At last Dick, fully convinced that he would be guilty of no presumption in speaking his mind to Mr. Irving on this subject, cheerfully turned his steps homeward, and resolved that the first moment he had of his own should be spent in seeking Mr. Irving, and informing him of what he could not now be aware of, the downfall of the Brandons. For the fall of the Brandons, as he heard from one or two who knew, had been very great, very rapid, and, it was feared, was not yet completed. Mr. Brandon had never held his head up since his failure, but dragged around, shabbily dressed, querulous and half-sick, dejected and clearly miserable. His two sons had been given very poor situations, on very niggardly pay, by a relative in another city, who, having always been odiously cringing to Mr. Brandon when he had money, seemed to delight now in heaping humiliations upon his sons. So great a crime it was in his eyes to be better bred, better educated, and more kindly cared for than were his own rude, blustering, ignorant boys. If only Fred and Joe had been taught whence come adversity and prosperity, doubtless these humiliations would have been crowns of glory for them; but theirs had been only a vague, dreamy sort of faith, which they never suspected had any application to their real life. I dare say they were very idle, useless, self-conceited and aggravating boys; but I can't help feeling sorry for them in their troubles. Miss Brandon, Dick was told, had not recovered her strength since the accident, and however well she might have been, with all her accomplishments, could not have done more than she was now doing: giving music-lessons to a few persons residing near her new home.
But all hope of seeing Mr. Irving faded the first thing the next day; for Dick's questions brought the unwelcome information that he had left home in October for two years' travel in Europe, and Dick, of course, could not presume to write to him.
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.