it with deference) I could not help thinking that he failed considerably in the universal and systematic application of this principle; and that the entire building he wished to display to the eye was erected with great inequalities in strength and skill. I shall barely mention the names of Price and Priestley, without offering any comment upon their writings; and having so done, I believe I have nearly completed the list of all the very considerable writers who have appeared since the time of Locke in this country.

May I be allowed to add to this splendid list the names of two gentlemen now living,-to one of whom the world may fairly look for no common improvement of this science, and from the other of whom it has already received it: I mean Sir James Mackintosh and Mr. Dugald Stewart. In my expectations from the first of these gentlemen, those will not think I am too sanguine who have witnessed the circumference, the order, and the connection of his knowledge, his zeal in prosecuting it, his perspicuity in detailing it, and that extraordinary mixture of enterprise and judgment which makes him as new and original as he is judicious and safe. Of the latter gentleman, if I am not misled by the suavity of his manners, the spotless integrity of his life, and the marvelous effects of that eloquence to which many others here can bear witness as well as myself,-if all these circumstances do not mislead me, I think I may say that never any man has taken up this science of the human mind with such striking and comprehensive views of man's nature. You begin with thinking you are taking up a curious, yet barren, speculation; and you find it, under the masterly hand of this writer, gradually unfolding itself into a wide survey of passions, motives, and faculties, made in chaste language, watched over with correct taste, and adorned with beautiful illustrations. He is ever drawing from those discussions which, in the hands of common men, are mere scholastic subtilties, principles useful in the conduct of life, and valuable for the improvement of the understanding. He is the first writer who ever carried a feeling heart and a creative fancy into the depth of these abstract sciences, without

rendering them a mass of declamatory confusion. He has not rendered his metaphysics dry and disgusting, like Reid; he has not involved them in lofty obscurity, like Plato; nor has he poisoned them with impiety, like Hume. Above all, he has that invaluable talent of inspiring the young with the love of knowledge, the love of virtue, and that feeling of modest independence which has ever been the ornament of his conduct. I have been his pupil, and have received kindness at his hands. Perhaps I am overrating his merit; but I am truly sincere when I say, that I know no reason why he is not ranked among the first writers of the English language, except that he is still alive; and my most earnest and hearty wish is, that that cause of his depreciation may operate for many, many years to come!

I ought, in point of time, to have mentioned Hobbes before; but as I could not connect him with the school of Locke, I was forced to put him out of his proper place. Hobbes lived in the reign of Charles the First, and was, at one period of his life, very much connected with Descartes. He offered to that philosopher some comments on one of his publications, which Descartes treated with great contempt; and they separated. Though he incurred the contempt of Descartes, he excited the astonishment of Leibnitz by his profundity, who always used to speak of him as one of the deepest thinkers that ever existed. For the origin of our ideas he referred entirely to sensation; and divided all human faculties into conception and imagination. Thinking, according to Hobbes, is the succession of one imagination after another,which may be either irregular, or regulated with a view to some end. Truth and falsehood are attributes, not of things, but of language. The intellect, peculiar to man, is a faculty arising from speech; and the use of reason is the deduction of remote consequences from the definitions of terms. Science is the knowledge of these consequences.

There are in animals two kinds of motion, one vital and involuntary, the other animal and voluntary. The latter, if it tend toward an object, is appetite; if it recede from it, is aversion: and the object in the former

case is said to be good; in the latter, evil. Appetite is attended with pleasure, aversion with pain. In deliberation, the last impulse is will; success in obtaining its object, enjoyment. His notion of virtue was, that the law of the civil magistrate was the sole standard of right and wrong; that there was no natural distinction between them antecedent to the institution of positive law. This last part of his system was answered and refuted by Dr. Cudworth, in his "Immutable Morality." Hobbes, though a man of the highest order of faculties, is a most pernicious and paradoxical writer upon almost all subjects. As a mathematician he is generally accused of ignorance; his morality is subversive of all morals, as his policy is of all free government. His works produced, at the time, the most prodigious effect; they are now read by a few speculative men, and he is entirely passed away from common notice,-as every writer always will pass away, whatever be his talents, who thinks himself mightier than nature, and would expunge from the hearts of men their primordial and irresistible feelings.

