systems become vitiated. A taint enters into them by reason of the exclusion of certain essential particulars: and when the peccant humour breaks out, as it is sure to do sooner or later, it is strange that this incipient symptom of a cure is often mistaken for the worst form of the disease. Never was such a taint more conspicuously brought to light, never was such a mistake as to its nature more strikingly illustrated, than in the instances of Locke and Hume. Locke, founding on the partial principle of an older philosophy, "Nihil est in intellectu quod non prius fuerit in sensu," banished all original notions from the mind. Hume, following in the footsteps of the approved doctrine, took up the notion of cause and effect, and demonstrated that this relation could not be perceived by sense, that it never was in sense, and that consequently the notion of it could not possibly have any place in intelligence. In fact, he proved the notion of cause and effect to be a nonentity. But all moral reasoning, or reasoning respecting matters of fact, rests upon the notion of cause and effect: therefore all moral reasoning rests upon a notion which is a nonentity; and by the same consequence is a nonentity itself. Thus Hume, following fairly out the premises of Locke, struck a blow which paralysed man's nature in its most vital function. Like Samson carrying the gates of Gaza, he lifted human reason absolutely off its hinges; and who is there that shall put it on again upon the principles of the then dominant philosophy?
But what was the issue of all this; what was the good consequence that ensued from it? Was it that the conclusion of Hume was true? Far from it. Hume himself never dreamt it to be so, never wished that it should be thought so. Such an intention would have been at variance with the whole spirit of his philosophy—the object of which was to expose, in all its magnitude, the vice of the prevailing doctrines of his times. Is this, says he, your boasted philosophy? Behold, then, what its consequences amount to! And his reductio, designed, as it was, to act back upon this philosophy, and to confound it, was certainly most triumphant. If Hume did not rectify the errors of his predecessors, he at any rate brought them clearly to light; and these errors consisted in the omission of certain phenomena, by which man was curtailed of his real proportions, and emptied of his true self. Take another instance. What has involved the doctrine of perception in so much perplexity, except the uncertainty and fluctuation which prevail respecting its facts? Without speculating one word on the subject, let us look for a moment to the facts of the question, let us see in what a state they stand, and how they have been dealt with by two of our most illustrious philosophers. At the time of Hume three facts were admitted in the prevailing doctrine of perception, and understood to stand exactly upon the same level with regard to their certainty. First, the object (i.e., the external world perceived). Second, the image, impression, representation, or whatever else it may be called, of this. Third, the subject (i.e., the mind of man perceiving). Hume embraced the second of these as a fact immediately given; but displaced the other two as mediate and hypothetical. Reid, on the other hand, rejected the second as mediate and hypothetical, and maintained the first and third to be facts immediately given. So that between the two philosophers the whole three were at once admitted as facts, and rejected as hypotheses. Which is right and which is wrong cannot be decided here. Probably Hume is not so much in the wrong, nor Reid so much in the right, as they are generally imagined to be; for it is certain that common sense repudiates the conclusion of the latter, just as much as it does that of the former. The subject and object, mind and matter, supposing them to exist, are certainly given in one indivisible simultaneous fact constituting immediate perception. This is what the natural understanding maintains. This is the fact of representation, the second in our series:—a synthesis perhaps of the other two facts; but nevertheless, according to the testimony of common sense, a distinct and undeniable fact, just as much as they are distinct and undeniable facts. This is the fact which Hume admits, and which Reid, however, rejects—his rejection of it being indeed the very lever by which he imagines himself at once to have replaced the other two facts in their original position, and to have displaced
