Coleridge's profound and brilliant, but unequal, and often somewhat nebulous _Essay on Method_, is worth reading over, were it only as an exercitation, and to impress on the mind the meaning and value of _method_. Method is the road by which you reach, or hope to reach, a certain end; it is a process. It is the best direction for the search after truth. System, again, which is often confounded with it, is a mapping out, a circumscription of knowledge, either already gained, or theoretically laid down as probable. Aristotle had a system which did much good, but also much mischief. Bacon was chiefly occupied in preparing and pointing out the way--the only way--of procuring knowledge. He left to others to systematize the knowledge after it was got; but the pride and indolence of the human spirit lead it constantly to build systems on imperfect knowledge. It has the trick of filling up out of its own fancy what it has not the diligence, the humility, and the honesty, to seek in nature; whose servant, and articulate voice, it ought to be.
Descartes' little tract on Method is, like everything the lively and deep-souled Breton did, full of original and bright thought.
Sir John Herschel's volume needs no praise. We know no work of the sort, fuller of the best moral worth, as well as the highest philosophy. We fear it is more talked of than read.
We would recommend the article in the _Quarterly Review_ as first-rate, and written with great eloquence and grace.
SYDNEY SMITH'S _Sketches of Lectures on Moral Philosophy_. Second Edition.
SEDGWICK'S _Discourse on the Studies at Cambridge, with a Preface and Appendix_. Sixth Edition.
We have put these two worthies here, not because we had forgotten them,--much less because we think less of them than the others, especially Sydney. But because we bring them in at the end of our small entertainment, as we hand round a liqueur--be it Curaçoa, Kimmel, or old Glenlivet--after dinner, and end with the heterogeneous plum-pudding--that most English of realized ideas. Sydney Smith's book is one of rare excellence, and well worthy of the study of men and women, though perhaps not transcendental enough for our modern philosophers, male and female. It is really astonishing how much of the best of everything, from patriotism to nonsense, is to be found in this volume of sketches. You may read it through, if your sides can bear such an accumulation of laughter, with great benefit; and if you open it anywhere, you can't read three sentences without coming across some, it may be common thought, and often original enough, better expressed and _put_ than you ever before saw it. The lectures on the Affections, the Passions and Desires, and on Study, we would have everybody to read and enjoy.