son.

Let us now hear the epigrammatic Frenchman, who sacrifices nearly as much to conciseness as the prosing Englishman loses by diffusion.

'Il y a donc des esprits de deux sortes. Les uns remarquent aisément les différences des choses, et ce sont les bons esprits. Les autres imaginent et supposent de la ressemblance entr' elles, et ce sont les esprits superficiels.' Rech. de la Vérité. Liv. ii. Seconde Partie, chap. ix. There are two sorts of minds. The one remark easily the differences of things, and these are the good minds [or understandings]. The other imagine and conjecture their resemblance, and these are the superficial minds.

Let us now listen to one who spoke as few others have spoken.

'Maximum et velut radicale discrimen ingeniorum, quoad philosophiam et scientias, illud est; quod alia ingenia sint fortiora et aptiora ad notandas rerum differentias; alia, ad notandas rerum similitudines. Ingenia enim constantia et acuta, figere contemplationes, et morari, et hærere in omni subtilitate differentiarum possunt. Ingenia autem sublimia, et discursiva, etiam tenuissimas et catholicas rerum similitudines, et cognoscunt et componunt. Utrumque autem ingenium facilè labitur in excessum, prensando aut gradus rerum, aut umbras.'

"That strain I heard was of higher mood!' exclaims Mr. Stewart, with an enthusiastic delight in which we fully participate. It is the original strain which has been much sung and variously altered, often deteriorated, never improved. We are afraid of marring it, else we would do it into English for the sake of the common reader. But let us hear it from the philosopher of Malmsbury. Natural wit consists principally in two things; celerity of imagining (that is swift succession of one thought to another), and steady direction to some approved end. On the contrary, a slow imagination makes the defect or fault of the mind which is commonly called dul

that signify slowness of motion, or difficulty to be moved.

'This difference of quickness is caused by the difference of men's passions, who love and dislike, some one thing, some another; and therefore some men's thoughts run one way, some another, and are held to, and observe differently, the things that pass through their imagination. And as in this succession of men's thoughts there is nothing to observe in the things they think on, but either in what they are like one another, or in what they are unlike, or what they serve for, or how they serve to such a purpose; those that observe their similitudes, in case they be such as are but rarely observed by others, are said to have a good wit; by which is meant, in this connexion, a good fancy. But they that observe their differences, and dissimilitudes (which is called distinguishing, discerning, and judging), if such discerning be not easy, are said to have a good judgment. *** The former, that is, fancy, without the help of judgment, is not commended as an excellence; but the latter, which is judgment, is commended by itself, without the help of fancy. Besides the discretion, or distinguishing, of times, places, and persons, necessary to a good fancy, there is required also a frequent application of his thoughts to their end; that is to say, to some use to be made of them. This done, he that has this excellence, will be easily fitted with similitudes, that will please not only by illustration of discourse, and adorning it with new and apt metaphors, but also by the rarity of their invention. But, without steadiness and direction to some end, a great fancy is one kind of madness; such as they have that, entering into any discourse, are snatched from their purpose by every thing that comes in thought, into so many, and so long digressions and parentheses, that they utterly lose themselves.' Leviathan, part I. chap. viii.

This, too, is not a bad strain, and more worthy of ranking with that of Bacon than either the epigram of Malebranche, or the very diffuse and wordy commentary upon it' by Locke. But what we intended chiefly was to bring into comparison, or rather contrast, the mode of expressing thought, as presented in the writings of Locke, and the writings of those from whom he borrowed; and to show how deficient he is in the use of words, or language, as the instrument or medium of knowledge. There is hardly a noted remark in the whole Essay on the Human Understanding which may not be compared or contrasted with some passage or other of some preceding author, particularly Hobbes, from whom he borrowed more than from all other authors put together, though he hardly ever mentions the name of his benefactor except in a way of reproach. This was, perhaps, more from fear than from ingratitude, or from the desire of appropriating to himself the fame of others. In his reply to the bishop of Worcester he says, 'I am not so well read in Hobbes and Spinoza as to be able to say what were their opinions in this matter; but possibly there may be those who will think your lordship's authority of more use than justly decried names.'

