Philosophical Papers Author:James McCosh Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: PREFACE TO SECOND EDITION. IN reading lately the Memoirs, Letters, and Remains of Alexis De Tocqueville, who has speculated so profoundly on the causes and co... more »nsequences of national character, I was much struck with the following : ? " The ages in which metaphysics have been most cultivated, have in general been those in which men have been most raised above themselves. Indeed, though I care little for the study, I have always been struck by the influence which it has exercised over the things which seem least connected with it, and even over society in general. I do not think that any statesmen ought to be indifferent as to whether the prevailing metaphysical opinions be materialistic or not. Condillac, I have no doubt, drove many people into materialism, who had never read his book; for abstract ideas, relating to human nature, penetrate at last, I know not how, into public morals." Had De Tocqueville's studies run in that direction, it would not have been difficult for him to unfold the causes of the phenomena which he has so carefully noted. These phenomena are three in number. First, a taste for philosophic speculation is a mark of an elevated age. It is the sign of a time which believes that there is as much above the surface of the earth, and beneath it, as there is on it; and is seeking successfully or unsuccessfully to gauge the height of the heavens, in order to draw down influences from it; or to penetrate the ground in the hope of discovering mines from which unseen wealth may be dug. The age which comprised Socrates,Plato, and Aristotle, in Greece ; the age of Cicero in Rome ; the seventeenth century in France, England, and Holland; the last part of the eighteenth and the first part of the nineteenth centuries in Scotland and in Germany, have been the peculiar...« less