“THE HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN ART” 177

and it had been well if the range of this introductory essay had been something less extensive, and its reasoning more careful. Its search after truth is honest and impetuous, and its results would have appeared as interesting as they are indeed valuable, had they but been arranged with ordinary perspicuity, and represented in simple terms. But the writer’s evil genius pursues him; the demand for exertion of thought is remorseless, and continuous throughout, and the statements of theoretical principle as short, scattered, and obscure, as they are bold. We question whether many readers may not be utterly appalled by the aspect of an “Analysis of Human Nature”-the first task proposed to them by our intellectual Eurystheus-to be accomplished in the space of six semi-pages,¹ followed in the seventh by the “Development of the Individual Man,” and applied in the eighth to a “General Classification of Individuals”: and we infinitely marvel that our author should have thought it unnecessary to support or explain a division of the mental attributes on which the treatment of his entire subject afterwards depends, and whose terms are repeated in every following page to the very dazzling of eye and deadening of ear (a division, we regret to say, as illogical as it is purposeless), otherwise than by a laconic reference to the assumptions of Phrenology.

“The Individual Man, or Man considered by himself as an unit in creation, is compounded of three distinct primary elements.

1. Sense, or the animal frame, with its passions or affections.

2. Mind or Intellect;-of which the distinguishing faculties-rarely, if

ever, equally balanced, and by their respective predominance determinative of his whole character, conduct, and views of life-are,

i. Imagination, the discerner of Beauty,-

ii. Reason, the discerner of Truth,-

the former animating and informing the world of Sense or Matter, the latter finding her proper home in the world of abstract or immaterial existences-the former receiving the impress of things Objectively, or ab externo, the latter impressing its own ideas on them Subjectively, or ab interno-the

¹ [Semi-pages, apparently because there are footnotes which occupy half the text in these pages (1-8) of Progression by Antagonism.]

XII. M

[Version 0.04: March 2008]