Dr. Porter appears not to admit. He consciously or unconsciously interposes a mundus logicus between the mind and the mundus physicus. The categories are with him abstract relations, and logic is a mere formal science. This is evident from Part III., in which he treats of what he calls "thought-knowledge." But the categories are not abstract forms of thought, but real relations of things; logic is founded in the principle and constitution of things, not simply in the constitution and laws of the human mind. Its type and origin are in being itself, in the Most Holy Trinity. The creative act is the copula of every strictly logical judgment. The Creator is logic, the

, or, as Plato would say, logic in itself, and therefore all the works of God are strictly logical, and form, mediante his creative act, a dialectic whole with himself. Whatever does not conform to the truth and order of things is illogical, a sophism; and every sophism sins against the essence of God, as well as against the constitution of the human mind. Psychologism is a huge sophism; for it assumes that the soul is being, and can exist and act independently when it is only a created, dependent existence; that it is God, when it is only man. Satan was the first psychologist we read of. Ontologism is also a sophism of very much the same sort. Psychologism asserts that man is God; ontologism asserts that God is man. This is all the difference between them, and they terminate at the same point. Existences cannot be logically deduced from being, because being, sufficing for itself, cannot be constrained to create either by extrinsic or by intrinsic necessity. Existences are not necessarily involved in the very conception of being, but are contingent, and dependent on the free-will of the Creator. God cannot be concluded by induction from psychological facts; for the universal cannot be concluded from the particular, nor the necessary from the contingent.

Both the ontological primum and the psychological must be given intuitively and in their real synthesis, or no science of either is possible. The mind must take its starting-point and principle of science from neither separately, but from the real synthesis of the two, as in the ideal formula. The attempt to construct an exclusively ontological or an exclusively psychological science is as absurd and as sophistical as the attempt to express a judgment without the copula, or to construct a syllogism without the middle term. The real copula of the judgment, the real medius terminus that unites the two extremes of the syllogism, is the creative act of being.

All Gentile philosophy failed, because it failed to recognize the creative act. Outside of Judaism, the tradition of creation was lost in the ancient world. In vain will you seek a recognition of it in Plato or Aristotle, or in any of the old Gentile philosophers. In its place you find only emanation, generation, or formation. The error of the Gentiles reappears in our modern philosophers, who—since Descartes detached philosophy from theology, of which it is simply the rational element—are endeavoring to construct science and the sciences without the creative act, and if they escape pantheism or atheism, it is by the strength of their faith in revelation, not by the force of their logic. Dr. Porter really attempts to construct the philosophy of the human intellect, unconsciously certainly, on purely atheistic or nihilistic principles; that is, without any principles at all. He, of course, believes in God, believes that God made the world; but most likely he believes he made it as the watch-maker makes a watch, so that when wound up and started it will go of itself—till it runs down. This is a very wide-spread error, and an error that originates with so-called philosophers, not with the people. Hence we find scientific men in large numbers who look upon the world God has made as a huge machine; and now that it is made, as independent of him, capable of going ahead on its own hook, and even able to bind him by its laws, and deprive him of his freedom of action, as if it were or could be anything but what he at each moment makes it. He ought, as a doctor of divinity, to understand that there can be no science without the efficacious presence of God, who created the soul, and none without his presence creating it now, and by his light rendering it intelligent. To construct science without God in his creative act as the principle, is to begin in sophism and end in nihilism.

We need hardly say that, in asserting the divine judgment or ideal formula as the principle of all science, and as the necessary and apodictic element of every fact of knowledge, we do not pretend that the mind is able in the first moment of intellectual life to say to itself, or to others, God creates existences. This is the real formula which expresses in principle the entire real order, but it is the formula to which the principles given in intuition are reduced by reflection. There are a large number of minds, and among them our illustrious Yale Professor of Moral Philosophy and Metaphysics, who do not recognize the identity of being with God, or are aware that the intuition is of that which is God. A still larger number do not distinguish the so-called necessary ideas from the contingent objects of experience cognizable only by them, and very few, even among professors of philosophy, ever identify these ideas—the necessary, the universal, the eternal, and the immutable—with real being, or reflect that they cannot subsist as abstractions, and that the universal, the eternal, the immutable, the necessary, of which we have intuition in all our mental acts, is and must be real, necessary, universal, eternal, and immutable being, that is to say, God himself. Few reflect far enough to perceive that in intuition the object is real being; and the number of men who distinctly recognize all the terms of the formula in their real relation is a very small minority, and every day growing smaller.

But the intuition is not, as Dr. Porter supposes, of ideas which lie latent or dormant in the mind till occasion wakes them up and calls them into action; but they are the first principles, or rather the principles from which the mind proceeds in all its intellectual acts. They are intuitively affirmed to the mind in the creative act, and are ever present and operative; but we become aware of them, distinguish them, and what they imply or connote, only by reflection, by contemplating them as they are held up before the mind, or sensibly represented to it, in language. Though the formula is really the primum philosophicum, we attain to it, or are masters of what is really presented in intuition, and are able to say, being is God, and God creates existences, only at the end of philosophy, or as its last and highest achievement.

The principles are given in the very constitution of the mind, and are present to it from its birth, or, if you will, from the first instant of its conception; but they are by no means what Descartes and others have called innate ideas. Descartes never understood by idea the intelligible object itself, but a certain mental representation of it. The idea was held to be rather the image of the thing than the thing itself. It was a tertium quid somewhere between real and unreal, and was regarded as the medium through which the mind attained to the object. In this sense we recognize no ideas. In the fact of knowledge, what we know is the object itself, not its mental representation. We take idea or the ideal in the objective sense, and understand by it the immediate and the necessary, permanent, immutable object of intuition, and it is identical with what we have called the primum philosophicum, or divine judgment, which precedes the mind's own activity. Hence we call that judgment the "ideal formula." With this view of idea or the ideal, analogous, at least, to one of the senses of Plato, from whom we have the word, it is evident that the Cartesian doctrine of innate ideas, which was afterward changed to that of innate faculties, cannot find in us an advocate.

