that his search was not continued to our times: he might still be marching o'er the weary earth, with his dim twinkling lamp, having found but Washington and a few more. men. But he sleeps full well in his forgotten tomb, while o'er his sacred dust crawl human reptiles, whom in life he would have scorned to spit upon.

The life of our hero was more eventful than might have been anticipated from the calmness of his disposition. He saw many changes of fortune and vicissitudes of circumstances. At one time a free, and as we have seen, highly respected, denizen of the first city of antiquity-he was, at another, an ignominious slave, holding thus the lowest rank of human existence. While participating in the luxury of a sea voyage he was captured by pirates, and according to the custom of the age sold at the nearest port. Thus, by one of those unfortunate casts of the dice which every man occasionally makes in the great game of life, he became the subject of a man whom he had informed, at the slave market, that he was purchasing a master. And so indeed it proved; for, as in servitude he continued to manifest the same proud superiority to unfavorable circumstances which had ever marked his conduct, his master, admiring the greatness that knew no diminution, the free mind that scorned the bonds his body wore, became convinced that chains were not for such as he; and giving him his liberty, made him the governor and instructor of his children and the steward of all his affairs-satisfied that such a man must be more competent to direct all those matters than he himself was.

After this we find recorded no other incident of sufficient importance to merit narration. The subject of our sketch continued to live in the unimpaired vigor of both his physical and mental powers, until the advanced age of ninety

six years, when the exposure to which he always addicted himself, and which his manly strength, fortified by confirmed habits of strict temperance and healthful exercise, had been enabled hitherto to bear without manifest detriment, proved too much for his aged frame, and he sank beneath it to an honored tomb, in which was buried with him the glory and hope of his sect. It, after this melancholy event, declined apace, and was ere long absorbed by the more popular schools of the sublime academical dreamer, the profound peripatetic dogmatist and the captivatingly eloquent sensualist of the garden. It deserves to be noted that Diogenes died, as he had lived, in extreme poverty, leaving absolutely nothing to defray the necessary funeral expenses. All the different philosophical societies of Athens aspired to the honor of conferring the last sad token of respect upon the mortal remains of one who had bequeathed a mantle of glory, not to his own sect alone, but to the universal race of truth-worshipers. While they were contending and striving, without much prospect of success, to adjust their complimentary dispute, the city interfered and a public burial was decreed and a public monument erected to him who had ever, by his useful and gratuitous instructions, proved himself a public benefactor.

We have thus given a necessarily brief notice of this most extraordinary man: a man who has excited the highest wonder, both in his own times and in all subsequent ages, and yet who has been, we fear, never fully appreciated—and with evident reason, for it is next to im possible for most men to prize, at its true valuation, what so much differs from themselves as did Diogenes from all other inen. And yet all have and all must acknowledge. that there was about him something unspeakably noble as

it was distinguished. For myself, I must say that no character in the world's history, after that preeminently divine one of Christ, has so forcibly struck my mind and so imperatively demanded my attention and reflection, as that of Diogenes, though I confess I find it quite difficult to analyze or very minutely describe it. This arises principally from the meager accounts we have of him, consisting almost entirely in a few detached anecdotes related by a multitude of different writers, without much connection or order; by collecting some of which from Plutarch, Laertius and Cicero, we have collated the preceding notice. We cannot fail, however, to observe that his great characteristic, which above all things else made him the original he was, was his boundless independence of thought, in which particular he by far excelled all other men. This first attribute of true greatness is manifested in every action of his whole life, in a most extraordinary degree. He seems at an early age to have sworn, (as did our own immortal Jefferson and as should every man,) "on the altar of God, eternal hostility to every kind of tyranny over the mind of man." And although he himself was afterwards forced to wear the helot's servile garb and to acknowledge the sway of a superior human power, never did Rome's fearful scourge, the destroying Carthagenian Hannibal, observe with more religious fidelity and successful enthusiasm, a hostile pledge, than did he keep his vow in the high resolve of a free mind which bent not to illegitimate authority because it claimed consecration from the prejudice-crowner, time; which refused not to think because it was then, "as it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be," unpopular. While in fetters he was unshackled in soul; while a degraded captive he was yet a proud king of thought. Such a man could not be enslaved such a

spirit could not die: it is immortal: it still lives and breathes and throbs with ardent aspiration, in the bosoms of such as, casting off the chains of antiquated error, of respected because moss-grown absurdity, acknowledge no law but right, love no institutions but those embracing something of reason's beauty, bow at no altar but the shrine of truth. "History," says Dionysius Halicarnassensis, "is philosophy teaching by example." A character such as we have been contemplating is not without its lesson, which we proceed to consider.

It is a generally received opinion in the philosophic world, that matter tends to inertia and mind to action; but like most generally received opinions, this favorite axiom is entirely unfounded and false. I say like most, for I am satisfied that no better reason can be adduced against the truth of any doctrine, than that it is universally believed. At the expense of a digression we will briefly justify our paradox, so far as it applies to this case.

Matter has really, as D'Holbach has amply proved and illustrated, in his profound "Systeme de la Nature," a constitutional tendency to move. That great pervading spirit of the universe which is the manifest or latent cause of all phenomena; which Newton, the high-priest of nature, has shown to be alike the bond of atoms and of worlds; which the philosopher names attraction, and the poet love; is constantly, by its unseen omnipotence, impelling all matter to seek all matter; and were it not for countervailing influences of the same agency, in different modifications and directions, the atoms of the universe must converge to a point, and being of infinite parvitude would constitute one simple, unextended monad, as now one complex and spacefilling. Matter, then, always tends to motion-indeed, is always moving; for, being connected with all other matter,

when one particle, even the least molecule, is moved, the relative position of every other particle is altered; or, we may say without impropriety, that the motion is reciprocal and the universe moves-for all motion is relative, not absolute; space being but extension without limit or measuring point. This principle may be pushed further to a grand ultimatum, as ought all principles, and as they will be sought to be, by the genuine philosopher. All negatives are equally positives, and all positives relatively negatives; and they can be no otherwise regarded when we are careful to remember, what we are ever liable to forget, that infinity has not a starting point on the one hand nor a goal on the other. Had this great undeniable truth been known and ever borne in mind by disputants, that finite knowledge is always and can but be relative, defining only the comparative positions of things, never essential existences, most of the innumerable contentions, both in physic and metaphysic, that have so confounded rather than enlightened men, the vain logomachies of science, would have slept unborn, although nature has constituted our mental eyes with different intensities and diversely colored lenses, so that objects can but appear differently to different individuals, according to the personal medium of each.

To return matter, as we have seen, is motive all matter moves when the repose of an atom is disturbed, and we surely see motion in matter daily. But even were a body at rest, it could only be so through the combined influence of opposing forces. Now, these cannot neutralize each other, as we are sometimes told, for it is a general axiom, non ens becomes not ens nor ens non ens; therefore force cannot destroy force, but antagonizing attractions. produce a resultant compound motion, equivalent to a re