know how to track it to its form.

Instinct is

the operation of the power of organized life by the exercise of certain natural laws, directing it to the perfection of the individual; and wherever organized life is to be found there is instinct. Irritation exists in the muscular fibre ; sensation in nervous cords; intelligence in the gland of the brain: for there is its seat, whatever may be its essence. But where is the seat, and what is the nature of this new principle? Is it capable of a separate existence? Does it expire with the body? Or does it accompany and still direct the soul after death? These are important questions; what is the answer to them? Or is there any other to be found than that of Dr. Reid already noticed? "Common sense is a part of human nature which hath never been explained."*

And what, after all, is it designed to teach us? What is the number and the precise character of those primary maxims, or instinctive notions, or natural dictates, or inspired truths, or whatsoever else they may be called, which form the sum of its communication? How are we to know what is a genuine and infallible first principle from what has the mere semblance of one and is spurious? Are the founders of the system agreed upon this subject among themselves? If so, they are far more fortunate than the Cartesians upon the first principles, the zowa

two of their own school. If they be not, their foundation slips from them in a moment, and all is wild and visionary; and every one may find a first principle in what his own fancy may suggest, or his own inclination lead him to. Yet we have no proof that any such convention has ever been settled; nor has any individual been bold enough to furnish a catalogue from the repository of his own endowment.

In few words, the whole of this hypothesis is nothing more than an attempt to revive the Cartesian scheme, so far as relates to, perhaps, the most obnoxious part of it, the doctrine of innate ideas, but to revive it under another name. Beattie and Stewart have in fact indirectly admitted as much, though neither of them have chosen to avow the design openly. The worst and most dangerous part of Mr. Locke's system, in the opinion of Dr. Beattie, is his first book-that very book in which this doctrine meets with its death-blow. While Mr. Stewart, notwithstanding the contempt with which he professes to treat this fanciful tenet of innate ideas, asserts almost immediately afterwards, that his chief objection to it consists in its name, and the absurdities that have been connected with it; and adds, that "perhaps he might even venture to say," if separated from these, it would agree in substance with the conclusion he had been attempting to establish.t Essay iii. p. 120.

+ "Perhaps I might even venture to say that, were the ambiguous and obnoxious epithet innate laid aside, and all the

It was my intention to have pursued this hypothesis in another direction, and to have pointed out its decisive tendency to an encouragement of mental indolence and immorality; a tendency, however, altogether unperceived by the uncorrupt and honourable minds of its justly eminent leaders. But our time has already expired, and I must leave it to yourselves to calculate at home, what must be the necessary result of a theory, provided it could ever be seriously embraced upon an extensive scale, that teaches, on the one hand, that intelligence is subordinate to instinct, and that our truest knowledge is that which is afforded by the dictates of nature, without trouble or exertion; and on the other, that our moral sense is identical with our instinctive propensities; and that the constitution of our nature is an infallible guide, and can never lead us amiss. This mischievous, but unquestionably unforeseen tendency of the theory of common sense, I must leave you to follow up at your leisure; but I cannot quit this subject without once more ad. verting to the total failure of this theory, in ac

absurdities discarded which are connected either with the Platonic, with the Scholastic, or with the Cartesian hypothesis, concerning the nature of ideas, this last theory ("the antiquated theory of innate ideas," as he has just above called it, and to which he here refers,) would agree in substance with the conclusion which I have been attempting to establish by an induction of facts." Phil. Essay iii. p. 120. 4to. 1810.

complishing the chief point for which it was devised, I mean that of engaging us to believe, in opposition to the philosophical vagaries of the Bishop of Cloyne and Mr. Hume, as well as of the earlier idealists, not only that the external world has a substantive existence, but that it substantively exists in every respect as it APPEARS to exist. I have already observed, that while Dr. Berkeley was contending metaphysically that we have no proof of a material world, because we have no proof of any thing but the existence of our own minds and ideas, M. Boscovich was contending physically, that we have no proof that matter contains any of the qualities which it APPEARS to contain; that whatever the OSTENSIBLE FORMS of bodies may present to us, it has in itself no such properties as they seem to exhibit; that the whole visible creation is nothing more than a collection of indivisible, unextended atoms, or mere mathematical points, whose only attributes are certain powers of attraction and repulsion, and consequently that every thing we behold is A MERE PHÆNOMENON, AN APPARITION, and nothing more.

Now, meaning to oppose this doctrine, and every doctrine of a similar import, could it be supposed possible, if the fact did not stare us in the face from his own writings, that Dr. Reid would after all avow and contend, not indeed for the same, but for a parallel tenet, and support almost in the same terms? Could it be supposed

it

that he would tell us, as we have already seen he has told us, that every object has its APPARITION; that the object is one thing and its APPARITION another; that the object is IN ONE PLACE and its apparition IN ANOTHER; and that neither the mind nor the eye behold the object itself, but only its APPARITION, or APPEARANCE, its PHANTASM or PHÆNOMENON?

But I have to draw still more largely upon your astonishment; for it yet remains for me to inform you, that Mr. Dugald Stewart, who may be regarded as the key-stone of Dr. Reid's system, and the chief aim of whose writings has been to proscribe the hypothesis of Berkeley, has himself fallen, not unintentionally, as Dr. Reid seems to have done, but openly and avowedly, into a modification of Boscovich's hypothesis; and has even brought forward its more prominent principles " as necessary," I "as I adopt his own terms, " to complete Dr. Reid's speculations." * He labours, indeed, to prove, that the two hypotheses, of Berkeley and Bos covich, have no resemblance or connexion with each other; and I am ready to admit, that in some respects there is a difference, since Boscovich allows us a visionary material world, a world of apparitions, or orderly phænomena, in the language of Leibnitz phenomenes bien réglés, while Berkeley allows us no material world what, ever; though he, too, has his world of phæno

* Essay ii. ch. ii. p. 80., and compare with ch.i. pp. 62, 63.