The formula is ideal and apodictic, but it is not the entire object of the cognitive act. It is that which precedes and renders possible experience, or what Kant calls synthetic judgments a posteriori. We have said the soul can know only as she exists, and that whatever object she depends on for her existence must she depend on for her acts, and it enters into all her thoughts or facts of knowledge. The soul depends for existence on God, on humanity and nature. In the formula, we have only the ideal principle of man and nature, and therefore the ideal formula, while it furnishes the principle and light which render knowledge possible, does not supersede experience, or actual knowledge acquired by the exercise of the soul and her faculties. Here the soul proceeds by analysis and synthesis, by observation and induction, or deduction, according to the nature of the subject. We do not quarrel with the inductive sciences, nor question their utility; we only maintain that they are not sciences till carried up to the principles of all real science presented to the mind in intuition. Induction is proper in constructing the physical sciences, though frequently improperly applied; but it is inapplicable, as my Lord Bacon held, in the construction of philosophy; for in that we must start from the ideal formula, and study things in their principles and in their real synthesis.

We have got through only the author's Introduction, yet that has brought up nearly all the salient points of his entire volume. Here we might stop, and assuredly should stop, if we had no higher object in view than to criticise its author, or simply to refute his psychological method. We believe one of the first steps toward arresting the atheistical or pantheistical tendency of the age, and of bringing the mind back to truth and the logic of things, is to set forth and vindicate sound philosophy, the philosophy which in substance has always been preserved in the Christian church. To use up an author or to denounce a false system is a small affair. The only solid refutation of error is in presenting the truth it impugns. As there are several questions of importance raised by the author on which we have hardly touched, we propose to return to the book and consider them at our earliest convenience.

---

The Catholic View Of Public Education
In The United States.

[We republish the following article from The American Educational Monthly, with the permission of the editor, on account of the importance of the subject, the intrinsic value of the article, and to aid in giving it a wide circulation. ED. C. W.]

It would be wholly superfluous to address an argument to any portion of the American people upon the absolute necessity of popular education. Upon that point there is no diversity of opinion. The fundamental principles of our social system rest upon it as a corner-stone; such as, that government derives all of its authority, under God, from the consent of the governed; the people possess the sovereignty; public officers are only public servants; the multitude rules by representation; Congress, the President, and the Courts are the people—without the people they have no existence; constitutions and laws are but the well-ordered expression of the public will, at all times revocable, in an orderly manner, and binding upon each citizen as the will of all, unless the popular decree be against the law of God, when, of course, it bind's no man's conscience. Hereditary rights, class privileges, ancient social divisions, and distributions of power have all disappeared, or rather, have never existed here. Even in Colonial times, the Crown was almost a myth, and cast but a shadowy reflection into the deep waters of the Hudson and the Mississippi, as they rolled on to the sea from the illimitable forests where the moccasined hunter was then as free as the Red Indian had been for unrecorded centuries. The Revolution of '76 changed the government, but really left the cardinal points of our American civilization very much as it found them. In fact, our political education is traceable back to the days of Alfred and Edward the Confessor; for the Norman king gave us no concession in Magna Charta which was unknown to Saxon liberty. In our Republic we have only drawn out these principles to their extreme conclusions. We have gone back to the original hypothesis, that society is an association of equal rights for mutual protection; and that power, under God, belongs to the whole body of corporators—that is, the multitude. From this postulate we are obliged to pass immediately to the axiom that there can be no fit administration of power without knowledge. Knowledge may be acquired in several ways. The most direct and impressive is experience. Alcuin was master of books; but Charlemagne was master of men. The great emperor could not read, but he possessed the wisdom to govern. Who shall say that he was not "educated" in the highest sense of that vague term? And yet, it is very clear that knowledge gained only by the slow accretions of experience will not answer the wants and rapid movements of such a republic as ours in the age of steam and electricity. Each generation must be trained from the cradle, and made to possess, enlarge, and transmit to its successor all the accumulated knowledge of its predecessor. As no atom of matter perishes, but is for ever recombining and reproducing; so every true idea and sound moral sentiment must be made the inheritance of society, and never cease to exert its power for good among men. Not that moral truth can ever change; for it is now precisely what it has been from all eternity; nor is it better understood by the divine to-day, than it was by Moses when he came down from the mountain; but the multitude may be made more fully to comprehend and reverence it. Christianity, although specially revealed and miraculously propagated, did not suddenly conquer and civilize barbarous peoples. It has been eighteen hundred years struggling with the powers of darkness and the corruption of the human heart; and yet, alas! how very, very far removed are not even the most polished nations from the severe standard of Christian perfection! See the tyrannies, the oppressions, the cruelties, the wars, the pride, the luxury, the folly and deceit which fill the fairest parts of the earth with mourning, and drag mankind down into the slough of sin and sorrow! To be sure, there is a certain stereotyped class of saints and philosophers who cry aloud, "Compare our enlightened era with the rude times of the crusaders; or place the nineteenth alongside of the ninth century; and let the celestial light of our civilization shine down into the abysses of monkish superstition!" We shall, nevertheless, refuse to close our eyes to those stupendous sins which have supplanted the violent crimes of our ancestors. We shall see how their robber-sword has been put aside for our forger's pen; how their wild foray has given place to our gigantic stock speculation or bank swindle, which sweeps widows and orphans, by the ten thousand, into utter poverty and despair; how their fierce lust has been civilized into the decorous forms of the divorce courts; how their bold grasping of power has been changed into the arts of the whining demagogue; how their undisguised plunder of the public treasure in times of civil commotion has been superseded by the adroit peculation and covert bribery of our times of peace; how their courageous, rude anger has vanished before the safer and more efficacious process of concealed hatred, nestling, like the scorpion, among the roses of adulation. We certainly shall be obliged to remember these things, to the great reproach of our times, and in serious dread of the future; and we shall feel anxious to go to work to find the cause and the remedy. We are all agreed that education, that is, knowledge and moral training, cannot be dispensed with for an hour—that no nation can be governed safely, much less govern itself at all, without a clear head and a sound heart—that, if governed as a dumb brute, it will kick against the pricks, fly in the face of its hard master, and dash out its foolish brains against the stone wall! It will sing the Marseillaise and cover its garments with the blood of kings and aristocrats; until, having spent its fury, it will return to its crust and shout "Vive l'Empereur!" Should it attempt to govern itself, it will become the prey of the infamous men who are the spawn of its own passions. Without knowledge, the nation is either a silent sepulchre, where all hopes are buried, or a raging sea, where they are quickly wrecked. Knowledge, then, it must have. But what knowledge? Shall we say, knowledge of the arts? Ask Phidias and Praxiteles if the arts saved Greece! Shall we say, polite literature? Ah! let the mournful chorus of Sophocles, AEschylus and Euripides give utterance to the sad cries of those old pagan hearts for a higher virtue than the sublimest tragedy could teach them! Shall it be the eloquence of the orator or the wisdom of the legislator? We shall hear in the Philippics how vainly the master of orators appealed to a degenerate race, and we shall read in the closing annals of Athens and Sparta how utterly the wisdom of Solon and Lycurgus had failed to save polished and warlike states from the penalty which God has affixed to the crimes of nations. Shall we take refuge in human philosophy? Socrates and the divine Plato had cast off the degrading superstitions of paganism, and had proclaimed to their intellectual countrymen the eternity and unity of God, and the immortality of the soul of man. They had most earnestly enjoined upon them the sanctity of all the natural virtues—temperance, industry, patience, courage, honesty, benevolence, patriotism, continence, filial duty, conjugal fidelity; but what did their philosophy avail? Why did it not save the Grecian states? They went down into the night upon which no sun ever again shone! Their Roman conquerors seized upon the rich treasures of their knowledge. The Senate listened with rapture to the wisdom of the old Hellenic sages translated by Cicero into the noble Latin tongue. Virgil and Livy sought to inspire the Roman heart with grand ideas borrowed from the Greek masters. What did it all avail? The Roman republic had practised the natural virtues as fully as unregenerated man is capable of doing by the power of vigorous and cultivated reason. What did it avail? They, too, went down into the tomb of dead nations; and a few broken columns remain to mark the seat of their world-wide empire! It is very manifest, then, that intellectual culture, even when carried to the highest development of which men are capable, can never subdue their passions, nor enable them to uphold the civilization to which they may have attained in the freshness of their national life. If this were not so, then we could not clearly perceive the necessity of the Christian revelation. If man was self-sustaining, he would not require the arm of God to lean upon. The apothegm of the Greek sage, "Know thyself," was a dead letter. It was precisely to teach a man how to know himself that our Saviour came. And this is the whole knowledge! No poetry, oratory, history, philosophy, arts, or sciences could teach that, else the world would have learned it four thousand years ago, and the primitive races would not have perished. Even under the Christian dispensation, and in very modern times, men and nations have failed to know themselves, because they turned their backs on Christ and placed their hopes in human science and natural virtue. And so we have seen an enlightened nation in our day deify humanity, refuse to adore God, and prostrate itself before a harlot, as the high-priestess in the apotheosis of Reason! We have seen an antichristian conspiracy, formed of the most learned, eloquent, witty, and fascinating men of modern Europe, exerting the highest arts of genius to repaganize the world. We have seen science, rudely torn from religion, waging an insane war against the peace of society. That terrific phase of blasphemous infidelity has passed from our immediate view; but has it left nothing more dangerous behind? We think it has. The mass of mankind shrank with horror from the defiant blasphemy of Voltaire; and they recoiled with alarm from the ruin caused by his teachings. We love liberty; but we dread license, anarchy, chaos. Man is, also, naturally religious. Long after he had forgotten the traditions of the patriarchs and had lost God in the night of heathen idolatry, he still clung to

