y in particular professors, or caprices of fashion,
have given a momentary fluctuation to this or that new form of
Kantianism,--an ascendency, for a period, to various, and, in some
respects, conflicting, modifications of the transcendental system; but
all alike have derived their power mediately from Kant. No weapons,
even if employed as hostile weapons, are now forged in any armoury but
that of Kant; and, to repeat a Roman figure which I used above, all
the modern polemic tactics of what is called metaphysics, are trained
and made to move either _ejus ductu_ or _ejus auspiciis_. Not one of
the new systems affects to call back the Leibnitzian philosophy, the
Cartesian, or any other of earlier or later date, as adequate to the
purposes of the intellect in this day, or as capable of yielding even
a sufficient terminology. Let this last fact decide the question of
Kant's vitality. _Qui bene distinguit bene docet._ This is an old
adage. Now, he who imposes new names upon all the acts, the functions,
and the objects of the philosophic understanding, must be presumed to
have distinguished most sharply, and to have ascertained with most
precision, their general relations--_so long as his terminology
continues to be adopted_. This test, applied to Kant, will show that
his spirit yet survives in Germany. Frederic Schlegel, it is true,
twenty years ago, in his lectures upon literature, assures us that
even the disciples of the great philosopher have agreed to abandon his
philosophic nomenclature. But the German philosophic literature, since
that date, tells another tale. Mr. Bulwer is, therefore, wrong; and,
without going to Germany, looking only to France, he will see cause to
revise his sentence. Cousin--the philosophic Cousin, the only great
name in philosophy for modern France--familiar as he is with North
Germany, can hardly be presumed unacquainted with a fact so striking,
if it _were_ a fact, as the extinction of a system once so
triumphantly supreme as that of Kant; and yet Mr. Bulwer, admiring
Cousin as he does, cannot but have noticed his efforts to naturalise
Kant in France. Meantime, if it were even true that transcendentalism
had lost its hold of the public mind in Germany, _prima facie_, this
would prove little more than the fickleness of that public which must
have been wrong in one of the two cases--either when adopting the
system, or when rejecting it. Whatever there may be of truth and value
in the system, will