Descartes, after arguing that mankind are universally deluded in their conviction that they have any immediate knowledge of aught beyond the modifications of their own minds; again argues that the existence of an external world must be admitted,because, if it do not exist, God deceives, in impressing on us a belief in its reality; but God is no deceiver; therefore, &c. This reasoning is either good for nothing, or good for more than Descartes intended. For on the one hand, if God be no deceiver, he did not deceive us in our natural belief that we know something more than the mere modes of self; but then the fundamental position of the Cartesian philosophy is disproved: and if, on the other hand, this position be admitted, God is thereby confessed to be a deceiver, who, having deluded us in the belief on which our belief of an external world is founded, cannot be consistently supposed not to delude us in this belief itself. Such melancholy reasoning is, however, from Descartes to Dr Brown, the favourite logic by which the Cosmothetic Idealists in general attempt to resist the conclusion of the Absolute Idealists. But on this ground there is no tenable medium between Natural Realism and Absolute Idealism.

It is curious to notice the different views, which Berkeley and Collier, our two Absolute Idealists, and which Dr Samuel Clarke, the acutest of the Hypothetical Realists with whom they both came in contact, took of this principle.

Clarke was, apparently, too sagacious a metaphysician not to see that the proof of the reality of an external world reposed mainly on our natural belief of its reality; and at the same time that this natural belief could not be pleaded in favour of his hypothesis by the Cosmothetic Idealist. He was himself conscious, that his philosophy afforded him no arms against the reasoning of the Absolute Idealist; whose inference he was, however, inclined neither to admit, nor able to show why he should not. Whiston, in his Memoirs, speaking of Berkeley and his Idealism, says :-" He was pleased to send Dr Clarke and myself, each of us, a book. After we had both perused it, I went to Dr Clarke and discoursed with him about it to this effect:-That I, being not a metaphysician, was not able to answer Mr Berkeley's subtile premises, though I did not at all believe his absurd conclusion. I, therefore, desired that he, who was deep in such subtilities, but did not appear to believe Mr Berkeley's conclusions, would answer him; which task he declined." Many years

after this, as we are told in the Life of Bishop Berkeley, prefixed to his works:-"There was, at Mr Addison's instance, a meeting of Drs Clarke and Berkeley to discuss this speculative point; and great hopes were entertained from the conference. The parties, however, separated without being able to come to any agreement. Dr Berkeley declared himself not well satisfied with the conduct of his antagonist on the occasion, who, though he could not answer, had not candour enough to own himself convinced."

Mr Benson affords us a curious anecdote to the same effect in a letter of Collier to Clarke. From it we learn,-that when Collier originally presented his Clavis to the Doctor, through a friend, on reading the title, Clarke good-humouredly said :-" Poor gentleman! I pity him. He would be a philosopher, but has chosen a strange task; for he can neither prove his point himself, nor can the contrary be proved against him."

In regard to the two Idealists themselves, each dealt with this ground of argument in a very different way; and it must be confessed that in this respect Collier is favourably contrasted with Berkeley. Berkeley attempts to enlist the natural belief of mankind in his favour against the Hypothetical Realism of the philosophers. It is true, that natural belief is opposed to scientific opinion. Mankind are not, however, as Berkeley reports, Idealists. In this he even contradicts himself; for, if they be, in truth, of his opinion, why does he dispute so anxiously, so learnedly against them ?-Collier, on the contrary, consistently rejects all appeal to the common sense of mankind. The motto of his work, from Malebranche, is the watchword of his philosophy: :"Vulgi assensus et approbatio circa materiam difficilem, est certum argumentum falsitatis istius opinionis cui assentitur." And in his answer to the Cartesian argument for the reality of matter, from "that strong and natural inclination which all men have to believe in an external world;" he shrewdly remarks on the inconsistency of such a reasoning at such hands:-"Strange! That a person of Mr Descartes' sagacity should be found in so plain and palpable an oversight; and that the late ingenious Mr Norris should be found treading in the same track, and that too upon a solemn and particular disquisition of this matter. That whilst, on the one hand, they contend against the common inclination or prejudice of mankind, that the visible world is not external, they should yet appeal to this same common inclination

for the truth or being of an external world, which on their principles must be said to be invisible; and for which therefore (they must needs have known, if they had considered it), there neither is, nor can be, any kind of inclination." (P. 81.)

2.) In the second place, it was very generally assumed in antiquity, and during the middle ages, that an external world was a supposition necessary to render possible the fact of our sensitive cognition. The philosophers who held, that the immediate object of perception was an emanation from an outer reality, and that the hypothesis of the latter was requisite to account for the phænomenon of the former,-their theory involved the existence of an external world as its condition. But from the moment that the necessity of this condition was abandoned, and this was done by many even of the scholastic philosophers ;-from the moment that sensible species or the vicarious objects in perception were admitted to be derivable from other sources than the external objects themselves, as from God, or from the mind itself from that moment we must look for other reasons than the preceding, to account for the remarkable fact, that it was not until after the commencement of the eighteenth century, that a doctrine of Absolute Idealism was, without communication, contemporaneously promulgated by Berkeley and Collier.