"The instinct of old reverence!"

and his wretched soul yearned after its Creator.

The false worship of Greece and Rome was the inarticulate cry of a lost people for that true worship which was promised to the Gentile at the appointed time. False and hideous as it was, who will not say that it was far preferable to atheism? It was only when the Epicurean philosophy had destroyed the faith of those people, that they cast off all moral restraint, and were swept away in the torrent of their vices. Man is naturally religious; and therefore the world will not long patiently tolerate the presence of blatant infidelity. The danger is not there. He who goes about like a roaring lion, seeking whom he may devour, knows very well that mankind is more easily seduced under the forms of virtue than by gross sin. His incarnate agents on earth know this too. Hence we find all the world covered over with gossamer nets of seduction! The press teems with books and journals, not confessedly infidel, yet working in the interests of infidelity; fanning the passions and exciting the morbid sensibilities of youth; teaching religious indifference under the pleasing garb of liberality; holding up the discipline of the church as hostile to personal freedom; depicting the doctrines and ceremonies of the Christian religion as trammels upon mental activity and intellectual progress; arraying the laity against their pastors; insisting that to be a humane man, an honest and industrious worker, a faithful friend, a good husband and father, a patriotic citizen, is to be all and to do all that the highest Christian morality can require or the welfare of the human race demand; asserting that the specific dogmas of the Christian faith, with perhaps one or two exceptions, are not essential, and may be rejected without concern; receiving with indifference and polite complacency either the divinity or the humanity of Christ; and accepting him as a God-Saviour, a man-prophet, or a harmless, self-deluded impostor, as your fancy may please to dictate; in a word, deifying man, and making this world, with its wealth, its pleasures, its pride and pomp, its power and magnificence, its civilization and nationalities, the sole object of his anxiety and love. Such, we say, is the growing evil of this nineteenth century, which is so scornful of the "dark ages;" an evil infinitely more subtile and destructive than the rage or gibes of Voltaire. This poison has gone through the chilled blood of renegade old men, destroying the religious vitality which had sustained their faith from the baptismal font to the very edge of the grave; how must it not, therefore, affect the hot veins of inexperienced youth, whose generous impulses are their greatest peril! See how, in those European revolutions gotten up by avowed enemies of religion, the students of the universities flock to the standards of infidelity, with the seductive cry of "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity!" They enlist, with enthusiasm, under what they believe to be the consecrated banner of inalienable human rights—their young, sympathetic hearts are justly moved by the sufferings of the toiling millions caused by unequal laws—their sense of justice and human brotherhood is outraged at the sight of domineering classes who monopolize the blessings of government—they see very clearly all the existing wrongs, but they do not see the practicable and wise remedies; and when they hear prudent voices counselling patience, and reminding them that the evil works of centuries, like old forest trees, have deep roots, and cannot be rudely torn out of the bosom of society without endangering its life, they cry out in their enthusiasm, "These are the voices of the enemies of the people, the voices of priests and aristocrats, away with them to the guillotine!" Only too late do they experience the retribution which God invariably visits upon those who presumptuously seek to drive the chariot of his Providence!

