JANUARY NUMBER. PAGE THE NICODEMITES OF THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY........ Rev. HENRY M. BAIRD, Professor in the University of the City of New York. THE METHODIST QUARTERLY REVIEW. JANUARY, 1864. ART. I.-THE MORAL PHILOSOPHY OF "THE INSTITUTES OF THEOLOGY," BY REV. RICHARD WATSON. STANDING on some lofty peak of the Andes, the traveler may see the head-waters of the great South American rivers mingling in one. But soon they separate, and, becoming more and more divergent in their course as they rush onward toward the sea, their mouths are at last separated by the length of a whole continent. So the student in philosophy, standing on the elevated plain of analytic thought, discovers that the two great philosophic systems which have divided the suffrages of learned men, and placed them on totally opposite poles of thought, have their common starting-point in the one question, "Are there any ideas in the human mind which have not come in through the senses from the external world?" Here are the head-waters of the sensational and transcendental schools of philosophy mingling in one, and just as the Amazon and La Plata flow on in opposite directions until they have reached the extremities of the continent, so from the yea or nay of this great question, the rivers of philosophic thought flow on in diverse courses until they have reached the antipodes. If you take the negative side of the question you are a sensationalist, and belong to the school of Locke. Hence sense is, for you, the only avenue of knowledge. All the simple ideas existing in the mind are the result of material impressions made upon the sensorium. They are photographs of the external world, the copies that remain after the sensations FOURTH SERIES, VOL. XVI.-1 |