he
ripened fruits of that grand uprising of the human mind which first
took form on the 4th day of July, 1776. Our era properly commences with
the downfall of the first Napoleon, and none of the events connected
therewith, either before or afterward, can be philosophically classed in
the epoch we represent, but must be referred to a former period. Ages
hence, then, the philosophic critic will thus describe the first half of
the nineteenth century:

"The normal state of Christendom was peace. The age of steel that
immediately went before it had passed. It was the Iron age.

"Speculative philosophy fell asleep; literature declined;
Skepticism bore sway in religion, politics, and morals; Utility
became the universal standard of right and wrong, and the truths
of every science and the axioms of every art were ruthlessly
subjected to the _experimentum crucis_. Everything was liable to
revision. The verdicts pronounced in the olden time against
Mohammed and Mesmer and Robespierre were set aside, and a new
trial granted. The ghosts of Roger Bacon and Emanuel Swedenborg
were summoned from the Stygian shore to plead their causes anew
before the bar of public opinion. The head of Oliver Cromwell was
ordered down from the gibbet, the hump was smoothed down on the
back of Richard III, and the sentence pronounced by Urban VIII
against the 'starry Galileo' reversed forever. Aristotle was
decently interred beneath a modern monument inscribed thus: '_In
pace requiescat_;' whilst Francis Bacon was rescued from the
sacrilegious hands of kings and peers and parliament, and
canonized by the unanimous consent of Christendom. It was the age
of tests. Experiment governed the world. Germany led the van, and
Humboldt became the impersonation of his times."

Such unquestionably will be the verdict of the future, when the present
time, with all its treasures and trash, its hopes and realizations,
shall have been safely shelved and labeled amongst the musty records of
bygone generations.

Let us now examine into the grounds of this verdict more minutely, and
test its accuracy by exemplifications.

I. And first, who believes now in _innate ideas_? Locke has been
completely superseded by the materialists of Germany and France, and all
speculative moral philosophy exploded. The audiences of Edinburgh and
Brown University interrupt Sir William Hamilton and Dr. Wayland in their
discourses, and, stripping