most illustrious Scotchman, Mr. Thomas Carlyle, first vindicated the
great German Realists from the vulgar misconceptions about them which
were so common at the beginning of this century, and brought the minds
of studious men to a more just appreciation of the philosophic severity,
the moral grandeur, of such thinkers as Emmanuel Kant, and Gottlieb
Fichte. To another Scotch gentleman, who, I believe, has honoured me by
his presence here to-night, we owe most valuable translations of some of
Fichte's works; to be followed, I trust, by more. And though, as a
humble disciple of Bacon, I cannot but think that the method both of
Kant and Fichte possesses somewhat of the same inherent defect as the
method of the Neoplatonist school, yet I should be most unfair did I not
express my deep obligations to them, and advise all those to study them
carefully, who wish to gain a clear conception either of the old
Alexandrian schools, or of those intellectual movements which are
agitating the modern mind, and which will, I doubt not, issue in a
clearer light, and in a nobler life, if not for us, yet still for our
children's children for ever.

The name of Philo the Jew is now all but forgotten among us. He was
laughed out of sight during the last century, as a dreamer and an
allegorist, who tried eclectically to patch together Plato and Moses.
The present age, however, is rapidly beginning to suspect that all who
thought before the eighteenth century were not altogether either fools
or impostors; old wisdom is obtaining a fairer hearing day by day, and
is found not to be so contradictory to new wisdom as was supposed. We
are beginning, too, to be more inclined to justify Providence, by
believing that lies are by their very nature impotent and doomed to die;
that everything which has had any great or permanent influence on the
human mind, must have in it some germ of eternal truth; and setting
ourselves to separate that germ of truth from the mistakes which may