Complete.

IN spite of our great advantages for prosecuting Physiology in England, the whole science is yet in a languishing condition amongst us; and purely for the want of first principles and a more philosophic spirit of study. Perhaps at this moment the best service which could be rendered to this subject would be to translate, and to exhibit in a very luminous aspect, all that Kant has written on the question of teleology, or the doctrine of Final Causes. Certainly the prima philosophia of the science must be in a deplorable condition, when it could be supposed that Mr. Lawrence’s book brought forward any new arguments in behalf of materialism; or that in the old argument which he has used (an argument proceeding everywhere on a metaphysical confusion which I will notice in a separate paper) there was anything very formidable. I have mentioned this book, however, not for the purpose of criticizing it generally, but of pointing out one unphilosophic remark of a practical tendency, which may serve to strengthen prejudices that are already too strong. On examining certain African skulls, Mr. Lawrence is disposed, with many other physiologists, to find the indications of inferior intellectual faculties in the bony structure as compared with that of the Caucasian skull. In this conclusion I am disposed to coincide; for there is nothing unphilosophic in supposing a scale of intellectual gradations amongst different races of men, any more than in supposing such a gradation amongst the different individuals of the same nation. But it is in a high degree unphilosophic to suppose that nature ever varies her workmanship for the sake of absolute degradation. Through all differences of degree she pursues some difference of kind, which could not perhaps have co-existed with a higher degree. If, therefore, the negro intellect be in some of the higher qualities inferior to that of the European, we may reasonably presume that this inferiority exists for the purpose of obtaining some compensatory excellence in lower qualities that could not else have existed. This would be agreeable to the analogy of nature’s procedure in other instances: for, by thus creating no absolute and entire superiority in any quarter—but distributing her gifts in parts, and making the several divisions of men the complements, as it were, of each other, she would point to that same intermixture of all the races with each other, which on other grounds, à priori as well as empirical, we have reason to suppose one of her final purposes, and which the course of human events is manifestly preparing.