truth.

But truth

But truth supposes mankind; for whom

and by whom alone the word is formed, and to whom only it is applicable. If no man, no truth. There is therefore no such thing as eternal, immutable, everlasting truth; unless mankind, such as they are at present, be also eternal, immutable, and everlasting. Two persons may contradict each other, and yet both speak truth. For the truth of one person may be opposite to the truth of another. To speak truth may be a vice as well as a virtue; for there are many occasions when it ought not to be spoken. If you reject my explanation, find out if you can some other possible meaning of the word, or content yourself with Johnson, by saying that true is not false, and fulse is-not true. For so he explains the words."- Vol. ii. p. 407.

In a note the author adds, "Mr Locke, in the second book of his Essay, chapter xxxii., treats of true and false ideas, and is much distressed throughout the whole chapter, because he had not in his mind any determinate meaning of the word true. If that excellent man had himself followed the advice which he gave to his disputing friends concerning the word liquor; if he had followed his own rule, previously to writing about true and false ideas, and had determined what meaning he applied to true, being, thing,

real, right, wrong, he could not have written the above chapter, which exceedingly distresses the reader, who searches for a meaning where there is none to be found."

Whether Mr Locke would have been satisfied with Mr Tooke's account of these words, I cannot say. I know that I am not. I do not think it the true one. It is therefore not the true one. Mr Tooke thinks it is, and therefore it is the true one. Which of us is right? That what a man thinks, he thinks, and that if he speaks what he thinks, he speaks truth in one principal sense of the word, is what does not require much illustration; but whether what he thinks is true or false, whether his opinion is right or wrong, or whether there is not another possible and actual meaning of the terms besides that given by Mr Tooke, is the old difficulty, which remains just where it was before, in spite of etymology.

The application of the theory of language to the philosophy of the mind, Mr Tooke has reserved for a volume by itself: the principle, however, which he means to establish, he has very explicitly laid down in the beginning of his first volume. "The business of the mind," he says, "as far as it concerns language, appears to me to be very simple. It extends no farther than to receive impressions, that is, to have sen

sations or feelings. What are called its operations, are merely the operations of language. The greatest part of Mr Locke's Essay, that is, all which relates to what he calls the composition, abstraction, complexity, generalization, relation, &c. of ideas, does indeed merely concern language. If he had been sooner aware of the inseparable connexion between words and knowledge, he would not have talked of the composition of ideas; but would have seen that the only composition was in the terms; and consequently that it was as improper to talk of a complex idea as of a complex star. It is an easy matter, upon Mr Locke's own principles and a physical consideration of the senses and the mind, to prove the impossibility of the composition of ideas; and that they are not ideas, but merely terms which are general and abstract.”—Vol. i. pp. 39, 51, &c.

Now I grant that Mr Locke's own principles, and a physical consideration of the mind, do lead to the conclusion here stated, that is, to an absurdity; and it is from thence I have endeavoured to show more than once that those principles, and the considering the mind as a physical thing, are themselves absurd. How a term can be complex otherwise than from the complexity of its meaning, that is, of the idea attached to it, is difficult to understand.

As to the other position, that we have no general ideas, but that it is the terms only that are general and abstract, Mr Tooke has borrowed this piece of philosophy from Mr Locke, who borrowed it from Hobbes. "Universality" says Mr Locke, as quoted by our author, "belongs not to things, which are all of them particular in their existence. When, therefore, we quit particulars, the generals that rest are only. creatures of our own; their general nature being nothing but the capacity they are put into of signifying or representing many particulars." I have, however, before shown how very loose, uncertain, and wavering, Mr Locke's reasoning on this subject is, though I cannot agree with Mr Tooke that it is therefore "very different from that incomparable author's usual method of proceeding." There is one question which may be asked with respect to this statement, which, if fairly answered, will perhaps decide the point in dispute: viz. if there is no general nature in things, or if we have no general idea of what they have in common or the same, how is it that we know when to apply the same general terms to different particulars, which on this principle will have nothing left to connect them together in the mind? For example, take the words, a white horse. Now say they, it is the terms

which are general or common, but we have no general or abstract idea corresponding to them. But if we had no general idea of white, nor any general idea of a horse, we should have nothing more to guide us in applying this phrase to any but the first horse, than in applying the terms of an unknown tongue to their respective objects. For it is the idea of something general or common between the several objects, which can alone determine us in assigning the same name to things which, considered as particulars, or setting aside that general nature, are perfectly distinct and independent. Without this link in the mind, this general perception of the qualities of things, the terms a white horse could no more be applied, and would, in fact, be no more applicable to animals of this description generally, than to any other animal. In short, what is it that "puts the same common name into a capacity of signifying many particulars," but that those particulars are, and are conceived to be of the same kind? That is, general terms necessarily imply a class of things and ideas. Language without this would be reduced to a heap of proper names: and we should be just as much at a loss to name any object generally, from its agreement with others, as to know whether we should call the