Page:Supplement to the fourth, fifth, and sixth editions of the Encyclopaedia Britannica - with preliminary dissertations on the history of the sciences - illustrated by engravings (IA gri 33125011196181).pdf/147

Rh To those who are familiarly acquainted with the writings of Locke, and of the very few among his successors who have thoroughly entered into the spirit of his philosophy, the foregoing observations may not appear to possess much either of originality or of importance; but when first given to the world, they formed the greatest step ever made in the science of Mind, by a single individual. What a contrast do they exhibit, not only to the discussions of the schoolmen, but to the analogical theories of Hobbes at the very same period! and how often have they been since lost sight of, notwithstanding the clearest speculative conviction of their truth and importance, by Locke himself, and by the greatest part of his professed followers! Had they been duly studied and understood by Mr Horne Tooke, they would have furnished him with a key for solving those etymological riddles, which, although mistaken by many of his contemporaries for profound philosophical discoveries, derive, in fact, the whole of their mystery, from the strong bias of shallow reasoners to relapse into the same scholastic errors, from which Descartes, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, and Reid, have so successfully laboured to emancipate the mind.

If anything can add to our admiration of a train of thought manifesting in its author so unexampled a triumph over the strongest prejudices of sense, it is the extraordinary circumstance of its having first occurred to a young man, who had spent the years commonly Ibid. A few sentences before, Descartes explains with precision in what sense Imagination is here to be understood. “”

The following extracts from a book published at Cambridge in 1660 (precisely ten years after the death of Descartes), while they furnish a useful comment on some of the above remarks, may serve te shew, how completely the spirit of the Cartesian philosophy of Mind had been seized, even then, by some of the members of that university.

“The souls of men exercising themselves first of all 🇬🇷, as the Greek philosopher expresseth himself, merely by a progressive kind of motion, spending themselves about bodily and material acts, and conversing only with sensible things; they are apt to acquire such deep stamps of material phantasms to themselves, that they cannot imagine their own Being to be any other than material and divisible, though of a fine ethereal nature. It is not possible for us well to know what our souls are, but only by their 🇬🇷, their circular or reflex motions, and converse with themselves, which can only steal from them their own secrets.” Smith’s Select Discourses, p. 65, 66.

“If we reflect but upon our own souls, how manifestly do the notions of reason, freedom, perception, and the like, offer themselves to us, whereby we may know a thousand times more distinctly what our souls are than what our bodies are. For the former, we know by an immediate converse with ourselves, and a distinct sense of their operations; whereas all our knowledge of the body is little better than merely historical, which we gather up by scraps and piecemeal, from more doubtful and uncertain experiments which we make of them; but the notions which we have of a mind, i. e. something within us that thinks, apprehends, reasons, and discourses, are so clear and distinct from all those notions which we can fasten upon a body, that we can easily conceive that if all body-being in the world were destroyed, yet we might then as well subsist as now we do.” Ibid. p. 98.