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For the lovely one whom thou left'st forlorn,
A deep lament shall be;

But no heart will sigh, and no bosom mourn,
And no eye e'er weep for thee.

Thou wilt pass away to the realms of death
In solitude and gloom;

And a curse will cling to thy parting breath,
As awful as thy doom.

But this, and a few other extreme cases, I consider as mere exceptions to my general rule. Now, supposing, as I have said before, that a man dotes upon a beauty without a heart: What, in the name of reason, should induce him to die for one who does not care a rush for him? There may be others who would have more feeling, and less coquetry, with quite as many personal charms. Or supposing that he is attached to one far above him, either in fortune or rank, or in both. What then! Must he therefore waste away, and become the mere shadow of himself? A child may long to catch a star as he does a butterfly, or to turn the sun round as he is accustomed to turn his hoop, but his non-success would not, as nurses call it, “be the death of him." Again: let us imagine that a man places his affections on an equal, and that she has a stronger yearning towards another. Still, I say, there is no harm done. Let him think (as I should do) that there may be other females with quite as many outward attractions, and more discernment. I have no notion of dying to please any I have had too much trouble to support existence to think of laying it down upon such grounds. I should deem it quite enough to perish for the sake of one who really loved me: for one who did not, I should be sorry to suffer a single twinge of the rheumatism, or the lumbago. I have read of a man who actually fancied he was fading away-" a victim to the tender passion ;"-but who afterwards discovered that his complaint was caused by abstaining too long from his necessary food. This was a sad fall from the drawing

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room window of romance into the area of common sense, and real life; but he was forced to make the best of it: so he took his meals oftener and thought no more about it. He afterwards actually became a suitor to another, was married, and now, I have no doubt, thinks just as I do on the subject of dying for love. Ere I part with you 66 my readers all!" take notice of these my last words, and farewell directions, which I give in sincerity of heart, and out of anxiety for your welfare. Ye who have never been in love, but who are approaching insensibly towards itCorydons of sixteen!" Apollines imberbes" come home for the holidays! take heed! Ye are entering on a little known and perilous sea. Look to your bark lest she founder. Bring her head round, and scud away before the wind into the port of Indifference. There is danger in the very serenity that sleeps upon the waves: there is faithlessness in the lightest breath that curls them. Ye who are in love-ye who are already on the deceitful ocean-listen to me! Look out for squalls!-Beware of hurricanes !-Have a care of approaching storms! There may be an enemy's ship nearer than you wot of. Just give a salute, and sheer off to Bachelor's harbour. And ye, the last and most pitiable class of all-ye, who fancy yourselves dying for love, make a tack! about ship! and, above all, keep plenty of good wine a-board; so that when a sigh is rising in the throat you may choke it with a bumper; and, in case of tears flowing, depend upon it that port will prove the best eye-water.

IDEA OF A UNIVERSAL HISTORY ON A COSMO-POLITICAL PLAN.

BY IMMANUEL KANT.

WHATSOEVER difference there may be in our notions of the freedom of the will metaphysically considered,it is evident that the manifestations of this will, viz. human actions, are as much under the control of universal laws of nature as any other physical phænomena. It is the province of history to narrate these manifestations; and let their causes be ever so secret, we know that history, simply by taking its station at a distance and contemplating the agency of the human will upon a large scale, aims at unfolding to our view a regular stream of tendency in the great succession of events; so that the very same course of incidents, which taken separately and individually would have seemed perplexed, incoherent, and lawless, yet viewed in their connexion and as the actions of the human species and not of independent beings, never fail to discover a steady and continuous though slow developement of certain great predispositions in our nature. Thus for instance deaths, births, and marriages, considering how much they are separately dependent on the freedom of the human will, should seem to be subject to no law according to which any calculation could be made beforehand of their amount: and yet the yearly registers of these events in great countries prove that they go on with as much conformity to the laws of nature as the oscillations of the weather: these again are events which in detail are so far irregular that we cannot predict them individually; and yet taken as a whole series we find that they never fail to support the growth of plants -the currents of rivers-and other arrangements of nature in a uniform and uninterrupted course. Individual men, and even nations, are little aware that, whilst they are severally pursuing their own peculiar and often contradictory purposes, they are unconsciously following the guidance of a great natural purpose which is wholly unnoticed by themselves; and are thus promoting and making efforts for a great process which, even Ост. 1824.

if they perceived it, they would little regard.

