I must now set to work with _all_ my powers and thoughts to my Leighton,[195] and then to my logic, and then to my _opus maximum_! if indeed it shall please God to spare me so long, which I have had too many warnings of late (more than my nearest friends know of) not to doubt. My kind love to Dorothy.
MY DEAR NEPHEW,--I need not tell you that no attention in my power to offer shall be wanting to Dr. Reich. As a foreigner and a man of letters he might claim this in his own right; and that he came from you would have ensured it, even though he had been a Frenchman. But that he is a German, and that you think him a worthy and deserving man, and that his lot, like my own, has been cast on the bleak north side of the mountain, make me reflect with pain on the little influence I possess, and the all but _zero_ of my direct means, to serve or to assist him. The prejudices excited against me by Jeffrey, combining with the mistaken notion of my German Metaphysics to which (I am told) some passages in some biographical gossip book about Lord Byron[196] have given fresh currency, have rendered my authority with the _Trade_ worse than nothing. Of the three schemes of philosophy, Kant's, Fichte's, and Schelling's (as diverse each from the other as those of Aristotle, Zeno, and Plotinus, though all crushed together under the name Kantean Philosophy in the English talk) I should find it difficult to select the one from which I _differed_ the most, though perfectly easy to determine which of the three _men_ I hold in highest honour. And Immanuel Kant I assuredly do value most highly; not, however, as a metaphysician, but as a logician who has completed and systematised what Lord Bacon had boldly designed and loosely sketched out in the Miscellany of Aphorisms, his Novum Organum. In Kant's "Critique of the Pure Reason" there is more than one fundamental error; but the main fault lies in the title-page, which to the manifold advantage of the work might be exchanged for "An Inquisition respecting the Constitution and Limits of the Human Understanding." I can not only honestly assert, but I can satisfactorily prove by reference to writings (Letters, Marginal Notes, and those in books that have never been in my possession since I first left England for Hamburgh, etc.) that all the elements, the _differentials_, as the algebraists say, of my present opinions existed for me before I had even seen a book of German Metaphysics, later than Wolf and Leibnitz, or could have read it, if I had. But what will this avail? A High German Transcendentalist I must be content to remain, and a young American painter, Leslie (pupil and friend of a very dear friend of mine, Allston), to whom I have been in the habit for ten years and more of shewing as cordial regards as I could to a near relation, has, I find, introduced a portrait of me in a picture from Sir W. Scott's "Antiquary," as Dr. Duster Swivil, or whatever his name is.[197] Still, however, I will make any attempt to serve Dr. Reich, which he may point out and which, I am not sure, would dis-serve him! I do not, of course, know what command he has over the English language. If he wrote it fluently, I should think that it would answer to any one of our great publishers to engage him in the translation of the best and cheapest Natural History in existence, viz., Okens, in three thick octavo volumes, containing the inorganic world, and the animals from the [Greek: Prôtozôa] and animalcula of Infusions, to man. The Botany was not published two years ago. Whether it is now I do not know. There is one thin quarto of plates. It is by far the most entertaining as well as instructive book of the kind I ever saw; and with a few notes and the omission (or castigation) of one or two of Oken's adventurous whimsies, would be a valuable addition to our English literature. So much for this.