remark that as the author affirms that sensation is the same thing as judgment, so he seems to conceive that the assertion of any proposition is the same thing as the proof of it. He supposes three several pictures to be presented to a man of understanding, and that from an attentive contemplation and comparison of the different objects and events contained in them, he comes to a judgment or conclusion, viz, That justice is preferable to mercy. "Nevertheless," he says, "this judgment is really nothing but a sensation." This is all the proof he brings; and perhaps, considering the language and country in which this celebrated author wrote, it is reasoning good enough. Do I say this with any view to throw contempt on that lively, ingenious, gay, social, and polished people? No; but philosophy is not their forte: they are not in earnest in these remote speculations. In order duly to appreciate their writings, we must consider them not as the dictates of the understanding, but as the effects Otherwise we shall do them

of constitution.

great injustice.

They pursue truth, like all other things, as far as it is agreeable; they reason for their amusement; they engage in abstruse questions to vary the topics of conversa tion. Whatever does not answer this purpose

is banished out of books and society as a morose and cynical philosophy. To obtrude the dark and difficult parts of a question, or to enter into an elaborate investigation of them, is considered as a piece of ill-manners. Those writers, therefore, have been the most popular among the French who have supplied their readers with the greatest number of dazzling conclusions founded on the most slight and superficial evidence, whose reasonings could be applied to every thing, because they explained nothing, and who most effectually kept out of sight every thing true or profound or interesting in a question. Who would ever think of plunging into abstruse, metaphysical inquiries concerning the nature of the understanding, when he may with entire ease to himself and satisfaction to others solve all the phenomena of the mind by repeating in three words, Juger est sentir. As it was the object of the school-philosophy, by a jargon of technical distinctions, to sharpen the eagerness of débate and give birth to endless verbal controversies, so the modern system, transferring philosophy from the cloistered hall to the toilette and the drawing-room, is calculated, by a set of portable phrases, as familiar and as current as the forms of salutation, to silence every difference of opinion, and to pro

duce an euthanasia of all thought. I have made these remarks not to prejudice the question, but to prevent the prejudice arising on the other side, from seeing the writers of a whole nation, not deficient in natural talents or in acquired advantages, agree in delivering the most puerile absurdities as profound and oracular truths.

The train of thought into which the author has fallen in the passage above cited is pretty obvious. Having undertaken to prove that the ideas of justice and mercy are mere sensations, and that the conclusion that justice is preferable to mercy is also a mere sensation, in order to shew the possibility of this he conjures up the ideas of a good and a bad king, of a criminal, a prison, chains, a dagger, and fifty citizens massacred before the eyes of the spectator, which form the subject of three imaginary pictures, and which are in general considered as so many sensible objects. All these sensible objects he supposes to be implied in, and to be the materials out of which we frame the judgment or conclusion, that justice is better than mercy; and therefore he infers that there is nothing else implied in or necessary to that judgment, and that consequently it is nothing but a sensation. Having succeeded in resolving the compound and general ideas of justice and mercy, good

and evil, into a number of sensible appearances, his imagination is entirely occupied with the novelty of the objects before him, and he drops altogether the consideration, whether the combination and comparison of these several objects or sensations which is absolutely necessary to their forming the moral ideas or inference spoken of, is not the act of some other faculty. In short, the principle that a judgment is nothing but a sensation, is not only a perfectly gratuitous assertion, but an assertion either without meaning, or a palpable contradiction. For the single objects presented in the foregoing metaphysical pictures, and which are supposed to constitute the judgment, are not one sensation, but many. Now if it be meant that these single objects, as they are perceived separately, or successively, one by one, without the intervention of any reflex act of the mind combining and comparing them together, constitute of themselves the judgment, "that justice is preferable to mercy," this is to say, in so many words, that the mind forms a comparison between things without comparing them, and judges of their relations without perceiving them. On the other hand, if it be meant to include the acts of the mind in comparing, judging, inferring, &c. in the term sensation, then the proposition that

judgment or sensation are the same, will be nothing but an idle and insignificant abuse of words, and will only prove that if to the sensation, or perception of particular objects we add the faculty of comparing and judging, nothing farther will be necessary for it to compare and judge. I shall therefore dismiss this well known maxim as no better than a misnomer, as an attempt to shorten the labour of thought by the interposition of an unmeaning phrase, and to confound all the distinctions of the understanding by an equivoque.

It will not be amiss in this place to transcribe a passage from the Logic of the Abbé Condillac (a work which may be regarded as the quintessence of slender thought, and of the art of substituting words for things) to show how far the doctrine of the origin of all our ideas from sensation may be carried, and what an imbecility it produces in the mind, and deadness to any but external objects. The design of the passage is to prove that morality is a visible thing. This however is a work of supererogation, even on the principle supposed: for it is not necessary to refer morality to any thing visible or audible, or to any other of the senses, but the sense of pleasure and pain; our feelings of this kind being allowed to come from, and make a