Not one word of what we have said is inapplicable to our own land. We live, move, and have our whole being in the midst of these same perils. Steam, electricity, commerce, and emigration have made us a part of the great European family. Every throb of their heart is felt in our own bosom. We are of their blood and civilization. We have their laws and their religion. We are nurtured by their science and literature. From us they have received more thorough ideas of democratic freedom, but from them we have derived all else that constitutes the intellectual life of man. It would be the height of folly in us to despise the lessons of their experience. Our children should be carefully instructed in all of it. They have a difficult task to perform in perpetuating our institutions as they were shaped by the fathers of the Republic. They must be well trained in the knowledge necessary for that purpose. From what has already been said it will be at once understood that we do not mean human science alone, nor principally. The beginning of wisdom is the fear of the Lord.

This brings us to the consideration of the immediate subject of this article; which can now, we think, be briefly stated; inasmuch as the foundation has been properly laid, if our views are correct as to the principles which we have presented.

Enlightened rulers all over Europe have been profoundly impressed with the lessons of this and the last century. It was once believed by monarchs that to enlighten their subjects would be to imperil their thrones. It is now very clearly seen that "the divinity which doth hedge a king" has long ceased to be an oracle to the people. The French emperor erects his dynasty upon popular suffrage. Hereditary right has come down from its ancient pedestal to accept from the people the confirmation of its authority. It is now too evident for further doubt that no ruler can rule modern nations by any appeal to the mausoleum of his ancestors. The garish light of the sun has penetrated every royal tomb, and has altogether annihilated the mystery which once filled the hearts of nations with awe and unquestioning obedience. Public opinion now rules the ruler. Kings and their ministers have now to elect between intelligent and virtuous opinion on the one hand, or revolutionary passions on the other. The wisest of them, therefore, are hastening to educate the people; and they are striving above all things to make such education distinctly Christian, and not simply moral; for they well remember the fate of all nations who have staked their salvation upon the sufficiency of the natural virtues. While kings are doing this to preserve the shadow of their royalty from the aggressive spirit of the age, we, in this chosen land, are doing or aiming to do the same thing, in order that we may rear successive generations of virtuous and enlightened heirs to the rich inheritance of our constitutional democratic freedom. Ours should be much the easier task; as we labor for no dynasty, but strive only to make a nation capable of self-preservation. We are no less in earnest than the kings; and we may surely examine their work and see what is good in it. The kings tried the pagan idea of intellectual culture adorned with the glittering generalities of moral philosophy; and they added to it the maxims of the Christian gospel, whenever that could be done without getting entangled in the conflicting creeds of the numerous sects. The school was like Plato's lecture-room, only that the sacred voice of the evangelist was heard occasionally in such passages as do not distinctly set forth faith and doctrine, about which the scholars could differ. Sectarianism, as it is called, had to be excluded, of course, in a mixed system of popular education, wherein freedom of conscience was conceded to be a sacred right and proselytism was disavowed. The result was twofold: first, tens of thousands of children were deprived of distinct religious instruction and doctrinal knowledge; and secondly, in countries where the Roman Catholic population was large, though in a minority, other tens of thousands were left without secular education, because their parents would not permit them to be brought up in habits of indifferentism, which means practical infidelity, or trained in knowledge hostile to their religious faith. Prussia, though she is the very embodiment and representative of Protestant Europe, soon came to the conclusion that this would not do—that education must be Christian—that it must be doctrinal and conducive to religious practices—that, as all could not or would not believe alike, each should have full opportunity to be reared in his own faith, to learn its doctrines and to fulfil its duties and discipline—and, therefore, that enlightened government established the denominational system, giving to each creed practical equality before the law, a separate school organization, (wherever numbers made it practicable,) and a ratable share of the public school-fund; reserving to the government only a general supervision, so as to secure a faithful application of the public money, and to enforce a proper compliance with the educational standard. The public schools are organized so that every citizen shall obtain the complete education of his child, in the faith and practice of his own church. All difficulties have disappeared, and perfect harmony prevails.

In France, by the last census, the population was thirty-seven millions, divided about as follows: 480,000 Calvinists, 267,000 Lutherans, 30,000 of other Protestant sects, and 73,000 Jews; the remaining thirty-six millions being either practically or nominally Catholic. Although the dissenters from the national faith are less than one million, that government has provided for them, at the public expense, separate primary schools, where each sect is at full liberty to teach its own doctrines. There are likewise three seminaries for the higher education of Lutherans and Calvinists.

Austria also supports schools, colleges, and universities for a Protestant minority.

The British Government has likewise adopted the same principle of public education for the Catholics and the Protestant dissenters of England; while, with her traditional and malignant hatred of the Irish people, she still denies them the justice which she extends to all of her other subjects, at home or in the colonies, even to the Hindoos and Mohammedans of her Indian empire!

And thus the most powerful and enlightened nations have decided that Christian civilization cannot be maintained upon pagan ideas; and that the safety of every commonwealth depends upon the Christian education of the people. They have also clearly seen that doctrines, discipline, morals, and "the religious atmosphere" must be kept united, and made to penetrate and surround the school at all times; and that, however greatly the Christian denominations may differ from each other, or even err in their belief, it is far better for society that their youth should be instructed in some form of Christian doctrine, than be left to perish in the dreary and soul-destroying wastes of deism. Experience has proved to them that moral teaching, with biblical illustrations, as the piety of Joseph, the heroism of Judith, the penitence of David, will not suffice to establish the Christian faith in young hearts, or to quiet the doubts of inquiring minds. The subtle Gibbon, mocking the cross of Christ, will confront the testimony of the martyrs with the heroes of pagan history. Voltaire did the same for the French youth of the last century, to their destruction. No. The experience of wise governments is this: that morals must be based upon faith, and faith made efficient in deeds of practical virtue; for faith worketh by charity. And another experience is this, which is best given in the very words of the eminent Protestant statesman and historian, M. Guizot: "In order to make popular education truly good and socially useful, it must be fundamentally religions. I do not simply mean by this, that religious instruction should hold its place in popular education and that the practices of religion should enter into it; for a nation is not religiously educated by such petty and mechanical devices; it is necessary that national education should be given and received in the midst of a religious atmosphere, and that religions impressions and religious observances should penetrate into all its parts. Religion is not a study or an exercise to be restricted to a certain place and a certain hour; it is a faith and a law, which ought to be felt everywhere, and which after this manner alone can exercise all its beneficial influence upon our minds and our lives." The meaning of which is, that not a moment of the hours of school should be left without the religious influence. It is the constant inhalation of the air which preserves our physical vitality. It is the "religious atmosphere" which supports the young soul. Religion cannot be made "a study or an exercise to be restricted to a certain place and a certain hour." It will not do to devote six days in the week to science, and to depend upon the Sunday-school for the religious training of the child. M. Guizot is right. The enlightened governments of Europe have accepted his wisdom and reduced it to practice in their great national school-systems.