Considering that men, taken collectively as a body, do not proceed like brute animals under the law of an instinct, nor yet again, like rational cosmopolites, under the law of a preconcerted plan,- one might imagine that no systematic history of their actions (such for instance as the history of bees or beavers) could be possible. At the sight of the actions of man displayed on the great stage of the world, it is impossible to escape a certain degree of disgust: with all the occasional indications of wisdom scattered here and there, we cannot but perceive the whole sum of these actions to be a web of folly, childish vanity, and often even of the idlest wickedness and spirit of destruction. Hence at last one is puzzled to know what judgment to form of our species so conceited of its high advantages. In this perplexity there is no resource for the philosopher but this-that, finding it impossible to presume in the human race any rational purpose of its own, he must endeavour to detect some natural purpose in such a senseless current of human actions; by means of which a history of creatures that pursue no plan of their own may yet admit a systematic form as the history of creatures that are blindly pursuing a plan of nature. Let us now see whether we can succeed in finding out a clue to such a history; leaving it to nature to produce a man capable of executing it. Just as she produced a Kepler who unexpectedly brought the eccentric courses of the planets under determinate laws; and afterwards a Newton who explained these laws out of a universal ground in nature.

PROPOSITION THE FIRST.

All tendencies of any creature, to which it is predisposed by nature, are destined in the end to develope themselves perfectly and agreeably to their final purpose.-External as well as internal (or anatomical) examination confirms this remark in all animals.

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An organ which is not to be used, a natural arrangement that misses its purpose, would be a contradiction in physics. Once departing from this fundamental proposition, we have a nature no longer tied to laws, but objectless and working at random; and a cheerless reign of chance steps into the place of reason.

PROPOSITION THE SECOND.

In man, as the sole rational creature upon earth, those tendencies which have the use of his reason for their object are destined to obtain their perfect developement in the species only and not in the individual.-Reason in a creature is a faculty for extending the rules and purposes of the exercise of all its powers far beyond natural instinct, and it is illimitable in its plans. It works however not instinctively, but stands in need of trials-of practice -and of instruction in order to ascend gradually from one degree of illumination to another. On this account either it would be necessary for each man to live an inordinate length of time in order to learn how to make a perfect use of his natural tendencies; or else, supposing the actual case that nature has limited his term of life, she must then require an incalculable series of generations (each delivering its quota of knowledge to its immediate successor) in order to ripen the germs which she has laid in our species to that degree of developement which corresponds with her final purpose. And the period of this mature developement must exist at least in idea to man as the object of his efforts: because otherwise his own natural predispositions must of necessity be regarded as objectless; and this would at once take away all practical principles, and would expose naturethe wisdom of whose arrangements must in all other cases be assumed as a fundamental postulate to the sus picion of capricious dealing in the case of man only.

PROPOSITION THE THIRD.

It is the will of nature that man should owe to himself only every thing which transcends the mere mechanic constitution of his animal existence; and that he should be susceptible of no other happiness or perfection than what he has created for himself, instinct

apart, through his own reason.-Nature does nothing superfluously: and in the use of means to her ends does not play the prodigal. Having given to man reason, and freedom of the will grounded upon reason, she had hereby sufficiently made known the purpose which governed her in the choice of the furniture and appointments, intellectual and physical, with which she has accoutred him. Thus provided, he had no need for the guidance of instinct, or for knowledge and forethought created to his hand: for these he was to be indebted to himself. The means of providing for his own shelter from the elements-for his own security, and the whole superstructure of delights which add comfort and embellishment to life, were to be the work of his own hands. So far indeed has she pushed this principle, that she seems to have been frugal even to niggardliness in the dispensation of her animal endowments to man, and to have calculated her allowance to the nicest rigor of the demand in the very earliest stage of his existence: as if it had been her intention hereby to proclaim that the highest degree of power-of intellectual perfection