3. A third cause of the defects of the Essay of Mr. Locke has been already indicated, a want of originality, that is, want of intellectual adaptation to his undertaking. There is a manifest lack of unity of design, and much inconsistency among the parts, because they were taken from very different minds; and because, when taken from one and the same mind, as for example from that of Hobbes, the commentator either did not understand his materials fully, or wished to work them up anew in a manner, and for a purpose, to which they were not suited; or to incorporate them with others wholly incongruous and heterogeneous. Take, for example, what he says about truth, at the opening of the fifth chapter of the fourth book. He adopts the statement of Hobbes, 'that truth properly belongs only to propositions; but he instantly makes nonsense of it by adding, 'whereof there are two sorts, viz. mental and verbal; as there are two sorts of signs commonly made use of, viz. ideas and words.' What the author could intend to mean by ideas being commonly made use of as signs, it is impossible for us to conjecture. From such a hopeful beginning we have this edifying sequel.—To form a clear notion of truth it is very necessary to consider truth of thought and truth of words distinctly one from another; but yet it is very difficult to treat of them asunder. Because it is unavoidable, in treating of mental propositions, to make use of words; and then the instances given of mental propositions cease immediately to be barely mental, and become verbal. For a mental proposition, being nothing but a bare consideration of the ideas as they are in our minds, stripped of names, they lose the nature of purely mental propositions as soon as they are put into words. And that which makes it yet harder to treat of mental and verbal propositions separately, is, ́that most men, if not all, in their thinkings and reasonings within themselves, make use of words instead of ideas; at least when the subject of their meditation contains in it complex ideas.'

Truly the case is not only hard, but desperate. What light or conduct of the understanding any man can find in statements like these we cannot divine; yet they are a fair specimen of very many of the statements contained in Mr. Locke's celebrated work. Such indistinctness, such confusion, or rather such absence of conceivable meaning, cannot possibly exist where a man has distinct thoughts in his mind, and writes only from his own understanding.

We might have remarked, under the former head, that it is not merely in putting words together that the author fails, which failure is generally connected with mental confusion, but in regard to single terms as signs of ideas, to use his own expression, he is almost habitually faulty. Take, for instance, his noted word idea, which is here, and there, and every where, throughout the essay. What can be more indefinite than this verbal Proteus? It seems to mean any thing, every thing, and nothing, by turns. And this, though a notable, is not a solitary example. There is hardly a word of much importance, and frequent recurrence, which is not applied in the same loose and careless manner. This of itself is a striking proof of want of adap

tation, or qualification, for metaphysical research and discussion. There was nothing, Hobbes said (in a passage already quoted), that he distrusted so much as his diction or expression; but, notwithstanding all Mr. Locke's sage remarks and remonstrances on the subject, there seems to have been nothing that he so little distrusted.

What then, it may be said, are the merits of Mr. Locke?-We are fully disposed to allow them to be great, though not precisely such as have been generally assigned. He was a sincere lover of truth, and a most determined enemy to error and scholastic pretension and imposition. His work, though not remarkable for originality, consistency, or any thing like a luminous and instructive exposition of the subjects on which it professedly treats, contains many judicious remarks, brought together from various quarters; and, though it might have been so written as to do much more, it has certainly done much in clearing away the rubbish of a false and deceitful philosophy, or rather of learned jargon. The third book, though very diffuse and wordy, is still calculated to be highly useful to young enquirers: and it is impossible almost to estimate the good which the first book (unquestionably the ablest) has effected in banishing the Platonic mysticism and absurdity of innate ideas; which, so late as the times of Descartes, Leibnitz, Cudworth, and even Price, maintained a hold of minds much above intellectual mediocrity. It is true, some harm may have been done by the same book, in leading such as Condillac, Hartley, and many others, to assign too much to the senses and too little to the mind itself; yet we think it does not merit the treatment it has received from Reid, Stewart, and others of the same school.