Now, the Catholics of the United States have said no more than that; have asked no more than that; and yet, a wild cry of anger has been raised against them at times, as though they were the avowed enemies of all popular education. They pay their full quota of the public taxes which create the school-fund, and yet they possess, to-day, in proportion to their wealth and numbers, more parochial schools, seminaries, academies, colleges, and universities, established and sustained exclusively by their own private resources, than any other denomination of Christians in this country! Certainly this is no evidence of hostility to education! And why have they made these wonderful efforts, these unprecedented sacrifices? It is because they believe in the truth uttered by M. Guizot. It is because they believe in the truth established by all history. It is because they believe in the truth accepted and acted upon by enlightened men and governments of this age. It is because they know that revealed religion is to human science what eternity is to time. It is because they know that the salvation of souls is more precious to Christ than the knowledge of all the astronomers. It is because they know that the welfare of nations is impossible without God. And yet, they fully understand how religion has called science to her side as an honored handmaid; how learning, chastened by humility, conduces to Christian advancement; how the knowledge of good and evil (the fruit of the forbidden tree) may yet be made to honor God, when the sanctified soul rejects the evil and embraces the good. Therefore the Catholic people desire denominational education, as it is called.

That is the general view of the question; but there is a particular view, not to be overlooked, and which we will now briefly consider.

The most marked distinction between pagan and Christian society is to be found in the relations which the state bears to the family. Scarcely was the Lacedaemonian boy released from his mother's apron-string, when the state seized him with an iron hand. The state was thenceforth his father and his mother. The sanctities and duties of the family were annihilated. Body and soul, he belonged to the Moloch of Power. Private conscience was no more than a piece of coin in circulation; it was a part of the public property. Christ restored the family as it existed in Adam and Eve. Christian civilization denies that the state can destroy the family. The family is primary; the father the head; the mother the helpmate; the children in subjection, and for whom the parents shall give an account to the Father in heaven. The Christian state has no authority, by divine or human appointment, to invade this trust. It has, therefore, no mission either to coerce conscience or to dictate the education of it. It is the duty of the state in every way to facilitate, but it cannot arbitrarily control the mental and moral training of the people's children. That right and that responsibility are domestical, and belong to the parent.

Now, the Catholic parent is aware that there are between his creed and all others the widest and most irreconcilable differences, and that it is impossible to open the New Testament, at almost any page, without forthwith encountering the prime difficulty. To read the Bible, without note or comment, to young children, is to abandon them to dangerous speculation, or to leave them dry and barren of all Christian knowledge. In mixed schools there is no other recourse; because it is impossible to make any comment upon any doctrinal teaching of Christ and his apostles, without trenching upon the conscientious opinions of some one or other of the listeners. "The Father and I are one;" "The Father is greater than I;" here at once we have the Unitarian and the Trinitarian at a dead-lock!" This is my body;" "It is the spirit which quickeneth, the flesh profiteth nothing;" here we have the primitive Lutheran, who believed in the real presence, (consubstantially,) and his Calvinistic coadjutor in reform squarely at issue! "Unless you be born again of water and the Holy Ghost," etc.; here we have the Baptist and the Quaker very seriously divided in opinion. Nevertheless, widely as they differ the one from the other, there is a fundamental assimilation between all the Protestant sects, which may render it possible for them to unite in one educational organization; and yet, we find many of the most enlightened and earnest among the Protestant clergy of America now zealously advocating the denominational system, such as we find in the European countries above referred to. They believe that education should be distinctly based upon doctrinal religion; and they are liberal enough to insist, that, by natural right, as well as by the constitutional guarantees of our free country, no doctrine adverse to the faith of a parent may lawfully be forced or surreptitiously imposed upon his child. It is well known, however, that, between the Catholic faith and all Protestant creeds, there is a gulf which cannot be bridged over. It would, therefore, be simply impossible to adopt any religious teaching whatever in mixed schools without at once interfering with Catholic conscience. No such teaching is attempted, as a general rule, we believe, in the public schools of the United States; and hence we have only a vague announcement of moral precepts, the utter futility and barrenness of which we have already alluded to. Catholics, agreeing with very many enlightened and zealous Protestants, believe that secular education administered in that way is not only vain, but eminently pernicious; that it is fast undermining the Christian faith of this nation; that it is rapidly filling the land with rationalism; that it is destroying the authority of the Holy Scriptures; that it is educating men who prefix "Reverend" and affix "D.D." to their names, the more effectually to preach covert infidelity to Christian congregations; that, instead of the saving morality of the gospel of Christ, which rests upon revealed mysteries and supernatural gifts, it is offering us that same old array of the natural virtues or qualities which pierced, like broken reeds, the sides of all heathen nations. And more than this, Catholics know by painful experience, that history cannot be compiled, travels written, poetry, oratory, or romance inflicted upon a credulous public, without the stereotyped assaults upon the doctrines, discipline, and historical life of their church. From Walter Scott to Peter Parley, and from Hume, Gibbon, and Macaulay, to the mechanical compilers of cheap school-literature, it is the same story, told a thousand times oftener than it is refuted; so that the English language, for the last two centuries, may be said, without exaggeration, to have waged war against the Catholic Church. Indeed, so far as European history is considered, the difficulty must always be insurmountable; since it would always be impossible for the Catholic and Protestant to accept the same history of the Reformation or of the Papal See, or the political, social, and moral events resulting from or in any degree connected with those two great centres and controlling causes. Who could write a political history of Christendom for the last three hundred years and omit all mention of Luther and the Pope? And how is any school compendium of such history to be devised for the use of the Catholic and Protestant child alike? And if history be philosophy teaching by example, shall we expel it from our educational plan altogether? Or shall we oblige the Protestant child to study the Catholic version of history, and vice-versa? Certainly, it is quite as just and politic to oblige the one as the other! Shall the "majority" control this? Who gave "majority" any such power or right? With us, the "majority" controls the "state;" and we have seen that the "state" becomes a usurper when it attempts this! We are quite sure that, if the Catholics were the "majority;" in the United States, and were to attempt such an injustice, our Protestant brethren would cry out against it, and appeal to the wise and liberal examples of Prussia and England, France and Austria! Now, is it not always as unwise, as it is unjust, to make a minority taste the bitterness of oppression? Men governed by the law of divine charity will bear it meekly, and seek to return good for evil; but all men are not docile; and majorities change sides rapidly and often in this fleeting world! Is it not wiser and more politic, even in mere regard to social interests, that all institutions, intended for the welfare of the people, should be firmly based upon exact and equal justice? This would place them under the protection of fixed habit, which in a nation is as strong as nature; and it would save them from the mutations of society. The strong of one generation may be the weak of the next; and we see this occurring with political parties within the brief spaces of presidential terms. Hence we wisely inculcate moderation and justice in political majorities, under the law of retribution.