3.)-In explanation of this fact, we must refer to a third ground, which has been wholly overlooked by the historians of philosophy; but which it is necessary to take into account, would we explain how so obvious a conclusion as the negation of the existence of an outer world, on the negation of our immediate knowledge of its existence, should not have been drawn by so acute a race of speculators as the philosophers of the middle ages, to say nothing of the great philosophers of a more recent epoch. This ground is :-That the doctrine of Idealism is incompatible with the Catholic doctrine of the Eucharist. It is a very erroneous statement of Reid, in which, however, he errs only in common with other philosophers, that "during the reign of the Peripatetic doctrine we find no appearance of scepticism about the existence of matter." On the contrary, during the dominance of the scholastic philosophy, we find that the possibility of the non-existence of matter was contemplated; nay, that the reasons in support of this supposition were expounded in all their cogency. We do not, however, find the conclusion founded on these reasons formally professed. And why? Because this conclusion, though

philosophically proved, was theologically disproved; and such disproof was during the middle ages sufficient to prevent the overt recognition of any speculative doctrine; for with all its ingenuity and boldness, philosophy during these ages was confessedly in the service of the church,-it was always Philosophia ancillans Theologiæ. And this because the service was voluntary;-a thraldom indeed of love. Now, if the reality of matter were denied, there would, in general, be denied the reality of Christ's incarnation; and in particular the transubstantiation into his body of the elements of bread and wine. There were other theological reasons indeed, and these not without their weight; but this was, perhaps, the only one insuperable to a Catholic. We find the influence of this reason at work in very ancient times. It was employed by the earlier Fathers, and more especially in opposition to Marcion's doctrine of the merely phænomenal incarnation of our Saviour." Non licet" (says Tertullian in his book De Anima, speaking of the Evidence of Sense-" non licet nobis in dubium sensus istos revocare, ne et in Christo de fide eorum deliberetur: ne forte dicatur, quod falso Satanam prospectârit de cælo præcipitatum; aut falso vocem Patris audierit de ipso testificatam; aut deceptus sit cum Petri socrum tetegit. Sic et Marcion phantasma eum maluit credere, totius corporis in illo dedignatus veritatem." (Cap. xvii.) And in his book, Adversus Marcionem :-" Ideo Christus non erat quod videbatur, et quod erat mentiebatur; caro, nec caro; homo, nec homo: proinde Deus Christus, nec Deus; cur enim non etiam Dei phantasma portaverit? An credam ei de interiore substantia, qui sit de exteriore frustratus? Quomodo verax habebitur in occulto, tam fallax repertus in aperto? Jam nunc quum mendacium deprehenditur Christus caro; sequitur ut omnia quæ per carnem Christi gesta sunt, mendacio gesta sint,-congressus, contactus, convictus, ipsæ quoque virtutes. Si enim tangendo aliquem, liberavit a vitio, non potest vere actum credi, sine corporis ipsius veritate. Nihil solidum ab inani, nihil plenum a vacuo perfici licet. Putativus habitus, putativus actus; imaginarius operator, imaginariæ operæ.” (Lib. iii. c. 8.)-In like manner, St Augustin, among many other passages:-"Si phantasma fuit corpus Christi, fefellit Christus; et si fefellit, veritas non est. Est autem veritas Christus; non igitur phantasma fuit corpus ejus." (Liber De lxxxiii. Quæstionibus, qu. 14.)—And so many others.

The repugnancy of the Catholic dogma of transubstantiation with the surrender of a substantial prototype of the species presented to our sensible perceptions, was, however, more fully and precisely signalised by the Schoolmen; as may be seen in the polemic waged principally on the great arena of scholastic subtlety-the commentaries on the four books of the Sentences of Peter Lombard. In their commentaries on the first book, especially, will be found abundant speculation of an idealistic tendency. The question is almost regularly mooted:-May not God preserve the species (the ideas of a more modern philosophy) before the mind, the external reality represented being destroyed? -May not God, in fact, object to the sense the species representing an external world, that world, in reality, not existing? To these questions the answer is, always in the first instance, affirmative. Why then, the possibility, the probability even, being admitted, was the fact denied? Philosophically orthodox, it was theologically heretical; and their principal argument for the rejection is, that on such hypothesis, the doctrine of a transubstantiated eucharist becomes untenable. A change is not,-cannot be,-(spiritually) real.

Such was the special reason, why many of the acuter Schoolmen did not follow out their general argument, to the express negation of matter; and such also was the only reason, to say nothing of other Cartesians, why Malebranche deformed the simplicity of his peculiar theory with such an assumptive hors d'œuvre, as an unknown and otiose universe of matter. It is, indeed, but justice. to that great philosopher to say, that if the incumbrance with which, as a Catholic, he was obliged to burden it, be thrown off his theory, that theory becomes one of Absolute Idealism; and that, in fact, all the principal arguments in support of such a scheme are found fully developed in his immortal Inquiry after Truth. This Malebranche well knew; and knowing it, we can easily understand, how Berkeley's interview with him ended as it did.*

*

[I cannot, however, concur in the praise of novelty and invention, which has always been conceded to the central theory of Malebranche. His "Vision of all things in the Deity," is, as it appears to me, simply a transference to man in the flesh, to the Viator, of that mode of cognition, maintained by many of the older Catholic divines, in explanation of how the Saints, as disembodied spirits, can be aware of human invocations, and, in general, of what passes upon earth. "They perceive," it is said, "all things in God." So that, in truth, the philosophical theory of Malebranche, is nothing but the extension of a theological hypothesis, long