peripatetics, than that of the divine I have just now quoted.He read too much to think enough, he admired too much to think freely, and it is impossible to forbear wishing that he had taken due notice of a passage in Tully's offices, "Ne ut quidam Græca verba inculcantes jure optimo rideamur." Greek phraseology was in fashion among the Romans, as well as Greek philosophy, in Tully's days, and it is reasonable to believe that many things passed then under a Greek varnish, that would not have passed so well in mere Latin; just as we may observe, that many things have passed by the help of Greek and Latin among us, that would not have passed so well in mere English. Tully reformed this pedantry indeed, but he did it rather with a view to enrich his language, than to determine his ideas, and he lost little or no advantage by the reformation: that advantage I mean which men take, who affect to know more than they do know, from which affectation the academicians, as much as they disclaimed knowledge, were not free. He invented Latin to answer Greek words; and readers, like writers, being apt to imagine that every new word denotes something new, this expedient served well enough to help out a system, or to get rid of troublesome objections. Thus vain phraseology has been always called in to the assistance of vain philosophy, and a learned mist has been raised in order to surprise, and impose, or to escape.These are some part of the arguties verbales, against which Montagne declaims: and, to speak in his style, they may serve to enrich a man's tongue, but they will leave his understanding as poor as they found it, and much more perplexed.

I return to the subject immediately before me, and I say that, since there must have been something from eternity, because there is something now, the eternal Being must be an intelligent Being, because there is intelligence now, (for no man will venture to assert that non-entity can produce entity, or non-intelligence intelligence,) and such a Being must exist necessarily, whether things have been always as they are, or whether they have been made in time; because it is no more possible to conceive an infinite than a finite progression of effects without a cause. Thus the existence of a God is demonstrated, and cavil against demonstration is impertinent. It is so impertinent, that he who refuses to submit to this demonstration, among others of the same kind, has but one short step more to make in order to arrive at the highest pitch of absurdity: for surely there is but one remove between a denial of the existence of God, and a denial of our own existence; because, if we have an intuitive knowledge of the latter, we have the same intuitive knowledge of all those ideas that connect the latter with the former in demonstrating á posteriori.

Now if the existence of such a Being can be demonstrated, the atheist and the divine are both defeated. The atheist, because the intelligence of this first Cause of all things must have preceded all existence, except his own, with which it is co-eternal. The divine, because an essential difference is established, in consequence of this demonstration, between God's manner of knowing, and that which he has been pleased to bestow on his creatures. Human knowledge is not only posterior to the human system, but the very first elements of it are ideas which we perceive impressed by outward objects on our minds: and it will avail little to urge that our minds must be still independent of outward objects, since we not only know what is, but can frame ideas of what may be, though it is not; because every man who pleases may perceive, that all the ideas he frames of what is not are framed by the combinations he makes of his ideas of what is, and in no other manner, nor by any other means whatsoever. Thus then, if we could be supposed to know that there is an ideal world in the divine intellect, according to which this sensible world was made, yet still the difference between the human and divine manner of knowing would admit of no comparison.

But it was too presumptuous in Plato to assert that the Supreme Being had need of a plan, like some human architect, to conduct the great design, when he raised the fabric of the universe: and it is still more presumptuous to assert not only that the divine intellect is furnished with ideas, like the human, and that God reasons and acts by the help of them, but that your ideas and mine are God's ideas, and that the modifications (for that is the fashionable term) of our minds are the modifications of God's mind. We talk indeed of the eternal ideas of the divine mind, and allude to our manner of knowing, that we may understand ourselves and be understood by others the better, just as we are forced very often to employ corporeal images when we speak of the operations of our own minds. But these expressions, so much abused by those who are in the delirium of metaphysical theology, have no intention to be understood in a literal sense among men who preserve their reason. If they had, they should never be employed by me, since I should think them profane as well as presumptuous.

I should think them silly too, and mere cant; for as one difference between God's manner of knowing and ours arises from what we are able to demonstrate concerning God, so there arises another from what we may know if we shut our ears to the din of hard words, and turn our attention inwards concerning man, and concerning these very ideas. Our knowledge is so dependent on our own system, that a great part of it would not be knowledge perhaps, but error, in any other. They who held, as I learn

from doctor Cudworth that some philosophers did hold, that "sensible ideas and phantasms are impressed on the soul, as on a dead thing," maintained, no doubt, a great absurdity. Aristotle's opinion was more conformable to universal experience, for he asserted, according to Sextus Empiricus, that sense was like the instrument, and intellect like the artificer; that sense was first in the order of mental operations, but that intellect was first in dignity. Now this comparison is just enough. We have internal as well as external sense, mental as well as corporeal faculties, and active as well as passive powers, if you will allow passivity as well as activity to be included in the idea of power. But then, as our senses are few, incapable of giving us much information, and capable of giving it falsely, unless we are on our guard against their deceptions; so the faculties of our minds. are weak, and their progress towards knowledge not only slow, but so confined, that they are not able to carry it to the full extent of the ideas, about which they are conversant, and which they have all contributed to frame. We must conceive, as well as we can, the knowledge of the Supreme Being to be immediate, and absolute. Knowledge in us is mediate by the intervention of ideas, not only as far as sensible objects are concerned, and that goes a great way, but in the whole. It is such knowledge as we are fitted by the organization of our bodies, and the constitution of our minds to acquire. It is such as results from

the relation established between them, and the system to which they belong. It is knowledge for us. It is, in one word, human, and relatively to us, when it is rightly pursued, real knowledge.

