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Rh mark is certainly just, if restricted to Locke’s doctrine as interpreted by the greater part of philosophers on the Continent; but it is very wide of the truth, if applied to it as now explained and modified by the most intelligent of his disciples in this country. The main scope, indeed, of Gassendi’s argument against Descartes, is to materialize that class of our ideas which the Lockists as well as the Cartesians consider as the exclusive objects of the power of reflection; and to shew that these ideas are all ultimately resolvable into images or conceptions borrowed from things external. It is not, therefore, what is sound and valuable in this part of Locke’s system, but the errors grafted on it in the comments of some of his followers, that can justly be said to have been borrowed from Gassendi. Nor has Gassendi the merit of originality, even in these errors; for scarcely a remark on the subject occurs in his works, but what is copied from the accounts transmitted to us of the Epicurean metaphysics.

Unfortunately for Descartes, while he so clearly perceived that the origin of those ideas which are the most interesting to human happiness, could not be traced to our external senses, he had the weakness, instead of stating this fundamental proposition in plain and precise terms, to attempt an explanation of it by the extravagant hypothesis of innate ideas. This hypothesis gave Gassendi great advantages over him, in the management of their controversy; while the subsequent adoption of Gassendi’s reasonings against it by Locke, has led to a very general but ill-founded belief, that the latter, as well as the former, rejected, along with the doctrine of innate ideas, the various important and well-ascertained truths combined with it in the Cartesian system.

The hypothetical language afterwards introduced by Leibnitz concerning the human soul (which he sometimes calls a living mirror of the universe, and sometimes supposes to contain within itself the seeds of that knowledge which is gradually unfolded in the progressive exercise of its faculties), is another impotent attempt to explain a mystery unfathomable by human reason. The same remark may be extended to some of Plato’s reveries on this question, more particularly to his supposition, that those ideas which cannot be traced to any of our external senses, were acquired by the soul in its state of pre-existence. In all of these theories, as well as in that of Descartes, the cardinal truth is assumed as indisputable, that the Senses are not the only sources of human knowledge; nor is anything wanting to render them correctly logical, but the statement of this truth as an ultimate fact (or at least as a fact hitherto unexplained) in our intellectual frame.

It is very justly observed by My Hume, with respect to Sir Isaac Newton, that “while he seemed to draw off the veil from some of the mysteries of nature, he showed, at the same time, the imperfections of the mechanical philosophy, and thereby restored her ultimate se-