The last-named author is sometimes rather indignant at what he calls the sophistry, and represents as of dangerous tendency, in the first book of the Essay: at other times he is not only extremely candid, but even eulogial towards the work as a whole. The enquiries,' he remarks in the first and second books, which are of a much more abstract, as well as scholastic, nature, than the sequel of the work, probably opened gradually on the author's mind in proportion as he studied his subject with a closer and more continued attention. They relate chiefly to the origiu and to the technical classification of our ideas frequently branching out into collateral, and sometimes into digressive, discussions, without much regard to method or connexion. The third book (by far the most important of the whole), where the nature, the use, and the abuse of language, are so clearly and happily illustrated, seems, from Locke's own account, to have been a sort of after-thought; and the two excellent chapters on the association of ideas, and on enthusiasm (the former of which has contributed as much as any thing else in Locke's writings, to the subsequent progress of metaphysical philosophy) were printed, for the first time, in the fourth edition of the Essay.'

Respecting what Locke named, not very happily, association of ideas, such as are more just and generous to the memory of Hobbes than Mr. Stewart, admit that he was the first, at least in mo

dern times, to state the mental fact or principle so much philosophised upon since his time (to what important purpose we hardly know notwithstanding Mr. Stewart's high-sounding language about the progress of metaphysical philosophy), and that he stated it in a far more striking and philosophical manner than his commentator.

The following is language far more loftily panegyrical both towards Mr. Locke and metaphysics than the writer of this article could sincerely adopt. But,' says Mr. Stewart, although these considerations render the two first books inferior in point of general utility to the two last, they do not materially detract from their merit, as a precious accession to the theory of the human mind. On the contrary, I do not hesitate to consider them as the richest contribution, of well-observed and well-described facts, which was ever bequeathed to this branch of science by a single individual; and as the indisputable (though not always acknowledged) source of some of the most refined conclusions, with respect to the intellectual phenomena which have been since brought to light by succeeding inquirers.'

The following perhaps may be regarded as a beautiful specimen of what we have failed in towards Mr. Locke :

'After the details given by Locke himself, of the circumstances in which his Essay was begun and completed, more especially after what he has stated of the discontinued way of writing,' imposed on him by the avocations of a busy and unsettled life, it cannot be thought surprising, that so very little of method should appear in the disposition of his materials; or that the opinions which, on different occasions, he has pronounced on the same subject should not always seem perfectly steady and consistent. In these last cases, however, I am inclined to think that the inconsistencies, if duly reflected on, would be found rather apparent than real. It is but seldom that a writer, possessed of the powerful and upright mind of Locke, can reasonably be suspected of stating propositions in direct contradiction to each other. The presumption is, that, in each of these propositions, there is a mixture of truth, and that the error lies chiefly in the unqualified manner in which the truth is stated; proper allowances not being made, during the fervour of composition, for the partial survey taken of the objects from a particular point of view. Perhaps it would not be going too far to assert, that most of the seeming contradictions which occur in authors animated with a severe love of truth, might be fairly accounted for by the different aspects which the same objects presented to them upon different occasions. In reading such authors accordingly, when we meet with discordant expressions, instead of indulging ourselves in the captiousness of verbal criticism, it would better become us carefully and candidly to collate the questionable passages; and to study so to reconcile them, by judicious modifications and corrections, as to render the oversights and mistakes of our illustrious guides subservient to the precision and soundness of our own conclusions. In the case of Locke it must be owned, that this is not always an easy task, as the limitations of some

of his most exceptionable propositions are to be collected, not from the context, but from different and widely separated parts of his essay.'

We leave our readers to judge of the soundness of the above criticism; but we thought it curious and worthy of insertion as a kind of contrast to our own; and we wished that Locke might have some chance of fair play with us.

