ing and his pages to many
so fascinating.

Therefore an adventurer. This is concerning _him_ the primary fact. But
the modifying fact is that he has the manners of a gentleman, the heart
of a humanitarian, the learning of a scholar, the pen of a ready writer,
the outside or _shell_ of a philosophical genius, excellent admixtures
of sense, and an attractive hatred of ecclesiastical and political
barbarisms.

He has great surface-reach, but no inward breadth. He invariably takes
the liberal side with regard to practical and popular questions;
he invariably takes the illiberal side in respect to questions of
philosophy. In politics and in social feeling he is cosmopolitan; in
questions of pure thought he is cockney. Here he is a tyrant; he puts
out the soul's eyes, and casts fetters about its feet; here he is hard,
narrow, materialistic, mechanical,--or, in a word, English. For--we may
turn aside to say--in philosophy no nation is so straitened, illiberal,
and hard of hearing as England, except, perhaps, China. Its tympanum
is sadly thickened at once with materialism and conceit; and the
consequence is that a thinker there is either ignored into silence, like
Wilkinson, or driven to bellow, like Carlyle, or to put rapiers and
poignards into his speech, like Ruskin. Carlyle began speaking sweetly
and humanly, and was heard only on this side the ocean; then he came to
his bull-of-Bashan tones, and was attended to on his own side the water.
It is observable, too, that, if a thinker in America goes beyond the
respectable dinner-table depth, your true Englishman takes it for a
personal affront, and hastens to make an ass of himself in the "Saturday
Review."

Apply to Mr. Buckle any test that determines the question of pure
intellectual power, and he fails to sustain it. Let us proceed to apply
one.

No man is an able thinker who is without power to comprehend that law
of reciprocal opposites, on which the world is built. For an example of
this: the universe is indeed a _uni_-verse, a pure unit, emanating, as
we think, from a spirit that is, in the words of old Hooker, "not only
one, but very oneness," simple, indivisible, and therefore total in all
action; and yet this universe is various, multifarious, full of special
character, full even of fierce antagonisms and blazing contradictions.
Infinite and Finite, Same and Diverse, Eternal and Temporary, Universal
and Special,--here they are, purest opposites, yet mutual, recip