of the great and good philosopher. But surely the merits of Locke, as the founder of a school of metaphysicians, are of a much higher order than such an estimate of his chief characteristics implies. Locke not only prepares the reader to reason, but prepares him to reason well; to know himself, and man, and nature, better. It is difficult for us in these times to conceive the clouds and mists which the Essay on the Human Understanding dissipated, and how it illuminated the whole horizon of human thought. Cudworth's Intellectual System is a book which sets the reader upon using his own reason; and it requires a vastly superior stock of erudition to weigh and consider its contents. But Cudworth's learning oppresses the mind with its weight, and lies upon the intellect like a London fog upon the chest; whereas Locke clears and braces the understanding. He has laid the broad and deep basis for a true intellectual system in his grand division of Sensation and Reflection; the world without us, and the world within. His second chapter, on the Origin of our Ideas, and his last

chapter, on Knowledge, Reason, Faith, and Judgement, are full of rich, just, and invaluable matter. In the 28th chapter of the 2nd book he has given, incidentally, an analysis of moral laws, which must be in part followed by every other inquirer into ethics and jurisprudence; and the few words of Mr. Austin (in a note, p. 174 of his work on Jurisprudence) are far more worthy of the subject than all Mr. Stewart's elaborate though elegant phraseology. "Allowing for defects, which were nearly inevitable, his analysis is strikingly accurate. It evinces that matchless power of precise and just thinking, with that religious regard for general utility and truth, which marked the incomparable man who emancipated human reason from the yoke of mystery and jargon. And from this, his incidental excursions into the field of law and morality, and from other passages of his essay wherein he touches upon them, we may infer the important services which he would have rendered to the science of ethics if, complying with the instances of Molyneux, he had examined the subject exactly."

Mr. Stewart's estimate of the defects

and excellencies of Locke can never satisfy the deep and cautious investigator of the constitution and powers of the human understanding; and his everlasting, untiring intimations that the principles of Locke's Essay, if carried out, or not guarded by Locke's admissions, lead to the scepticism of Hume, are beyond measure unsatisfactory and wearisome to those who neither see nor understand the consequence, and who find it difficult to make out, at least from Mr. Stewart's statements, in what the scepticism of Hume precisely consisted, or how far it extended, save in the celebrated Essay on Miracles, where the uniformity of nature, or our own experience of it, is contrasted, in a loose manner, with the variableness of human testimony, and perhaps in a general want of principles and convictions in all the objects of metaphysical inquiry. There are two very different states of mind often confounded under the term scepticism; one is that of an inquirer, who is desirous of placing his own meaning, and the meaning of others, before him in the clearest and most satisfactory light, and pro

portioning the degree of his assent to the strength of the evidence; the other, that of a man who concludes positively against certain opinions and propositions, as having no foundation in truth, merely because he cannot keep steadily before him the chain of arguments or evidence by which they are supported. The former is allied to what Hartley calls a "religious scepticism," which receives nothing rashly, and is always prepared and seeking for evidence, with a view of concluding wisely and rationally. The latter is less allied to scepticism than to dogmatism, and becomes dogmatism when a man, losing sight of the degrees of evidence by which the opinions he controverts are supported, thinks to bear them down by the strength, rather than the justness, of his assertions. It is that of a man who is not seeking for truth, but doubts its existence; who is in the habit of questioning every thing, and believing nothing.

But if Mr. Stewart's work be open to criticism, what shall we say of Sir James Mackintosh, whose Dissertation excites the prin

cipal reviews to rapture, and which Mr. Whewell undertakes to preface and to edit? That it is well-very well-worth perusal, may be asserted, partly because so little is written and so little is read with becoming care in such departments of human inquiry. But that the more it is read and examined, the less satisfactory it will appear, may also be asserted; and he who does not choose to rest his justification of this assertion upon any elaborate showing of his own, may shelter himself behind Mill's Fragment on Mackintosh, and ask, Where is the answer to that book? He may ask why the laudatory reviewers never allude to its existence, and why, since it contains so vigorous, hearty, and relentless an attack upon the merits of Sir James, there is no attempt to protect his fame, to meet and rebut its arguments. Surely Mr. Mill was no puny adversary-no mere fly, that stings but impedes not the noble racer in his dazzling course. The peaceful student of nature and of truth may not admire the somewhat bearish style in which Mr. Mill shakes and tears his prey; and with his Fragment strews the