JEWS IN POLAND.

55

much rather shall they be blest by the conversion and restoration of Israel! Why do we expect the Jews to abandon their national customs and distinctions? The Abyssinian church said that they claimed a descent from Abraham; and that, in virtue of such ancestry, they observed circumcision: but declaring withal, that they rejected the covenant of works, and rested on the promise fulfilled in Jesus Christ. In consequence of this appeal, the Abyssinians were permitted to retain their customs.

If Rhenferd's Essays were translated—if the Jews were made acquainted with the real argument-if they were addressed kindly, and were not required tc abandon their distinctive customs and national type, but were invited to become Christians as of the seed of Abraham-I believe there would be a Christian synagogue in a year's time. As it is, the Jews of the lower orders are the very lowest of mankind; they have not a principle of honesty in them; to grasp and be getting money for ever is their single and exclusive occupation. A learned Jew once said to me, upon this subject:-"O Sir! make the inhabitants of Holywell Street and Duke's Place Israelites first, and then we may debate about making them Christians."*

In Poland, the Jews are great landholders, and are the worst of tyrants. They have no kind of sympathy with their labourers and dependants. They never meet them in common worship. Land, in the hand

* Mr. Coleridge had a very friendly acquaintance with several learned Jews in this country, and he told me that, whenever he had fallen in with a Jew of thorough education and literary habits, he had always found him possessed of a strong natural capacity for metaphysical disquisitions. I may mention here the best known of his Jewish friends, one whom he deeply respected, Hyman Hurwitz.-ED.

of a large number of Jews, instead of being, what it ought to be, the organ of permanence, would become the organ of rigidity, in a nation; by their intermarriages within their own pale, it would be, in fact, perpetually entailed. Then, again, if a popular tumult were to take place in Poland, who can doubt that the Jews would be the first objects of murder and spoliation?

IN

APRIL 17, 1830.

Mosaic Miracles.-Pantheism.

the miracles of Moses, there is a remarkable intermingling of acts, which we should now-a-days call simply providential, with such as we should still call miraculous. The passing of the Jordan, in the 3rd chapter of the book of Joshua, is perhaps the purest and sheerest miracle recorded in the Bible; it seems to have been wrought for the miracle's sake, and so thereby to show to the Jews-the descendants of those who had come out of Egypt-that the same God who had appeared to their fathers, and who had by miracles, in many respects providential only, preserved them in the wilderness, was their God also. The manna and quails were ordinary provisions of Providence, rendered miraculous by certain laws and qualities annexed to them in the particular instance. The passage of the Red Sea was effected by a strong wind, which, we are told, drove back the waters; and so on. But then, again, the death of the first-born was purely miraculous. Hence, then, both Jews and Egyptians might take occasion to learn, that it was one and the same God who interfered specially, and who governed all generally.

POETIC PROMISE.

57

Take away the first verse of the book of Genesis, and then what immediately follows is an exact history or sketch of Pantheism. Pantheism was taught in the mysteries of Greece; of which the Samothracian or Cabeiric were probably the purest and the most ancient.

APRIL 18, 1830.

Poetic Promise.

IN the present age it is next to impossible to predict from specimens, however favourable, that a young man will turn out a great poet, or rather a poet at all. Poetic taste, dexterity in composition, and ingenious imitation, often produce poems that are very promising in appearance. But genius, or the power of doing something new, is another thing. Mr. Tennyson's sonnets, such as I have seen, have many of the characteristic excellencies of those of Wordsworth and Southey.

IT

APRIL 19, 1830.

T is a small thing that the patient knows of his own state; yet some things he does know better than his physician.

I never had, and never could feel, any horror at death, simply as death.

Good and bad men are each less so than they seem.

APRIL 30, 1830.

Nominalists and Realists.-British Schoolmen.-Spinosa.

THE result of my system will be, to show, that, so far from the world being a goddess in petticoats,

it is rather the Devil in a strait waistcoat.

The controversy of the Nominalists and Realists was one of the greatest and most important that ever occupied the human mind. They were both right, and both wrong. They each maintained opposite poles of the same truth; which truth neither of them saw, for want of a higher premiss. Duns Scotus was the head of the Realists: Ockham,* his own disciple, of the Nominalists. Ockham, though certainly very prolix, is a most extraordinary writer.

* John Duns Scotus was born in 1274, at Dunstone in the parish of Emildune, near Alnwick. He was a fellow of Merton College, and Professor of Divinity at Oxford. After acquiring an uncommon reputation at his own university, he went to Paris, and thence to Cologne, and there died in 1808, at the early age of thirty-four years. He was called the Subtle Doctor, and found time to compose works which now fill twelve volumes in folio. See the Lyons edition, by Luke Wadding, in 1639.

William Ockham was an Englishman, and died about 1847; but the place and year of his birth are not clearly ascertained. He was styled the Invincible Doctor, and wrote bitterly against Pope John XXII. We all remember Butler's account of these worthies:

"He knew what's what, and that's as high

As metaphysic wit can fly;

In school divinity as able

As he that hight Irrefragable,

A second Thomas, or at once

To name them all, another Dunse;
Profound in all the Nominal

And Real ways beyond them all;
For he a rope of sand could twist

As tough as learned Sorbonist."

HUDIBRAS. Part I. Canto I. v. 149. The Irrefragable Doctor was Alexander Hales, a native of Gloucestershire, who died in 1245. Amongst his pupils, at Paris, was Fidanza, better known by the name of Bonaventura, the Seraphic Doctor. The controversy of the Realists and the Nominalists cannot be explained in a note; but in substance the original point of dispute may be thus stated. The Realists held generally with Aristotle, that there were universal ideas or essences impressed upon matter, or coöval with, and inherent in, their objects. Plato held that these universal forms existed as exemplars in the divine mind previously to, and independently of, matter; but both maintained, under one shape or other, the real existence of universal forms. On the other hand, Zeno and the old Stoics denied the existence of these universals, and contended that they were no more than mere terms and nominal representatives of their particular objects. The Nominalists were the followers of Zeno, and held that universal forms are merely modes of conception, and exist solely in and for the mind. It does not require much reflection to see how great an influence these different systems might have upon the enunciation of the higher doctrines of Christianity.-ED.

BRITISH SCHOOLMEN.

59

It is remarkable, that two-thirds of the eminent schoolmen were of British birth. It was the schoolmen who made the languages of Europe what they now are. We laugh at the quiddities of those writers now, but, in truth, these quiddities are just the parts of their language which we have rejected; whilst we never think of the mass which we have adopted, and have in daily use.

One of the scholastic definitions of God is this,Deus est, cui omne quod est est esse omne quod est : as long a sentence made up of as few words, and those as oligosyllabic, as any I remember. By the by, that oligosyllabic is a word happily illustrative of its own meaning, ex opposito.

Spinosa, at the very end of his life, seems to have gained a glimpse of the truth. In the last letter published in his works, it appears that he began to suspect his premiss. His unica substantia is, in fact, a mere notion,—a subject of the mind, and no object at all.

Plato's works are preparatory exercises for the mind. He leads you to see, that propositions involving in themselves contradictory conceptions, are nevertheless true; and which, therefore, must belong to a higher logic-that of ideas. They are contradictory only in the Aristotelian logic, which is the instrument of the understanding. I have read most of the works of Plato several times with profound attention, but not all his writings. In fact, I soon found that I had read Plato by anticipation. He was a consummate genius.*

"This is the test and character of a truth so affirmed (-a truth of the reason, an Idea)—that in its own proper form it is inconceivable. For to conceive, is a function of the understanding, which can be exercised only on