Profoundly impressed with these views, and impelled by this commanding sense of duty, our Catholic people have created a vast network of schools over the country, at a price which the world knows little of—the sacrifice which the poor man makes, who curtails the wheaten loaf that he may give to his child the spiritual bread! Ah! how many humble cottages and dreary tenement-houses could testify to that! There are six millions of them here now; and still they come, from the deserted hearths beyond the seas. They are upright, industrious, and love the new land like the old! In war, they shoulder the musket; in peace, they are found filling every avenue of labor and enterprise. They contribute millions to the public revenue, and hundreds of millions to the productive industry of the country. Their own welfare and the highest interests of the country demand that their children and their children's children should be well instructed in secular learning, and thoroughly grounded in moral and religious knowledge. As we have shown, they cannot avail themselves of the public school system, as now organized, though they contribute largely to its support by their taxes. They do not desire to interfere with that system, as it seems at present to meet the wants, or at least the views, of their Protestant fellow-citizens; and they are, therefore, not "opposed to the common schools" in the sense in which they have been represented to be. They simply ask that they may be allowed to participate in the only way open to them, that is, by the apportionment to them of a ratable part of the fund, in aid of their existing schools, and of such others as their numbers, in any given locality, may properly enable them to establish, subject to the limited supervision of the state, as we have before explained. We need go no further than Canada to witness this system operating harmoniously and to the best advantage. The argument generally used against it is, that this would destroy the unity and efficiency of the whole. Why is it not so in Prussia, Austria, France, England, and the British Colonies? Besides, the Catholic populations in this country are very much aggregated, as in Baltimore, Philadelphia, Boston, New York, Brooklyn, Cincinnati, St. Louis, Chicago, Milwaukee, and in the large agricultural settlements throughout the North-Western States. Certainly, in such localities there could be no difficulty. It is contemplated by the school law that all these are to be educated. Then, why can they not be permitted to organize separate schools, as in the countries referred to? Such organization would be an integral part of the whole system; and the cost would be precisely the same. In fact, we learn from the Reports of Assistant Superintendents Jones and Calkins, made to Hon. S. S. Randall, the City Superintendent, and also from his Report made to the Hon. Board of Education, in December, 1866, that the school room provided in the city of New York (especially in the primary department) is altogether inadequate; and yet we know that tens of thousands of Catholic children could easily be cared for, if the means were afforded those who, even now, with the scantiest resources, are erecting parochial schools all over the city.

It would be impossible in a brief article to enter into details. Our purpose has been rather to set this question before a liberal public in its great leading aspects, as we are quite willing to trust to the wisdom and experience of our legislators to devise the proper plan and specifications. They will be at no loss for precedents. The statute-books of half a dozen countries may be consulted profitably. All we ask is, that this momentous question may be candidly considered and justly and generously disposed of. We hope that the day has gone by when such a question as this shall be met with passionate declamation or the obsolete cry of "no popery." Disraeli has failed to stem the tide of popular reform in England by reviving the insane clamor of Lord George Gordon. The world has outgrown such narrow bigotry. Vital questions, affecting the conscience and the rights of multitudes of men, and deeply involving the welfare of nations, must henceforth be settled by calm and just decisions. Christendom will tolerate nothing else now. And surely, this free and wise Republic will not be the last to put into practice those principles of equality before the law, justice, and generous confidence in human nature, which it published to all the down-trodden nationalities of the earth, almost a century ago, over the signatures of Hancock, Livingston, and Carroll of Carrollton.

---

The Eclipse Of The Sun Of August 18, 1868.
A Report Addressed By M. Janssen To The Marshal Of France,
President Of The Bureau Of Longitudes.

Calcutta, November 3, 1868.
M. Le Maréchal Et Ministre:

I have the honor of addressing to you, as President of the Bureau of Longitudes, my report on the eclipse of the 18th of last August, and upon some subsequent observations, which led me to the discovery of a method of observing the solar protuberances when the sun is not eclipsed. I will beg you to have the kindness to communicate this to the Bureau.

I have the honor to be, etc. etc.,

Janssen.

Mr. President:

I had the privilege of writing to you on the 19th of September last, to give you a brief account of my expedition. I am now able to furnish you with a more complete report of my observations during the great eclipse of the 18th of August.

The steamer of the Messageries Imperiales, in which I left France, landed me, on the 16th of July, at Madras, where I was received by the English authorities with great courtesy. Lord Napier, the governor of the province, gave me passage to Masulipatam upon a government boat. Mr. Grahame, an assistant collector, was sent with me to remove any difficulties which I might meet with in the interior.

On arriving, I had to select my station.

A chart of the eclipse shows that the central line, after crossing the Bay of Bengal, enters the peninsula of India at Masulipatam, and crossing the great plains formed by the delta of the Kistna, passes into a hilly country, containing several chains of mountains, on the frontier of the independent state of Nizzam. After receiving and considering much information on the subject, I determined to choose the city of Guntoor, situated on this central line, half-way between the mountains and the sea. I thus avoided the sea-fogs, very frequent at Masulipatam, as well as the clouds which often hang about lofty peaks.

Guntoor is quite an important place, being the centre of a large cotton trade. This cotton comes mostly from Nizzam, and is shipped to Europe from the ports of Cocanada and Masulipatam. Several French merchants, with their families, live at Guntoor; they are descended, generally speaking, from those ancient and numerous families which in former times were the glory of our beautiful Indian colonies.

