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 Essays on the Intellectual Powers of the Human Mind. It will easily divide into eight Essays; but with regard to this, as well as whether the two parts may be published separately, I wish to have your advice and Mr. Stewart’s. I apprehend that the Second Part—I mean what relates to the Active Powers—will not be near so large as the First.' On '2nd May 1785' he announces that the Essays on the Intellectual Powers are ready for publication, dedicated to Dr. Gregory and to Dugald Stewart:—'I send you enclosed what I propose as the title of my Essays, with an Epistle which I hope you and Mr. Stewart will allow me to prefix to them. Whether your name should go first, on account of your doctor’s degree, or Mr. Stewart’s, I leave you to adjust between yourselves. I know not how to express my obligations to you both, for the aid you have given me.'

The book thus ushered into the world in 1785 treats of those constituents of the common sense that are implied, not only in perception of things through the five senses and memory, but also in imagination and in the experimental sciences that deal with the past, the distant, and the future. One of them contains the rudiments of a criticism of the common sense principles that finally regulate all abstract reasonings, and above all, those that determine our judgments of truths contingent upon Will—human and divine; in all of which what philosophers called ‘ideas’ seemed to him to spoil the genuine common sense and its inspirations. The fifth Essay deals with the office and relations of our abstract conceptions. Of this Essay Schopenhauer remarks that 'the best and most intelligent exposition of the nature and essence of conceptions which I have been able anywhere to find is in Thomas Reid’s