and of happiness to which he should ever toil upwards from a condition utterly savage, must all be wrung and extorted from the difficulties and thwartings of his situation-and the merit therefore be exclusively his own: thus implying that she had at heart his own rational self-estimation rather than his convenience or comfort. She has indeed beset man with difficulties; and in no way could she have so clearly made known that her purpose with man was not that he might live in pleasure; but that by a strenuous wrestling with those difficulties he might make himself worthy of living in pleasure. Undoubtedly it seems surprising on this view of the case that the earlier generations appear to exist only for the sake of the latter-viz. for the sake of forwarding that edifice of man's grandeur in which only the latest generations are to dwell, though all have undesignedly taken part in raising it. Mysterious as this appears, it is however at the same time necessary, if we once assume a race of rational animals, as destined by means of this characteristic reason to a per

fect developement of their tendencies, and subject to mortality in the individual but immortal in the species.

PROPOSITION THE FOURTH.

The means, which nature employs to bring about the developement of all the tendencies she has laid in man, is the antagonism of these tendencies in the social state-no farther however than to that point at which this antagonism becomes the cause of social arrangements founded in law. By antago nism of this kind I mean the unsocial sociality of man; that is, a tendency to enter the social state combined with a perpetual resistance to that tendency which is continually threatening to dissolve it. Man has gregarious inclinations, feeling himself in the social state more than man by means of the developement thus given to his natural tendencies. But he has also strong anti-gregarious inclinations prompting him to insulate himself, which arise out of the unsocial desire (existing concurrently with his social propensities) to force all things into compliance with his own humor; a propensity to which he naturally anticipates resistance from his consciousness of a similar spirit of resistance to others existing in himself. Now this resistance it is which awakens all the powers of man, drives him to master his propensity to indolence, and in the shape of ambition-love of honor-or avarice impels him to procure distinction for himself amongst his fellows. In this way arise the first steps from the savage state to the state of culture, which consists peculiarly in the social worth of man: talents of every kind are now unfolded, taste formed, and by gradual increase of light a preparation is made for such a mode of thinking as is capable of converting the rude natural tendency to moral distinctions into determinate practical principles, and finally of exalting a social concert that had been pathologically extorted from the mere necessities of situation into a moral union founded on the reasonable choice. But for these anti-social propensities, so unamiable in themselves, which give birth to that resistance which every man meets with in his own self-interested pretensions, an Arcadian life would arise of perfect harmony and mutual love such as

must suffocate and stifle all talents in their very germs. Men, as gentle as the sheep they fed, would communicate to their existence no higher value than belongs to mere animal life; and would leave the vacuum of creation which exists in reference to the final purpose of man's nature as a rational nature, unfilled. Thanks therefore to nature for the enmity, for the jealous spirit of envious competition, for the insatiable thirst after wealth and power! These wanting, all the admirable tendencies in man's nature would remain for ever undeveloped. Man, for his own sake as an individual, wishes for concord: but nature knows better what is good for man as a species; and she ordains discord. He would live in ease and passive content: but nature wills that he shall precipitate himself out of this luxury of indolence into labors and hardships, in order that he may devise remedies against them and thus raise himself above them by an intellectual conquest-not sink below them by an unambitious evasion. The impulses, which she has with this view laid in his moral constitution, the sources of that antisociality and universal antagonism from which so many evils arise, but which again stimulate a fresh reaction of the faculties and by consequence more and more aid the developement of the primitive tendencies,

all tend to betray the adjusting hand of a wise Creator, not that of an evil spirit that has bungled in the execution of his own designs, or has malevolently sought to perplex them with evil.