General ideas, or notions, such as the mind frames by its innate powers, such as are said to be architypes, and to refer to nothing besides themselves, may seem to be materials of axiomatical, scientifical, and, in a word, of absolute, real knowledge. But even this boasted knowledge is very precarious. These ideas or notions are not taken with exactness from the nature of things on many occasions, and the same affections, and imperfections of the mind, that corrupt the first, corrupt the subsequent operations of it. Ideas or notions are ill abstracted first, and ill compared afterwards. The more complex, the more obscure they are, and the more important, the more liable they are likewise to be abused by prejudices and habits that infect the mind, and put a wrong bias on it. But further; our progression in this knowledge, such as it is, stops always very short of our aim. We soon want ideas, or want means of comparing those we have, and it is in vain that we struggle to get forward. It is in vain that we endeavor to force that barrier, which God has opposed to our insatiable curiosity. To what purpose, indeed, should we force it, if that was in our power, since we have reason to acknowledge,

with the utmost gratitude to the Author of our nature, that every thing necessary to our well being in the state wherein he has placed us lies on the human side of this barrier; within that extent, I mean, where the operations of our minds are performed with ease and vigor, and are attended with the certainty of knowledge, or the sufficient probability of opinion? Not only unattainable, but difficult, very often, is a term synonymous to unnecessary; as we might prove, I think, by some examples drawn even from mathematical knowledge. In short, the profound meditations of philosophers, which we are so apt to admire before we have thought for ourselves, have as much regard paid to them as they deserve, when they are made the amusements of men of sense and leisure; when they are used as exercise, without any other aim than to invigorate, and strengthen the mind, and prepare it for something more conducive to our happiness, and therefore more properly our business.

"The good, the just, the meet, the wholesome rules
Of temperance, and aught that may improve
The moral life."*

This short account of human ideas, and human knowledge, no part of which can be applied, without blasphemy and absurdity, to the Supreme Being, nor be denied, without folly and effrontery, of the human, is sufficient, I suppose, to constitute another difference between God's manner of knowing, and ours: a difference arising from those imperfections and limitations, of which every man is conscious.

But it is time now to ask, what then is the precise notion we are to entertain of the human mind? Shall be continue to think with some philosophers, ancient and modern, that the soul, the rational soul, for they have given us more than one, is a spiritual, and divine substance, "furnished with forms, and ideas to conceive all things by, and printed over with the seeds of universal knowledge, though the active energies of it are fatally united to some local motions in the body, and concurrently produced with them by reason of the magical union betwixt the soul and the body?" Shall we say too, that from this union all the imperfections of the human mind proceed, and that the perfection of our nature is to be quite abstracted from sensation, like the Janguis, or illuminated saints of the Indostan, whom Bernier mentions? Shall we endeavor, like these philosophers, by intenseness of thought, by fasting and other austerities, to rise up to the contemplation of the divinity, whom they assure that they see like a white, lively, ineffable light? Or shall we soften these preten

*John Phillips.

sions a little, and embrace the system of a modern philosopher,* who affirms that God is the place of ideas, as space is of body, and that this all-perfect mind containing the ideas of all created beings, it is in God alone that we perceive every thing exterior to the soul? Shall we assume, like another philosopher,† that our ideas are the only real sensible things; that we have no reason to imagine there are any substances but active thinking substances, and that it is absurd to ascribe power to bodies, or to suppose any power but active power, any agent but spirit, or any actions of spirit without volition?

Who does not see all this to be as inconceivable as that which it pretends to explain? Have the authors of such systems, from Plato down to that fine writer Malebranche, or to that sublime genius, and good man, the bishop of Cloyne, contributed to make us better acquainted with ourselves? I think not. They have done all that human capacity can do in a wrong method; but all they have done has been to vend us poetry for philosophy, and to multiply systems of imagination. They have reasoned about the human mind, à priori, have assumed that they know the nature of it, and have employed much wit and eloquence to account for all the phenomena of it upon these assumptions. But the nature of it is as much unknown as ever, and we must despair of having any real knowledge at all about it, unless we will content ourselves with that which is to be acquired, à posteriori. The mind of man is an object of physics, as much as the body of man, or any other body: and the distinction that is made between physics and metaphysics, is quite arbitrary. His mind is part of his nature, as well as his body. Both of them together constitute his whole being, and as the first is the most noble part, I presume, we should determine his species by it principally, which we do not, if his mind was not more liable than his figure to be confounded with that of other animals. Let us content ourselves therefore to trace his mind, to observe its growth, and the progress it makes from its infancy to its maturity. Let us be content with particular, and experimental knowledge, upon which we may found a few general propositions, such as are or may be properly called axiomata media. But let us aim no longer at a general knowledge, too remote for our search; nor hope to discover more of intellectual nature by internal sense, than we are able to discover of corporeal nature by external. All that we can know of one and the other is, that we have such and such senses, and such and such faculties, and that divers sensations of the body and operations of the mind are produced in them on such and such apparent occasions.