My observatory was at the residence of M. Jules Lefaucheur, who was so kind as to place at my disposal all the first story of his house, which is in the highest and best part of the city. The rooms of this first story communicated with a large terrace, upon which I erected a temporary structure suitable for the observations intended.

The instruments were several achromatic lenses of six inches aperture, and a Foucault telescope of twenty-one centimetres. The former were all mounted upon one stand. The general movement was given by a mechanism constructed by Messrs. Brunner Bros., which enabled one to follow the sun by a simple rotation.

The apparatus was furnished with finders of two and two and three quarter inches aperture, which were themselves good astronomical glasses. In spectral analysis, these finders have a peculiar importance; for by means of them the precise point of the object under examination is known, to which the slit of the spectroscope in the principal telescope is directed. It is therefore necessary that the cross-wires, or in general the sights placed in the field of the finder, should correspond with great exactness with the slit of the spectral apparatus, and I had, of course, taken great care to secure this essential point. Special micrometers were also provided, to measure rapidly the height and angle of position of the protuberances. As for the spectroscopes, I had chosen them of different magnifying powers, so as to answer to the different requirements of the various phenomena. Finally, the apparatus carried, at the eye-piece end, screens of black cloth, forming a dark chamber, in order to preserve the sensibility of the eye.

Besides these instruments, intended for the principal observations, I had brought a full set of very delicate thermometers, made with great skill by M. Baudin; also some portable spy-glasses, hygrometers, barometers, etc. Thus I was able to turn to account the kindness of MM. Jules, Arthur, and William Lefaucheur, who offered their services for the subsidiary work. M. Jules, who is a good draughtsman, undertook to sketch the eclipse. An excellent telescope, of three inches aperture, furnished with cross-wires, was assigned to his use; he practised with it the representation of the expected phenomena by means of artificial imitations of eclipses. The thermometric observations were given to M. Arthur, who was also directed to ascertain the brilliancy of the protuberances and of the corona at the moment of totality, by a very simple photometric process.

I was assisted in my own operations by M. Redier, a young subaltern, whom the commander of the steamer L'Imperatrice had supplied to me. The services of M. Redier, who has excellent observing qualities, were very useful to me.

The time which remained before the eclipse was employed in preliminary study and practice, which served to familiarize us with the handling of our instruments, and suggested to me various improvements in them.

The day approached, but the weather did not promise to be favorable. It had rained for some time all along the coast. These rains were considered as extraordinary and exceptional. Fortunately, they moderated gradually before the 18th; and on that day the sun rose unclouded, and dimmed only by a mist out of which it soon passed; and at the time when our telescopes showed us that the eclipse began, it was shining with its full splendor.

Every one was at his post, and the observations immediately commenced. During the first phases some thin vapors passed before the sun, which interfered somewhat with the thermometric measurements; but, as the moment of totality approached, the sky became sufficiently clear.

Meanwhile the light diminished sensibly, surrounding objects appearing as if seen by moonlight. The decisive moment was near, and we waited for it with some anxiety; this anxiety took nothing from our powers of observation, it rather stimulated and increased them; and it was, besides, fully justified by the grandeur of the spectacle which nature was preparing for us, and by the consciousness that the fruits of our thorough preparations and of a long voyage would depend on the use now made of a few minutes.

The solar disc was soon reduced to a narrow bright arc, and we redoubled our attention. The slits of the spectroscopes were kept precisely upon the part of the moon's limb where the last light of the sun would be seen, so that they would be directed to the lower regions of the solar atmosphere at the moment of contact of the discs.

The total obscuration occurred instantaneously, and the spectral phenomena also changed immediately in a very remarkable manner. Two spectra, formed of five or six very bright lines—red, yellow, green, blue, and violet—occupied the field in place of the prismatic image of the sun which had just disappeared. These spectra, about one minute (of arc) long, corresponded line for line, and were separated by a dark space in which I could see no lines.

The finder showed that these two spectra were caused by two magnificent protuberances which were now visible on each side of the point of contact. One of them, that on the left, was more than three minutes (or one tenth of the sun's diameter) in height; it looked like the flame of a furnace, rushing violently from the openings of the burning mass within, and driven by a strong wind. The one to the right presented the appearance of a mass of snowy mountains, with its base resting on the moon's limb, and enlightened by a setting sun. These appearances have been carefully drawn by M. Jules Lefaucheur. I will therefore only remark before quitting the subject, which I shall have to treat subsequently under a special aspect, that the preceding observation shows at once:

1st. The gaseous nature of the protuberances, (the lines being bright.)

2d. The general similarity of their chemical composition, (the spectra corresponding line for line.)

3d. Their chemical species, (the red and blue lines of their spectrum being no other than the lines C and F of the solar one, and belonging, as is well known, to hydrogen gas.)

Let us now return to the dark space which separated the spectra of these protuberances. It will be remembered that, at the moment of the total obscuration, the slits were tangent to the solar and lunar discs, and were therefore directed toward the circumsolar regions immediately above the photosphere, in which regions M. Kirchhoff's theory places the atmosphere of vapors, which produces by absorption the dark lines of the solar spectrum. This atmosphere, when shining by its own light, should, according to the same theory, give a reversed solar spectrum, that is to say, one composed entirely of bright lines. This is what we were expecting and trying to verify, and it was to make the proof decisive that I had used so many precautions. But we have just seen that only the protuberances gave positive or bright-line spectra. Now, it is very certain that, if an atmosphere formed of the vapors of all the substances which have been found in the sun really existed above the photosphere, it would have given a spectrum at least as brilliant as that of the protuberances, which were formed of a gas much less dense and less luminous. It must, then, be admitted that, if this atmosphere exists, its height is so small that it has escaped notice.

I must also add that this result did not much surprise me; for my investigations on the solar spectrum had led me to doubt the reality of any considerable atmosphere around the sun, and I am more and more inclined to think that the phenomena of elective absorption, ascribed by the great physicist of Heidelberg to an atmosphere exterior to the sun, are clue to the vapors of the photosphere itself, in which the solid and liquid particles forming the luminous clouds are floating. This view is not merely in harmony with the beautiful theory on the constitution of the photosphere which we owe to M. Faye, but even seems to be a necessary deduction from it.

In fine, the eclipse of the 18th of August appears to me to show that the formation of the solar spectrum cannot be explained by the theory heretofore admitted, and I propose a correction to this theory as above indicated.

