Note 8 — JUNE.

"Nothing is more interesting in the history of the human mind than the tendency of enlightened souls in all ages to gather in clusters, as in the material world crystallization goes on by the gathering of individual atoms about one axis of formation. Thus the schools of Greek Philosophy, the Pythagorean, the Eleatic, the Peripatetic, the Alexandrian, were human crystallizations about a central idea, and generally in a given locality,—as Samos, Athens, or the Lucanian city of Elea, where Zeno learned lessons of Parmenides, and whence they both journeyed to Athens in the youth of Socrates, and held their "Radical Club" at the house of Pythodorus in the Ceramicus. The Schoolmen and the Mystics of the middle ages clustered together in the same way about Abelard. Thomas Aquinas, Occam, Gerson, Giardano Bruno, the early Italian poets, rally in groups in the same way; so do the Elizabethan Dramatists, the Puritan Politicians, the English Platonists. Coming nearer our own time, there are the Lake Poets of England, the Weimar circle of genius, in Germany, the Transcendental Idealists in Concord and Boston, and finally, the German American Philosophers of St. Louis, concerning whom we now speak. In all these Schools and Fellowships of the human soul, a common impulse, aided by accident of locality and other circumstances, trivial only in appearance, has led to the formation of that strictest bond, the friendship of united aspirations. New England has so long been considered the special home of ideas, that it may surprise one to learn that St. Louis, on the Mississippi, has become the focus of a metaphysical renaissance; yet such it has become. A few Germans, New Englanders, and Western men gathered there, having found each other out, began to meet, expatiate, and confer about Kant and Hegel, Fichte, and Sir William Hamilton. Soon they formed a Philosophical Society, and by and by, having accumulated many manuscripts, they began to publish a Magazine of "Speculative Philosophy." At first, this publication came out semi-occasionally, but finally settled down into a regular Quarterly, with contributors on both sides of the Atlantic, and from various schools of metaphysical thought. The January number is, indeed, a remarkable production. Every article is good, and most of them profound; no such collection of striking varieties of philosophic thought has been made public for a long time as this. The Journal is edited by William T. Harris, ll.d., Superintendent of the Public Schools of St. Louis."