patronage. Mention is made, more than once, of her pecuniary benefactions to him and his family; and in the following paragraph, he has degraded himself to the condition of a starving pedagogue. How shall I thank you, Madam, for all your goodness?. Your refusal to accept of any indemnification for the expense of my advertisements, is a new instance! I am ashamed, and know not what to say. Dii tibi-et mens sibi conscia recti, præmia digna ferant ↓ ›

There are worse traits of the same kind in the book. When he was soliciting his pension, the Dutchess of Portland, who had never seen him before, asked him to accept 1001.; he did not take it indeed; but, instead of resenting the insulting offer of charity to an established professor, he appears to have declined it with many thanks, and ever afterwards to have regarded the Dutchess with uncommon veneration. Samuel Johnson, when he was starving on fourpence a day, would have rejected the alms with disdain. The most humiliating of all these stories, however, is one about a subscription which Lady Mayne, and some of her friends, had set on foot for a splendid edition of his Essay, by which they thought a considerable sum might be raised, in case his application to Government should prove unsuccessful. After it was crowned with success, and the pension obtained, it appears that the subscription was allowed to languish; and Dr Beattie was even directly warned by some of his friends, that it would have an appearance of great meanness, and be disgraceful to his character, if it were still allowed to go on. The Doctor, however, would not agree to drop it. He wrote a long letter in answer to this remonstrance, setting forth, that it was a private thing, and not projected by him, but by his friends; that he thought it honourable to him, &c. &c.; and, at last, finding that this did not satisfy his more scrupulous correspondent, he wrote to Lady Mayne, requesting, that since such misconstructions existed, no entreaty should be used to draw in subscribers, and that they who make objections should not be solicited a second time! If he had been begging for a widow and eight orphans, he could not have made a more pitiful concession.

We are less offended with the silken courtesy of all his addresses to the bishops and well beneficed clergymen of England, in whose palaces and parsonages he takes his repose, and the dexterity with which he selects for them those topics on which he must have known that the flattery of a Scottish philosopher would be most acceptable. We, for our own parts, are still so national, that it takes all our charity to believe that he could be quite sincere in his praises of the pulpit eloquence of England, and his decided preference of their plan of academical education to our own. The most amusing

of

of all his complimentary productions, however, are the sentimental love-letters which he addresses, in great numbers, to the Dutchess of Gordon, for ten or twelve years of his life. He cautions her against her excessive love of solitude, and her passion for moonlight wanderings and pensive contemplation,-enlarges upon the dangers of indulging in extreme sensibility,-and exhorts her to moderate her passion for Young's Night Thoughts, and her amiable anxiety for her husband and children!

We have great indulgence for the vanity of an author; and therefore, we say nothing of the manifold false judgments which Dr Beattie here passes in his own favour; but we cannot quite so easily forgive the affected contempt with which he pretends to speak of those who were ranged against him in controversy, and the impatience with which he allows even his own associates to give them credit for any sort of genius. He is very angry with Dr Reid and Dr Campbell, for treating Mr Hume as a writer of distinguished abilities, and is quite out of humour with Dr Robertson, for praising the eloquence and accuracy of Voltaire, and paying some compliments to Gibbon and Raynal;— for himself, he openly avows, that he detests the principles of those infidel writers, and despises their talents.' This would scarcely go down, we should imagine, even among the blue stockings of Montagu house; and certainly is not calculated to produce any very favourable impression of the author's judgment or sincerity. As he has borrowed the whole of his philosophy from Dr Reid, he might have submitted to take his opinion of the talents against which it was directed; and really should not have let Miss Hannah More and Lord Lyttleton persuade him that he was entitled to talk with contempt of the genius of Hume and Voltaire. With the same supercilious scorn for his infidelity, he has a girlish admiration of Rousseau, and places him, as a moral philosopher, in the same class with Bacon and Montesquieu. He had too tender a heart! he says, to be a confirmed infidel, and was led into scepticism by the bad company which he kept at Paris! The perusal of these letters, in short, has not often exalted our ideas of Dr Beattie's intellectual attainments; and has certainly brought to light some flaws in his moral character, which his friends would have acted more discreetly in allowing to descend to oblivion.

We have not left ourselves much room to estimate the general merits of his various publications; but, as they are all analyzed and extolled in the work before us, it is necessary, before dismissing it, to say something on the subject.

The work which makes the greatest figure, and was certainly the first foundation of the author's celebrity, is the Essay on

the Nature and Immutability of Truth,' on which such unmeasured praises are bestowed, both by the present biographer, and by all the author's male and female correspondents, that it is with difficulty we can believe that they are speaking of the performance which we have just been wearying ourselves with looking over. That the author's intentions were good, and his conviction sincere, we entertain not the least doubt; but that the merits of his book have been prodigiously overrated, we think, is equally undeniable. It contains absolutely nothing, in the nature of argument, that had not been previously stated by Dr Reid in his Inquiry into the Human Mind; and, in our opinion, in a much clearer and more unexceptionable form. As to the merits of that philosophy, we have already taken occasion, in two separate places, to submit our opinion to the judgment of our readers; and, after having settled our accounts with Mr Stewart and Dr Reid, we really do not think it worth while to enter the lists again with Dr Beattie. Whatever may be the excellence of the common-sense school of philosophy, he certainly has no claim to the honours of a founder. He invented none of it; and it is very doubtful with us, whether he ever rightly understood the principles upon which it is rested. It is unquestionable, at least, that he has exposed it to considerable disadvantage, and embarrassed its more enlightened supporters, by the misplaced confidence with which he has urged some propositions, and the fallacious and fantastic illustrations by which he has aimed at recommending them.

