part of our original sensations. But this system is not an improvement on reason, but a progression in superficiality and absurdity, a vast vacuity, where "fluttering its pennons vain, the mind drops down ten thousand fathoms deep."

"Moral ideas," says my author, "seem to elude the senses: they at least elude the senses of those philosophers who deny that our knowledge proceeds from sensation. They would gladly know of what colour virtue is, or of what colour vice is. I answer that virtue consists in the habitual performance of good actions, as vice consists in the habitual performance of bad ones. Now these habits and these actions are visible.

"What, then, is the morality of actions a thing which falls under the cognizance of the senses! Wherefore should it not? Morality depends solely on the conformity between our actions and the laws; but these actions are visible, and the laws are so equally, since they are certain conventions made by men.

"But it will be said, if the laws are only things of convention, they must be altogether arbitrary. They may indeed be sometimes arbitrary; there are but too many such laws; but those which determine whether our actions are good or bad, are not so, nor can they be so. They are the work of man, it is true, because

they are conventions which we have made ; nevertheless, we alone have not made them : nature made them as well as we, she dictated them to us, and it was not in our power to make others. The wants and the faculties of man being given, the laws which are to regulate his conduct must necessarily follow: and though we enacted them, God who has created us with such wants and such faculties, is in truth our sole legislator. In obeying the laws which are conformable to our nature, we render obedience to him who is the author of our nature; and this is that which perfects the morality of actions."Page 56.

For a work entitled Logic, there are a pleasant number of contradictions in this passage. To pass over many of them, if the laws here spoken of are such merely in consequence of their being visible, then all visible objects are laws, and all laws are equally moral. But no! there are some arbitrary laws. Now if the goodness of the laws depends on their conformity to our wants and faculties, neither of these are visible, any more than God who is said to be our only lawgiver. So that "the latter end of this system of law and divinity forgets the beginning." That those actions are moral which are conformable to a moral law, and that those laws are

moral, which are agreeable to our nature and wants, may be readily admitted: but I cannot myself think that this conformity is an object of the senses, or that the true features of morality can ever be discerned but by the eye of the understanding. The friends of morality, it seems, according to our author, are not to despair, or to suppose that the distinctions of right and wrong are banished entirely out of the material system. They only become more clear and legible than ever; we are still right in asserting virtue to have a real existence, namely, on paper, and in supposing that we have some idea of it, as consisting of the letters of the alphabet. Almost in the same manner, Mr Horne Tooke very gravely defines the essence of law and just, from the etymology of these words, to consist in their being something laid down, and something ordered (jussum); and when pressed by the difficulty that there are many things laid down and ordered which are neither laws nor just, he makes answer that their obligation depends on a higher species of law and justice, to wit, a law which is no where laid down, and a justice which is no where ordered, except indeed by the nature of things, on which the etymology of these two words does not seem to throw any light.

On all the other points of the modern metaphysical system, such as the nature of abstraction, judgment and reasoning, the materiality of the soul, free-will, the association of ideas, &c. Mr Locke either halts between two opinions, or else takes the common-place side of the question. The motion of the system, which bears his name and which by this very delay gained all that it wanted to become popular, was retrograde in him, not progressive. The extracts I am about to give from his work will I think establish this point. They will at the same time show him to be a man of strong practical sense, of much serious thought and inquiry, and considerable freedom of opinion, and a real lover of truth, though not so bold and systematic a reasoner, or so great a dealer in paradoxes as some others. Moderation, caution, a wish to examine every side of a question, and an unwillingness to decide till after the most mature and circumspect investigation, and then only according to the clearness of the evidence, seem to have been the characteristics of his mind, none of which denote the daring innovator, or maker of a system. What there is of system in his work is Hobbes's, as I have already shown: the deviations from its common sense and general observation are his own, There is throughout

his reasoning the same contempt for the schoolmen, and the same preference of native, rustic reason to learned authority: the same notion of the necessity for reforming the system of philosophy, and of the possibility of doing this by a more exact use of words: there is the same dissatisfaction with the prevailing system, but he at the same time entertained doubts of his own. What he wanted was confidence and decision. The prolixity and ambiguity of his style seem to have arisen from this source: for he is never weary of examining and re-examining the same objection, and he states his arguments with so many limitations and with such a variety of expression to prevent misapprehension, that it is often difficult to guess at his real meaning. There is it must be confessed a sort of heaviness about him, a want of clearness and connection, which in spite of all his pains, and the real plodding strength of his mind he was never able to overcome. To return to his account of complex ideas: the beginning of his observations on this subject is as follows:

"We have hitherto considered those ideas, in the reception whereof the mind is only passive, which are those simple ones received from sensation and reflection before mentioned, whereof the mind cannot make one to itself, nor have