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tions; for when men are very warm in such cases like your first messengers, it is a presumption to me that they are in danger of running into an extreme, however honest and undesigning. After all, I must own, that it was not Mr. Halsey's representation, so much as some letters received from persons of integrity and good intelligence (though not of your board) that chiefly determined me to send an absolute refusal. I am so unwilling I should be so much as the occasion of such surmises and uneasinesses, and that I would rather bear all the burden myself, and stand as the mark of random censure for all parties.

"It would afford me a pleasure, the loss of which I shall not be able to make up, to sit once more with you, dear sir, in a Synod now happily united and formed of once jarring materials. But it would give umbrage for severe surmises and suspicions, which I would by no means willingly incur; for hardly any thing in life makes me more happy than the share I flatter myself I have in the esteem and affection of my brethren.*

"To tell you the truth, dear sir, I am not a little afraid of you. This may startle you. But I only mean you will be my powerful enemy both among the trustees and in the Synod. I appeal to yourself whether you are not deliberately resolved upon this act of hostility. It is this that scares me, lest I should at last be obliged to capitulate and submit.

"The Lord bless you! my kind friend. Return, and often repeat the prayer for, dear sir, your affectionate brother, and obliged servant, SAM'L. DAVIES.

"P. S. March 31. Upon further reflection and conversation with one of my brethren, I have been uneasy lest the last application should have been private and not by order of the board. I understood it as coming from the majority, and those honourable gentlemen expressed themselves in such a manner as to warrant me to understand it so. But lest I should be mistaken, I have wrote to our worthy friend, Mr. Caleb Smith, and given him such directions as will place the matter upon a fair footing; and to his letter I refer you.

"Consult our learned friend Dr. Alison, and he will rectify the mistaken choice, which the excess of your charity has tempted you to make.

As the question whether Mr. Davies should accept the presidency was likely to be submitted to the Synod, he seems to have thought it most delicate for him not to attend that body.

"I herewith send you the petition from my dear congregation to the presbytery of Hanover upon the first application, which it may be proper to communicate to the trustees."

When the trustees met, May 9, 1759, "The Rev. Mr. Samuel Davies was proposed as a candidate for the presidency of the college, and admitted, nem. con.; and also the Rev. Mr. Samuel Finley, was admitted a candidate in the same manner. Whereupon, after mature deliberation of the premises, the said Mr. Samuel Davies was duly elected president of this college; and as this society has so long been destitute of a fixed president, and by means thereof its former flourishing state so greatly affected, the trustees desire, and do hereby appoint Messrs. Caleb Smith, John Brainerd, and Elihu Spencer, of their number, (who design to meet the Synod of New York and Philadelphia on the next week) and any other gentlemen of this board who shall then be there, to request the said synod to dismiss the said Mr. Davies from his pastoral charge, that he may thereby be enabled to accept the said office.'

This application was accordingly presented to the Synod; and also a supplication from Mr. Davies' congregation, carnestly requesting his continuance with them. "The Synod having seriously considered the congregation's supplication, and fully heard the reasonings for and against Mr. Davies' liberation, after solemn prayer to God for direction, do, upon the whole, judge that the arguments in favour of said liberation, do preponderate, and agree that Mr. Davies' pastoral relation to his congregation be dissolved, in order to his removal to the college, and do accordingly hereby dissolve it."t

Mr. Davies submitted to this decision, and entered upon the presidency of the college the July following. The preceding letters can hardly fail of interesting our readers as they exhibit, in so favourable a light, the humility and amiableness of one of the most distinguished and useful ministers of our church. This correspondence is also interesting, as showing the cordial feeling which existed between members of the two Synods, which were so long divided. Mr. Cowell belonged to the Synod of Philadelphia, and was the gentleman with whom Mr. Tennent had his doctrinal controversy, and yet we see the terms on which he was with Mr. Davies.

Minutes of the Board, quoted by Dr. Green, p. 330. † Minutes of Synod, p. 16.

There are several letters also in this collection of an earlier date, from Mr. Burr to Mr. Cowell, relating to matters of little importance in themselves, but clearly showing the intimate friendship which subsisted between them. We must not suppose, therefore, that the controversy which divided the Synod, destroyed all confidence and friendly intercourse between the members.

ART. V.-Psychology; or a View of the Human Soul: including Anthropology, being the substance of a Course of Lectures, delivered to the Junior Class, Marshall College, Penn. By Frederick A. Rauch. New York: M. W. Dodd. 1840. pp. 386. 8vo.