PROPOSITION THE FIFTH.

The highest problem for the human species, to the solution of which it is irresistibly urged by natural impulses, is the establishment of a universal civil society founded on the empire of politi- . cal justice. Since it is only in the social state that the final purpose of nature with regard to man (viz. the developement of all his tendencies) can be accomplished,—and in such a social state as combines with the utmost possible freedom, and consequent antagonism of its members, the most rigorous determination of the boundaries of this freedom-in order that the freedom of such individual may coexist with the free

dom of others; and since it is the will of nature that this as well as all other objects of his destination should be the work of men's own efforts, on these accounts a society in which freedom under laws is united with the greatest possible degree of irresistible power, i. e. a perfect civil constitution, is the highest problem of nature for man: because it is only by the solution of this problem that nature can accomplish the rest of her purposes with our species. Into this state of restraint man, who is other wise so much enamored of lawless freedom, is compelled to enter by necessity-and that the greatest of all necessity, viz. a necessity selfimposed; his natural inclinations making it impossible for man to preserve a state of perfect liberty for any length of time in the neighbourhood of his fellows. But, under the restraint of a civil community, these very inclinations lead to the best effects: just as trees in a forest, for the very reason that each endeavours to rob the other of air and sun, compel each other to shoot upwards in quest of both; and thus attain a fine erect growth: whereas those which stand aloof from each other under no mutual restraint, and throw out their boughs at pleasure, become crippled and distorted. All the gifts of art and cultivation, which adorn the human race,-in short the most beautiful forms of social order, are the fruits of the anti-social principle which is compelled to discipline itself, and by means won from the very resistance of man's situation in this world to give perfect developement to all the germs of nature.

PROPOSITION THE SIXTH.

This problem is at the same time the most difficult of all, and the one which is latest solved by man.-The difficulty, which is involved in the bare idea of such a problem, is this: Man is an animal that, so long as he lives amongst others of his species, stands in need of a master. For he inevitably abuses his freedom in regard to his equals; and, although as a reasonable creature, he wishes for a law that may set bounds to the liberty of all, yet do his self-interested animal propensities seduce him into making an exception in his own favor whensoever he dares. He re

quires a master therefore to curb his will, and to compel him into submission to a universal will which may secure the possibility of universal freedom. Now where is he to find this master? Of necessity amongst the human species. But, as a human being, this master will also be an animal that requires a master. Lodged in one or many, it is impossible that the supreme and irresponsible power can be certainly prevented from abusing its authority. Hence it is that this problem is the most difficult of any; nay, its perfect solution is impossible: out of wood so crooked and perverse as that which man is made of, nothing absolutely straight can ever be wrought. An approximation to this idea is therefore all which nature enjoins us. That it is also the last of all problems, to which the human species addresses itself, is clear from thisthat it presupposes just notions of the nature of a good constitution-great experience-and above all a will favorably disposed to the adoption of such a constitution; three elements that can hardly, and not until after many fruitless trials, be expected to concur.

PROPOSITION THE SEVENTH.

The problem of the establishment of a perfect constitution of society depends upon the problem of a system of international relations adjusted to law; and, apart from this latter problem, cannot be solved. To what purpose is labor bestowed upon a civil constitution adjusted to law for individual men, i. e. upon the creation of a commonwealth? The same anti-social impulses, which first drove men to such a creation, is again the cause -that every commonwealth in its external relations, i. e. as a state in reference to other states, occupies the same ground of lawless and uncontroled liberty; consequently each must anticipate from the other the very same evils which compelled individuals to enter the social state. Nature accordingly avails herself of the spirit of enmity in man, as existing even in the great national corporations of that animal, for the purpose of attaining through the inevitable antagonism of this spirit a state of rest and security: i. e. by wars, by the immoderate exhaustion of incessant preparations for war, and by the pressure of evil conse

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