In speaking of the celebrity which the Essay on the Understanding so soon acquired, the same writer adds very justly, something I suspect must be ascribed to the political importance which Mr. Locke had previously acquired as the champion of religious toleration, as the great apostle of the revolution, and as the intrepid opposer of a tyranny which had recently been overthrown.' No doubt all this did much for the work; and a high reputation once obtained is sure to remain unless put down by some powerful re-action of opinion. Another circumstance was the magnitude of the work; it seemed a complete body of metaphysics. A third favorable circumstance was the modesty and amicableness of the author; in this respect he was a complete contrast to his metaphysical master. But it is probable that the celebrity of the essay is owing chiefly to its indefinite character. It has been justly observed that most readers delight to repose in generalities.' The author so often quoted already, when speaking of Leibnitz, remarks with more than usual acuteness, the phraseology is so indeterminate, that it may be interpreted in various senses essentially different from each other. Whether this vagueness of language was the effect of artifice, or of real vagueness in the author's notions, may perhaps be doubted; but that it has contributed greatly to extend his reputation, among a very numerous class of readers, may be confidently asserted.'

As almost all sects, and parties, and persons in Britain have vied with one another in lauding Locke; so his fame has been great on the continent, particularly in France. According to Voltaire he is the Hercules of metaphysics, who has fixed the boundaries of the human understanding. Locke est l'Hercule de la metaphysique, qui a posé les bornes de l'esprit humain. This is sublime, but another passage of the same celebrated Voltaire is quite the marvellous. Locke alone has developed the human understanding in a work where there is nothing but truths, and what renders the work perfect all its truths are luminous. Locke seul a developpé l'entendement humain dans un livre où il n'y a que des vérites; et ce qui rend l'ouvrage parfait, toutes ces vérités sont claires.' Is there here any evidence that this smart Frenchman ever read the perfect work concerning the human understanding? Or need we wonder at the unmeasured praise of Locke after this?

Condillac is to be regarded as the French interpreter and commentator of Locke; and it is universally allowed that he has performed his task with great perspicuity and eloquence. But he has not given the whole of Locke and nothing but Locke; for he has so much transmuted the English doctrines about the human understanding, that it would be more proper to call them after Gassendi; and some French writers are now

inclined to restore the long alienated fame of the true philosophy of the human mind to its rightful owner; as has already appeared by a quotation from Degerando. According to Condillac all our ideas, thoughts, mental operations, and emotions, are nothing but transformed sensations. What he means by transformation he has not defined. If we consider,' says he, 'that to remember, to compare, to judge, to distinguish, to imagine, be astonished, to have abstract ideas, to have ideas of number and duration, to know truths, whether general or particular, are but so many modes of being attentive; that to have passions, to love, to hate, to hope, to fear, to will, are but so many different modes of desire; and that attention in the one case, and desire in the other case, of which all these feelings are modes, are themselves, in their origin, nothing more than modes of sensation, we cannot but conclude that sensation involves in it all the faculties of the soul.'-Traité des Sensations, part I. chap. vii.

This is a very short and simple process no doubt. The soul and all its faculties are resolvable into the five senses, and there is an end of the matter. Locke allowed that there was something of a mind or soul to begin, with analogous to a sheet of white paper, and Hobbes thought it rather analogous to a slate. But according to Condillac there is nothing whatever beside or beyond, or distinct from the senses, or their agency, called sensation; all that is supposed to be distinct from this is nothing but itself transformed like a harlequin into another character when performing a different part. Whatever we may think of this doctrine, says Dr. Brown, Lecture 33, as true or false, ingenious or absurd, it seems, at least, scarcely possible that we should regard it as the doctrine of Locke -of him who sets out with a primary division of our ideas, into two distinct classes, one class of which alone belongs to sensation; and who considers even this class of our mere ideas, not as involving all the operations of the mind with respect to them, but only as the objects of the mind in these various operations, as being what we compare, not the very feelings of our comparison itself, the inducements to passion, not what constitutes any of our passions, as a state, or series of states of the mind. To render the paragraph quoted from Condillac at all accordant with the real doctrine of Locke, it would be necessary to reverse it in almost every proposition which it involves.