Having said all I have to say of English moral philosophers, it may not be unacceptable to give some short account of the progress of Mr. Locke's doctrine in France. Pere Buffier, after Gassendi (whom I have already mentioned), was the first person in France who developed any philosophical views analogous to those of Mr. Locke. He was the first person who attempted an enumeration of first principles to serve as a basis for all moral reasoning; but though he has the merit of being the first to enforce this method of philosophizing, he has, in the execution of it, been still more unfortunate than his disciple Dr. Reid, and has multiplied his catalogue of fundamental truths beyond all bounds of good sense and discretion. The Essay upon Abstraction by Dumarsais, is an admirable abridgment of Locke's Essay. The reputation of Locke was very widely disseminated by Voltaire. Vauvenargues, whose maxims are so little read in this country, appears to have studied him; but Condillac is the person who has almost naturalized Locke in France. He has expanded and exemplified Locke's doctrines of sensation. Locke only perceived

a very little chapter of the law of association, and treated it as a mere disease of the mind; Condillac has shown its effects upon the entire system of our knowledge. Locke showed that language registers our ideas; Condillac points out to us that it analyzes them, and is an indispensable instrument in reasoning. In short, we must unquestionably consider Condillac as the most. valuable disciple and commentator that Locke has yet had. The effect of his book in disseminating the philosophy of Locke among the French, has been prodigious. D'Alembert undoubtedly, in his intellectual philosophy, is a pupil of the Locke school; and to his name may be added those of Condorcet, Charles Bonnet, and Degerando, who wrote his Essay upon Natural Signs, when a common soldier in the army of General Moreau.

Germany had principally received its tone of moral philosophy from Leibnitz and Wolfe, before this last revolution effected by Professor Kant. Perhaps no man that ever lived combined in so eminent a degree as Leibnitz, the faculty of invention with the habit of labor. His theories abound with boldness and originality, as any one who has cast a glance upon them may easily perceive; and he had acquired more knowledge, taking it in extent and accuracy, than any man, perhaps, that ever existed. His habits of labor were so intense, that he sometimes was known to sit in his study for fortyeight hours together; and for whole months confined himself to his books, without any other interruptions than those which hunger and sleep rendered absolutely necessary. His system was, that Nature, in granting organs to animals, had made them capable of distinct perception, memory, and imagination. Man is distinguished from inferior animals by the power of knowing necessary and eternal truths: it is from this power, that we are capable of those reflex acts by which we are conscious of our own existence, and form the ideas of being, substance, and God. Our reasonings are raised upon two great principles: the one, that of consistency, by means of which we judge that to be false which involves a contradiction, and that to be true which is the reverse of the false; the second, is that of sufficient reason, which

admits nothing to exist without a sufficient reason for its existence, though that reason may not be known to us. In the united state of soul and body, each follows its own laws; but they agree together by means of a preestablished harmony between all substances, which renders each a representation of the universe. The soul, he says, acts according to the law of final causes, or by motives; the body, according to efficient causes, or by motion: and between these two kingdoms of nature there is a harmony, originally established, and continually preserved, by the power of God. Such is a very summary view of the theory of the great Leibnitz, whom both Locke and Molyneux evidently consider as a very overrated man, and whose system Voltaire calls "une bonne plaisanterie."

To Leibnitz, and his successor Wolfe, succeeded an endless list of German metaphysicians, whose systems I am so far from being acquainted with, that I am too ignorant to pronounce their authors' names-Baumgarten, Meyer, Crousaz, Plouquet, Mendelsohn (the antagonist of Hume), and Eberhard, Platner, and names without any vowels or any end.

This superb list is terminated by Professor Kant, the explanation of whose philosophy I really can not attempt: first, from some very faint doubts whether it is explicable; next, from a pretty strong conviction that this good company would not be much pleased to sit for another half-hour and hear me commenting on his twelve categories; his distinctions between empirical, rational, and transcendental philosophy; his absolute unity, absolute totality, and absolute causation; his four reflective conceptions, his objective nonmenal reality, his subjective elements, and his pure cognition. I am very far from saying that these terms are without their share of relish and allurement; I must only decline, myself, the interpretation of them, and refer those whose curiosity they may excite, to the exposition of Villiers and Degerando, in their lately-published history of philosophy.

I can not conclude this lecture without remarking the high destiny and splendid fortune of this country, in giving to the world its great masters of philosophy. We