To return to the protuberances. During the total obscuration, I was much impressed by the extreme brilliancy of their spectral lines. The idea immediately occurred to me that they might be seen even when the sun was unobscured; unfortunately the weather, which became cloudy after the eclipse, did not allow me to try the experiment on that day. During the night, the method and the means presented themselves clearly to my mind. Rising the next morning at three, I prepared for these new observations. The sun rose quite clear; as soon as it had risen from the haze of the horizon, I began to examine it, placing the slit of the spectroscope, by means of the finder, upon the same place where, the day before, I had seen the protuberances.

The slit, being placed partly on the solar disc and partly outside, gave, of course, two spectra, that of the sun and that of the protuberances. The brilliancy of the solar spectrum was a great difficulty; I partially avoided it by hiding the yellow, the green, and the blue portions, which were the most brilliant. All my attention was directed to the line C, dark for the sun, bright for the protuberance, and which, coming at a rather faint part of the spectrum, was seen with comparative ease.

I had not examined the right hand or western part of the protuberant region long when I suddenly noticed a small bright red line, forming an exact prolongation of the dark line G of the sun. Moving the slit so as to sweep methodically the region which I was exploring, this line remained, but changed its length and its brilliancy in the different parts, showing a great inequality in the height and brightness of the various parts of the protuberance. This examination was resumed at three different times, and the bright line always appeared in the same circumstances. M. Redier, who assisted me with much interest in these experiments, saw it as well as I, and soon we could even predict its appearance by merely knowing what region we were examining. Soon after, I ascertained that the line F showed itself simultaneously with G.

In the afternoon, I returned to the region examined in the morning; the bright lines again showed themselves, but they indicated great changes in the distribution of the protuberant matter; the lines broke up sometimes into isolated fragments which would not unite with the principal one, notwithstanding the shifting of the slit. This suggested the existence of scattered clouds formed during the forenoon. In the region of the great (or left hand) protuberance, I found some bright lines, but their length and arrangement showed that great changes had also occurred here.

These first observations already showed that the coincidence of the lines G and F was real, and that hydrogen was certainly the most important element in these circumsolar masses. They also established the rapidity of the changes which these bodies undergo, which cannot be perceived during the short duration of an eclipse.

The following days, I availed myself of all the opportunities allowed by the weather to apply and perfect the new method, at least as far as was permitted by the character of the instruments, which had not been constructed to suit this new idea.

Observing very attentively the lines of the protuberances, I have sometimes noticed that they penetrated into the dark lines of the solar spectrum, showing thus that the protuberance extends over part of the sun's disc. This result was naturally to be expected; but the interposition of the moon has always made its proof impossible during eclipses.

I will also detail here an observation made on the 4th of September at a favorable time, which shows how rapidly the protuberances change their form and position.

At 9h. 50m., the examination of the sun showed a mass of protuberant matter in the lower part of the disc. To determine its shape, I used a method which may be called chronometric, since time is employed in it as the standard of measure.

In this method, the telescope is placed in a fixed position, so chosen that by the diurnal movement of the sun all parts of the region to be explored shall come in turn into the field of the spectroscope; and at determinate times the length and situation of the spectral lines successively produced are noted.

The time occupied by the sun's disc in passing before the slit gives the value of a second of time in minutes of arc. This, combined with the length of the lines estimated in the same unit, gives the means for a graphic representation of the protuberance.

The application of this method to the study of the solar region just mentioned as seen on this occasion, showed a protuberance extending over about thirty degrees (or one twelfth) of the sun's circumference, ten of which were east of the vertical diameter, and twenty west. Near the extremity of the western part, a cloud was lying, distant one and a half minutes, or one twentieth of the sun's diameter, from its limb. This cloud, about two minutes long and one high, was parallel to the limb. One hour afterward, a new drawing showed that the cloud had risen rapidly, and taken a globular form. But its movements soon became still quicker; for ten minutes later, at eleven o'clock, the globe was enormously extended in a direction perpendicular to the limb and to its previous position. A little mass of matter was also detached from the lower part, and hung between the sun and the main body of the cloud. Thick weather coming on prevented further observations.

To resume our remarks. Considered in regard to its principle, the new method is based upon the difference of the spectral properties of the protuberances and of the photosphere. The light of the latter emanates from solid or liquid particles, which are incandescent, and is incomparably brighter than that of the former; so that these have hardly been visible hitherto, except during eclipses. But the case is quite altered when we use the spectra of these bodies. For the solar light is spread over the whole extent of its spectrum, and thus much weakened; while that of the protuberances, on the contrary, is condensed into a few lines whose intensity bears some proportion to that of the corresponding solar ones. Hence their lines are quite easily seen in the field, together with those of the sun, though their ordinary images are entirely effaced by the dazzling light of the photosphere.

Another very fortunate circumstance for the new method comes to the support of the one just mentioned, namely, that the bright lines of the protuberances answer to the dark ones of the solar spectrum. Hence they are not only more easily seen in their own proper field, outside and on the edge of the solar spectrum, but they can even be followed into the interior of the latter, and by this means the protuberances can be traced upon the globe of the sun itself.

As regards the determination of chemical composition, the methods followed during total eclipses always carried with them some uncertainty; since, in the absence of the sun's light, graduated scales had to be employed to fix the position of the lines. The new method enables us to compare the two spectra directly.

As to the results obtained during the brief period in which this method has been used, they are as follows:

1st. That the luminous protuberances observed during total eclipses belong unquestionably to the circumsolar regions.

2d. That these bodies are mainly or entirely composed of incandescent hydrogen gas.

3d. That they are subject to movements of which no terrestrial phenomenon can give us any idea; since, though they are masses of matter having several hundred times the volume of the earth, they change completely their form and position in the course of a few minutes.

Such are the principal facts arrived at. I hope, notwithstanding the state of my eyes—fatigued by protracted experiments upon the subject of light—that I shall be able to continue my labors, and have the honor of submitting the results to the Bureau.

In conclusion, I will add, that I have also had an opportunity to continue my researches on the spectrum of the vapor of water. The climate of India, which is very moist at present, is quite favorable to these investigations. I am inclined to attribute to this spectrum a continually increasing importance. The whole series of my observations here and at Paris has made me confident of an elective action upon all the solar rays as far as the extreme violet, though in the latter such an action is much more difficult to establish with certainty. These experiments will form the subject of a separate communication.

---