nighest, but the one true, knowledge; and its first-fruit, as has been said, is humility. Simple nescience is not proud; consummated science is positively humble. For this knowledge it is not, which puffeth up;' but its opposite, the conceit of false knowledge, the conceit, in truth, as the apostle notices, of an ignorance of the very nature of knowledge: :

'Nam nesciens quid scire sit,

Te scire cuncta jactitas.'

-

"But as our knowledge stands to Ignorance, so stands it also to Doubt. Doubt is the beginning and the end of our efforts to know; for as it is true, 'Alte dubitat qui altius credit,' so it is likewise true, 'Quo magis quærimus magis dubitamus.'

"The grand result of human wisdom is thus only a consciousness that what we know is as nothing to what we know not, (Quantum est quod nescimus!') — an articulate confession, in fact, by our natural reason, of the truth declared in revelation, that' now we see through a glass, darkly.'"

His pupil writes in the same spirit and to the same end:-"A discovery, by means of reflection and mental experiment, of the limits of knowledge, is the highest and most universally applicable discovery of all; it is the one through which our intellectual life most strik ingly blends with the moral and practical part of human nature. Progress in knowledge is often paradoxically indicated by a diminution in the apparent bulk of what we know. Whatever helps to work off the dregs of talse opinion, and to purify the intellectual mass - what ever deepens our conviction of our infinite ignorance — really adds to, although it sometimes seems to diminish

This is the highest

the rational possessions of man. kind of merit that is claimed for Philosophy, by its earliest as well as by its latest representatives. It is by this standard that Socrates and Kant measure the chief results of their toil."

BOOKS REFERRED TO.

1. Arnauld's Port-Royal Logic; translated by T. S. Baynes. —— 2. Thomson's Outlines of the Necessary Laws of Thought. — 3. Descartes on the Method of Rightly Conducting the Reason, and Seeking Truth in the Sciences.-4. Coleridge's Essay on Method. - 5. Whately's Logic and Rhetoric; new and cheap edition. — 6. Mill's Logic; new and cheap edition. 7. Dugald Stewart's Outlines. - 8. Sir John Herschel's Preliminary Dissertation. -9. Quarterly Review, vol. lxviii; Article upon Whewell's Philosophy of Inductive Sciences. – 10. Isaac Taylor's Elements of Thought.-11. Sir William Hamilton's edition of Reid; Dissertations; and Lectures. Fraser's Rational Philosophy.-13. Locke on the Conduct of the Understanding.

12. Professor

THE MYSTERY OF BLACK AND TAN.

"The reader must remember that my work is concerning the aspects of things only." - RUSKIN.