*

His confidence and his inaccuracy, however, might have been easily forgiven. Every one has not the capacity of writing philosophically; but every one may at least be temperate and candid; and Dr Beattie's book is still more remarkable for being abusive and acrimonious, than for its defects in argument or originality. There are no subjects, however, in the wide field of human speculation, upon which such vehemence appears more groundless and unaccountable, than the greater part of those which have served Dr Beattie for topics of declamation or invective.

His first great battle is about the real existence of external objects. The sceptics say, that perception is merely an act or affection of the mind, and consequently might exist without any external cause. It is a sensation or affection of the mind, indeed, which consists in the apprehension and belief of such external existences; but being in itself a phenomenon purely mental, it is a mere supposition or conjecture to hold that there are any such existences, by whose operation it is produced. It is impossible, therefore, to bring any evidence for the existence of material obVOL. X. NO. 19.

N

*Vol. III. p. 281. Vol. VII. p. 170.

jects;

jects; and the belief which is admitted to be inseparable from the act of perception, can never be received as such evidence. The whole question is about the grounds of this belief, and not about its existence; and the phenomena of dreaming and madness even prove experimentally, that perception, as characterized by belief, may exist where there is no external object. Dr Beattie answers, after Dr Reid, that the mere existence of this instinctive and indestructible belief in the reality of external objects, is a complete and sufficient proof of their reality; that nature meant us to be satisfied with it; and that we cannot call it in question, without running into the greatest absurdities.

'This is the whole dispute, and a pretty correct summary of the argument upon both sides of the question. But is there any thing here that could justify the calling of names, or the violation of decorum among the disputants? The question is, of all other questions that can be suggested, the most purely and entirely speculative, and obviously disconnected from any practical or moral consequences. After what Berkeley has written on the subject, it must be a gross and wilful fallacy to pretend that the conduct of men can be in the smallest degree affected by the opinions they enter tain about the existence or non-existence of matter. The system which maintains the latter, leaves all our sensations and perceptions unimpaired and entire; and as it is by these, and by these only, that our conduct is guided, it is evident that it can never be altered by the adoption of that system. The whole dispute is about the cause or origin of our perceptions; which the one party ascribes to the action of external bodies, and the other to the inward development of some mental energy. It is a question of pure curiosity; it never can be decided; and as its decision is perfectly indifferent and immaterial to any practical purpose, so, it might have been expected that the discussion should be conducted without virulence or abuse.

The next grand dispute is about the evidence of memory. The sceptics will have it, that we are sure of nothing but our present sensations; and that, though these are sometimes characterised by an impression and belief that other sensations did formerly exist, we can have no evidence of the justice of this belief, nor any certainty that this illusive conception of former sensation, which we call memory, may not be an original affection of our minds. The orthodox philosophers, on the other hand, maintain, that the instinctive reliance we have on memory is complete and satisfactory proof of its accuracy; that it is absurd to ask for the grounds of this belief; and that we cannot call it in question without manifest inconsistency. The same observations which were made on the argument for the existence of matter, apply alse to this controversy. It is purely speculative, and without application

application to any practical conclusion. The sceptics do not deny that they remember like other people, and, consequently, that they have an indestructible belief in past events or existences. All the question is about the origin, or the justice of this belief;whether it arise from such events having actually happened before, or from some original affection of the mind, which is attended with that impression.

The argument, as commonly stated by the sceptics, leads only to a negative or sceptical conclusion. It amounts only to this, that the present sensation, which we call memory, affords no evidence of past existence; and that for any thing that can be provea to the contrary, nothing of what we remember may have existed. We think this undeniably true; and so we believe did Dr Beattie. He thought it also very uselesss; and we agree with him: but he thought it very wicked, and very despicably silly; and there we cannot agree with him at all. It is a very pretty and ingenious puzzle, affords a very useful mortification to human reason, -and leads us to that state of philosophical wonder and perplexity in which we feel our own helplessness, and in which we ought to feel the impropriety of all dogmatism or arrogance in reasoning upon such subjects. This is the only use and the only meaning of such sceptical speculations. It is altogether unfair, and indeed absurd, to suppose that their authors could ever mean positively to maintain that we should try to get the better of any reliance on our memories, or that they themselves really doubted more than other people as to the past reality of the things they remembered. The very arguments they use, indeed, to show that the evidence of memory may be fallacious, prove, completely, that they relied implicitly on the accuracy of that faculty. If they were not sure that they recollected the premises of their reasoning, it is evidently impossible they should ever have drawn their conclusion. If they did not believe that they had seen the books they answered, it is impossible they should have set about answering them.

The truth is, however, that all men have a practical and irresistible belief both in the existence of matter, and in the accuracy of memory; and that no sceptical writer ever meant or expected to destroy this practical belief in other persons. All that they aimed at was to show their own ingenuity, and the narrow limits of the human understanding,-to point out a curious distinction between the evidence of immediate consciousness, and that of perception or memory,-and to shew that there was a kind of logical or argumentative possibility, that the objects of the latter faculties might have no existence. There never was any danger of their persuading men to distrust their senses or their memory; nor can they be rationally suspect