Page:A biographical dictionary of eminent Scotsmen, vol 4.djvu/85

Rh as laid down by Dr Gerard;—according to his system, jurisprudence and politics are to be preceded by pneumatology and natural theology, and is to be mixed up "with the perusal of some of the best ancient moralists." Thus the studies of jurisprudence and politics, two sciences of strictly modern practical origin, are to be mixed with the dogmas of philosophers, who saw governments but in dreams, and calculated political. contingencies in the abstract rules of mathematicians; and the British student finds, that the constitutional information, for which he will, at a more advanced period of life, discover that his country is renowned, is the only science from which the academical course has carefully excluded him, and which he is left to gather in after-life by desultory reading or miscellaneous conversation and practice. The change produced by Dr Gerard was sufficiently sweeping as a first step, and the reasons for it were a sufficient victory for one mind over the stubbornness of ancient prejudice. It is to be also remembered, that those admirable constitutional works on the government and constitutional laws of England, (which have not" even yet been imitated in Scotland,) and that new science by which the resources of governments, and the relative powers of different forms of constitutions are made known like the circumstances of a private individual—the work of an illustrious Scotsman—had not then appeared. It will be for some approaching age to improve this admirable plan, and to place those sciences which treat of men—in the methods by which, as divided in different clusters through the earth, they have reduced abstract principles of morals to practice as an intermediate exercise betwixt the acquisition of mere physical facts, and the study of those sciences which embrace an abstract speculation on these facts; keeping the mind chained as long as possible to things which exist in the world, in morals as well as in facts—the example of the tyrannical system never deviated from till the days of Bacon and Des Cartes—and of many reasonings of the present day, which it might be presumption to call absurd, showing us how naturally the mind indulges itself in erecting abstract edifices, out of proportions which are useless when they are reduced to the criterion of practice. In 1756, a prize offered by the philosophical society of Edinburgh, for the best essay on taste, was gained by Dr Gerard, and in 1759, he published this essay, the best and most popular of his philosophical works. It passed through three English editions and two French, in which language it was published by Eidous, along with three dissertations on the same subject by Voltaire, D'Alembert, and Montesquieu. This essay treats first of what the author calls taste, resolved into its simple elements, and contains a sort of analytical account of the different perceptible qualities, more or less united, to be found in any thing we admire: he then proceeds to consider the progress of the formation of taste, and ends with a discussion on the existence of a standard of taste. The author follows the system of reflex senses, propounded by Hutchinson. The system of association, upon which Mr Alison afterwards based a treatise on the same subject, is well considered by Gerard, along with many other qualifications, which he looks upon as the sources of the feeling qualifications which other writers, whose ideas on the subject have rot yet been confuted, have referred likewise to the principles of association for their first cause. Longinus, in his treatise on sublimity, if he has not directly maintained the original influence of association—or in other words, the connexion of the thing admired, either through cause and affect, or some other tie, with what is pleasing or good—as an origin of taste, at least in his reasonings and illustrations, gives cause to let it be perceived that he acknowledged such a principle to exist. The first person, however, who laid it regularly down and argued upon it as a source of taste, appears to have been Dr Gerard, and his theory was ad-