WE are so much accustomed to get our German Philosophy at second-hand, that it is a refreshing novelty to have an authentic original work on the subject, written in our own language. We have had translations from German metaphysicians which, from the inadequacy of our own terminology to reproduce the original, have been either unintelligible or barbarous, if not both together. We have had German philosophy filtered through the French and American burlesques of the continental masters, in which the unintelligible has been made to pass for the profound. And last and lowest of all, we have had a train of admiring disciples of Carlyle and Emerson, who have no claim to rank among philosophers at all, but who, by affecting to talk nonsense in king Cambyses' vein,' have persuaded some that they were talking philosophy.

We owe an apology to President Rauch for mentioning his name in such connexion, and it by way of contrast only that we do it. What our opinion of his system may be, will appear in good time. Let it here suffice to say, that we opened the work with sincere respect for the author, and that we lay it down with increased regard for his learning, taste and piety.

In the very outset of our remarks, let us be clearly understood as placing Dr. Rauch in a very different class from the metaphysicians with whom we have lately been called to deal. He is no compiler, retailer, or sciolist; he affects no

inaccessible heights of mystical diction; even where a Transcendentalist, he is not such a one as would please the admirers of Spinoza and Hegel. Indeed, if we could clearly discern in his elaborate work a tendency towards this hideous. system, no considerations even of personal friendship should withhold us from denouncing it in the strongest terms. Let others, if they see cause, sneer at these fears of Pantheistic speculation, as idle, prejudiced, and proceeding from shallowness of mind. We see such a gulf between the idea of a Godeternal, unchangeable, allwise, all-good, simple, immense and personal-and that of an eternal impersonal chaos, ever striving after self-consciousness, that we conceive of no two systems more destructive of one another: the difference between Deism and Christianity being trifling in the comparison. Of this godless philosophy we see no traces in the work. If in a few instances modes of expression have strayed into the system which seem to have come from the enemy's camp, we hope it is from mere neglect, and that these forms will be exchanged for others more becoming a Christian, a supernaturalist, and a believer in Jesus. We rejoice to see for once a work on Philosophy in which we find the name of Christ, and in which are recognised the fallen state of man, the need of regeneration, and the influence of the Holy Spirit.

It would be unjust to try this book by a comparison with works of similar title in our own language. It is eminently German rather than English, and this in every page; and in saying this we ought to add that it is the idiom not of the diction, but of the thought which is German.* As to the language, it is sound and vigorous English, far more pure than that of many among ourselves, whose principal claim to foreign scholarship is founded upon the corruption of our tongue by unauthorized German idioms. Indeed, we doubt whether one so lately a foreigner ever produced an English work less open to censure in this point. Yet it is in every respect a German work, and might be recommended with more propriety than any production which we could call to mind, as a specimen of German thought to those who are ignorant of the language.

The work is divided into two parts, of which the former

* If this work should cross the Atlantic, there are some variations from classical orthography which English scholars will ascribe to the ignorance of the American compositor, but which after all are only Websterian whims, as laughable here as in Great Britain. Such are chimist, center, specter, &c.

treats of Anthropology and the latter of Psychology. The second we consider the more valuable, as it is in the former that we discern most of what we are accustomed to think censurable in the German methods. The questions discussed under the head of Anthropology are those which British philosophers, since the time of Hartley, have, for the most part, laid somewhat out of view, as requiring a length of patient observation and experiment, and a width of induction, such as have not yet been secured. Such topics as the conditions of Life, the Plastic Power, the influence of Climate, of the Sun and Moon, Instinct, Sleep, Dreaming, and Somnambulism belong to a pleasing land of drowsy-head,' which most modern British psychologists have shunned, as a domain where nothing is ascertained, nothing free from debate, and nothing distinctly visible. On these and the like topics, which it is customary for the British school to approach with the utmost delicacy, scruple, and scepticism, and where our greatest metaphysicians rather suggest a hypothesis than assert a theory, it is, if we mistake not, too common for the German philosopher to declare a law or a principle, with only the narrow basis of a disputed fact, but with all the confidence due to an induction of the most extensive character. We cannot altogether acquit our author of this charge. He says, for example, under the title of 'Prophetic Dreams;' "A woman about to be taken sick with an inflammation of the brain, dreamed that her heart was changed into a Serpent which rose with awful hissing up to her head. Her imagination represented her disease symbolically" p. 117. If such a fact had occurred in the practice of an English or American pathologist, with how much caution would he examine it? how scrupulous would he be in publishing it, till corroborated by many analogous facts? and how impossible would it be for him, as in the present case, to connect it with so questionable a hypothesis?

Dr. Rauch has given us a little on Animal Magnetism; but we consider even that little to much. Not that we would represent him as avowing his reverence for this hoeus-pocus, for he says, and it is his best remark on the topic: "Animal Magnetism is not above but below the common and healthy life of man; those that praise it, and raise it above the waking mind do not understand its nature." p. 380. But the dignity of his main subject would be better sustained in the judgment of American readers, if the topic had been treated with less regard, or omitted altogether. For in a philosophi

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