We will not detain the reader longer with Condillac, who may be regarded, however, as standing at the head of the metaphysicians on the continent who consider themselves the disciples of the metaphysical Hercules of England. According to both Mr. Stewart and Dr. Brown they have all misunderstood their master's doctrine; whether this proves their dulness or perversity, or his unfathomable profundity, or dazzling brightness, the reader must judge for himself.

HARTLEY.

Dr. Hartley is known, and was for a time, to some extent at least, admired as the author of a work entitled Observations on Man; in which

he propounded a very fanciful theory of vibration for the purpose of explaining the operations of the mind. Dr. Brown has expended some very unnecessary refutation on the vibrating theory in one of his lectures; especially as he states that it has now fallen into merited disrepute even with those who are inclined, in other respects, to hold in very high estimation the merits of Hartley as an intellectual analyst.' 'His followers, he continues, have generally been extravagant admirers of his philosophical genius, which I own seems to me to be very opposite to the genius of sound philosophy. That there is considerable acuteness, however, displayed in his work, and that it contains some successful analyses of complex feelings, I am far from de-. nying; and, as intellectual science consists so much in the analysis of the complex phenomena of thought, its influence in this respect has unquestionably been of service, in promoting that spirit of free enquiry, which, in a science that presents no attraction to the senses, is so easily laid asleep, or at least so readily acquiesces, as if to justify its indolence, in the authority of great names, and of all that is ancient in error and venerable in absurdity. But though the influence of his philosophy may have been of service in this respect, the advantage which has perhaps flowed from it in this way must have been inconsiderable compared with the great evil which has unquestionably flowed from it in another way, by leading the enquirer to acquiesce in remote analogies, and to adopt explanations and arrangements of the phenomena of mind, not as they agree with the actual phenomena, but as they chance to agree with some supposed phenomena of our material part.'

Dr. Hartley has given the same general account of the origin of ideas with Condillac; but so far from claiming the sanction of Locke's authority he points out the difference between his own opinion and that expressed by the author of the Essay on the Understanding. It may not be amiss (he remarks in the introduction to his work) here to take notice how far the theory of these papers has led me to differ in respect of logic from Mr. Locke's excellent Essay on the Human Understanding, to which the world is so much indebted for removing prejudices and incumbrances, and advancing real and useful knowledge. First, then, it appears to me, that all the most complex ideas arise from sensation, and that reflection is not a distinct source, as Mr. Locke makes it.'

The materialists and necessitarians have a sort of natural affection for Hartley; and Dr. Priestley speaks in very admiring strains of the author of the vibratory and vibratiuncle theory. Something was done,' (he says, remarks on Reid, Beattie and Oswald), 'in this field of knowledge by Descartes, very much by Mr. Locke, but most of all by Dr. Hartley, who has thrown more useful light on the theory of mind, than Newton did upon the theory of the natural world. 'What with one light and another that has been thrown upon the theory of mind, the northern lights beth Scottish and German, and the effulgent radiance of Locke, Condillac, and Hartley, we might have expected of course to be dark, as we are, through excess of brightness.

According to Mr. Stewart the theory of Hartley seems to be fast passing into oblivion: the temporary popularity which it enjoyed in this country having in a great measure ceased with the life of its zealous and indefatigable apostle Dr. Priestley.' Yet one of his co-operators in the Supplement to the Encyclopædia Britannica, the writer of the article Education, is almost as ardent an admirer of Hartley as Priestley himself. "It is surprising,' he says, 'how little the author of the vibratory theory has left unaccomplished.' It is truly astonishing too, what Condillac, Helvetius, and Cabanis have done; as to Locke, of course, the Hercules of metaphysics, none but Voltaire is fit to tell his metaphysical exploits.

HUME.

