I shall best exculpate myself by the full statement of the third system, and by the exposition of its grounds and consequences.

The third and last system, then, denies all rightful origin to government, except as far as it is derivable from principles contained in the reason of man, and judges all the relations of men in society by the laws of moral necessity, according to ideas. -I here use the word in its highest and primitive sense, and as nearly synonymous with the modern

whether of his outward senses, or the inner sense of imagination. This, in the language of the schools, was called the vis receptiva, or recipient property of the soul, from the original constitution of which we perceive and imagine all things under the forms of space and time. By the 'understanding,' I mean the faculty of thinking and forming judgments on the notices furnished by the sense, according to certain rules existing in itself, which rules constitute its distinct nature. By the pure 'reason,' I mean the power by which we become possessed of principles,-the eternal verities of Plato and Descartes, and of ideas, not images-as the ideas of a point, a line, a circle, in mathematics;* and of justice, holiness, free-will, and the like, in moral Hence in works of pure science the definitions of precede the reasoning, in other works they more rm the conclusion.

To many of my readers it ill, I trust, be some recom

mendation of these distinctions, that they are more than once expressed, and every where supposed, in the writings of St. Paul. I have no hesitation in undertaking to prove, that every heresy which has disquieted the Christian Church,

* In the severity of logic, the geometrical point, line, surface, circle, and so forth, are theorems, not ideas.

word ideal,-according to archetypal ideas coessential with the reason, the consciousness of these ideas being indeed the sign and necessary product of the full developement of the reason. The following then is the fundamental principle of this theory: Nothing is to be deemed rightful in civil society, or to be tolerated as such, but what is capable of being demonstrated out of the original laws of the pure reason. Of course, as there is but one system of geometry, so according to this theory there can be but one constitution and one system of legislation, and this consists in the freedom, which is the common right of all men, under the control of that moral necessity, which is the com

from Tritheism to Socinianism, has originated in and supported itself by, arguments rendered plausible only by the confusion of these faculties, and thus demanding for the objects of one, a sort of evidence appropriated to those of another faculty. These disquisitions have the misfortune of being in ill-report, as dry and unsatisfactory; but I hope, in the course of the work, to gain them a better character-and if elucidations of their practical importance from the most momentous events of history, can res em interesting, to give them that interest at least. Besides, there is surely some good in the knowledge of truth, as truth— -we were not made to live by bread alone-and in the strengthening of the intellect. It is an excellent remark of Scaliger's-Harum indagatio subtilitatum, etsi non est utilis ad machinas farinarias conficiendas, exuit animum tamen inscitiæ rubigine, acuitque ad alia.—. Exerc. 307. §§ 3. The investigation of these subtleties, though of no use to the construction of machines for grinding corn, yet clears the mind from the rust of ignorance, and sharpens it for other things.

seem.

mon duty of all men. Whatever is not every where necessary, is no where right. On this assumption the whole theory is built. To state it nakedly is to confute it satisfactorily. So at least it should But in how winning and specious a manner this system may be represented even to minds of the loftiest order, if undisciplined and unhumbled by practical experience, has been proved by the general impassioned admiration and momentous effects of Rousseau's Du Contrat Social, and the writings of the French economists, or, as they more appropriately entitled themselves, physiocratic philosophers and in how tempting and dangerous a manner it may be represented to the populace, has been made too evident in our own country by the temporary effects of Paine's Rights of Man. Relatively, however, to this latter work it should be observed, that it is not a legitimate offspring of any one theory, but a confusion of the immorality of the first system with the misapplied universal principles of the last: and in this union, or rather lawless alternation, consists sence of Jacobinism, as far as Jacobinism is any thing but a term of abuse, or has any meaning of its own distinct from democracy and sedition.

A constitution equally suited to China and America, or to Russia and Great Britain, must surely be equally unfit for both, and deserve as little respect in political, as a quack's panacea in medical, practice. Yet there are three weighty motives for

a distinct exposition of this theory,* and of the ground on which its pretensions are bottomed: and I dare affirm, that for the same reasons there are few subjects which in the present state of the world have a fairer claim to the attention of every serious Englishman, who is likely, directly or indirectly, as partizan or as opponent, to interest himself in schemes of reform.

The first motive is derived from the propensity of mankind to mistake the abhorrence occasioned by the unhappy effects or accompaniments of a particular system for an insight into the falsehood of its principles. And it is the latter only, a clear insight, not any vehement emotion, that can secure its permanent rejection. For by a wise ordinance of nature our feelings have no abiding-place in our memory; nay, the more vivid they are in the mo- | ment of their existence, the more dim and difficult to be remembered do they make the thoughts which accompanied them. Those of my readers, who at time of their life have been in the habit of read

any

* As metaphysics are the science which determines what can, and what can not, be known of being and the laws of being, a priori,—that is, from those necessities of the mind or forms of thinking, which, though first revealed to us by experience, must yet have pre-existed in order to make experience itself possible, even as the eye must exist previously to any particular act of seeing, though by sight only can we know that we have eyes—so might the philosophy of Rousseau and his followers not inaptly be entitled, metapolitics, and the doctors of this school metapoliticians.

ing novels, may easily convince themselves of this truth, by comparing their recollections of those stories which most excited their curiosity, and even painfully affected their feelings, with their recollections of the calm and meditative pathos of Shakspeare and Milton. Hence it is that human experience, like the stern lights of a ship at sea, illumines only the path which we have passed over. The horrors of the Peasants' War in Germany, and the direful effects of the Anabaptist tenets, which were only nominally different from those of Jacobinism by the substitution of religious for philosophical jargon, struck all Europe for a time with affright. Yet little more than a century was sufficient to obliterate all effective memory of those events: the same principles budded forth anew, and produced the same fruits from the imprisonment of Charles I. to the restoration of his son. In the succeeding generations, to the follies and vices of the European courts, and to the oppressive privileges of the nobility, were again transferred those feelings of disgust and hatred, which for a brief while the multitude had attached to the crimes and extravagances of political and religious fanaticism: and the same principles, aided by circumstances and dressed out in the ostentatious garb of a fashionable philosophy, once more rose triumphant, and effected the French revolution. That man has reflected little on human nature who does not perceive that the detestable maxims and correspondent crimes of the