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Rh fire is not hot, nor grass green; for the heat I feel, and the colours I see, are only in the soul.” It is surprising how this, and other passages to the same purpose in Malebranche, should have escaped the notice of Dr Reid; for nothing more precise on the ambiguity in the names of secondary qualities is to be found in his own works. It is still more surprising that Buffier, who might be expected to have studied with care the speculations of his illustrious countrymen, should have directly charged, not only Descartes, but Malebranche, with maintaining a paradox, which they were at so much pains to banish from the schools of philosophy.

The important observations of Descartes upon this subject, made their way into England very soon after his death. They are illustrated at considerable length, and with great ingenuity, by Glanville, in his Scepsis Scientifica, published about thirteen years before Malebranche’s Search after Truth. So slow, however, is the progress of good sense, when it has to struggle against the prejudices of the learned, that, as lately as 1713, the paradox so clearly explained and refuted by Descartes, appears to have kept some footing in that university from which, about thirty years before, Mr Locke had been expelled. In a paper of the Guardian, giving an account of a visit paid by Jack Lizard to his mother and sisters, after a year and a half’s residence at Oxford, the following precis is given of his logical attainments. “For the first week (it is said) Jack dealt wholly in paradoxes. It was a common jest with him to pinch one of his sister’s lap-dogs, and afterwards prove he could not feel it. When the girls were sorting a set of knots, he would demonstrate to them that all the ribbons were of the same colour; or rather, says Jack, of no colour at all. My Lady Lizard herself, though she was not a little pleased with her son’s improvements, was one day almost angry with him; for, having accidentally burnt her fingers as she was lighting the lamp for her tea-pot, in the midst of her anguish, Jack laid hold of the opportunity to instruct her, that there was no such thing as heat in the fire.”

This miserable quibble about the non-existence of secondary qualities, never could have

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