Mr. Hume commenced his literary career in the twenty-fifth year of his age, by writing a work entitled a Treatise of Human Nature, suggested no doubt by that of Hobbes, bearing essentially the same title. The reception of this first work was sufficient to have extinguished the ambition of authorship in a less ardent. mind. 'Never literary attempt was more unfortunate,' says the author; it fell dead-born from the press without reaching such distinction as even to excite a murmur among the zealots.' He afterwards endeavoured to adapt the contents of the abortive publication to the public taste by modifying them anew and presenting them in the popular and fashionable form of essays. According to Mr. Stewart, with whom every thing save and except pure Hobbism, is metaphysical optimism, the Treatise of Human Nature has contributed, either directly or indirectly, more than any other single work, to the subsequent progress of the Philosophy of the Human Mind.' What with the sure law of continuity and infinite progression, the Philosophy of the Human Mind will doubtless at last reach infinitesimal perfection in the arrangement of well authenticated facts, refined speculations, and all the genera and species of intellectual phenomena.

The objects contemplated in the Treatise of Human Nature are thus presented by the author: "Tis evident that all the sciences have a relation, greater or less, to human nature, and that, how ever wide any of them may seem to run from it, they still return back by one passage or another. Even mathematics, natural philosophy, and natural religion, are in some measure dependent on the science of man, since they lie under the cognizance of men, and are judged of by their powers and faculties. *** If, therefore, the science of mathematics, natural philosophy, and natural religion, have such a dependence on the knowledge of man, what may be expected in the other sciences, whose connexion with human nature is more close and intimate? The sole end of logic is to explain the principles and operations of our reasoning faculty, and the nature of our ideas: morals and criticism regard our tastes and sentiments, and politics consider men as united in society and dependent on each other. *** Here, then, is the only expedient from which we can hope for success in our philosophical researches, to leave the tedious lingering method which we have hitherto followed, and,

instead of taking now and then a castle or village on the frontier, to march up directly to the capital or centre of these sciences, to human nature itself; which being once masters of we may every where else hope for an easy victory. From this station we may extend our conquests over all those sciences which more intimately concern human life, and afterwards proceed at leisure to discover more fully those which are the objects of pure curiosity. There is no question of importance whose decision is not comprised in the science of man; and there is none which can be decided with any certainty before we become acquainted with that science. In pretending, therefore, to explain the principles of human nature, we in effect propose a complete system of the sciences, built on a foundation almost entirely new, and the only one upon which they can stand with security.'

See, the conquering hero come! A precocious Kant! A second Hercules of metaphysics, mightier far than the first! But iet us hear this wonderful projector, so pregnant with metaphysical wisdom, disburthen himself of his philosophical inspiration.

And, as the science of man is the only solid foundation for the other sciences, so the only solid foundation we can give to this science itself must be laid on experience and observation. 'Tis no astonishing reflection to consider, that the application of experimental philosophy to moral subjects should come after that to natural, at the distance of above a whole century; since we find, in fact, that there was about the same interval betwixt the origin of the sciences; and that, reckoning from Thales to Socrates, the space of time is nearly equal to that betwixt iny lord Bacon and some late philosophers in England, who have begun to put the science of man on a new footing, and have engaged the attention and excited the curiosity of the public.'

This is all very lofty and very wonderful, and no doubt mortified the pride of the author to the last hour of his life. Hence he was always peevish and querulous on the subject of this juvenile work as he terms it. Several writers,' he says, 'who have honored the author's philosophy with answers, have taken care to direct all their batteries against that juvenile work, which the author never acknowledged, and have affected to triumph in any advantage which they imagined they had gained over it: a practice very contrary to all rules of candor and fair dealing, and a strong instance of those polemical artifices which bigoted zeal thinks itself authorised to employ. Henceforth the author desires that the following pieces may alone be regarded as containing his philosophical sentiments and principles.' 'I was carried away, by the heat of youth and invention, to publish too precipitately. So vast an undertaking, planned before I was one-andtwenty, and composed before twenty-five, must necessarily be very defective.—I have repented my haste a hundred and a hundred times.'

The youthful projector or aspiring adventurer in the wonder-working science of man, not succeeding in his ambitious expectations in marching up to the capital,-in extending his conquests,-in acquiring an easy victory,-in