mind, and the object of that operation. That the object perceived is one thing, and the perception of that object another, I am as certain as I can be of any thing. The same may be said of conception, of remembrance, of love and hatred, of desire and aversion. In all these, the act of the mind about its object is one thing; the object is another thing. There must be an object, real or imaginary, distinct from the operation of the mind about it. Now, if in these operations the idea be a fourth thing different from the three I have mentioned, I know not what it is, nor have been able to learn from all that has been written about ideas. And if the doctrine of philosophers about ideas confounds any two of these things, which I have mentioned as distinct; if, for example, it confounds the object perceived with the perception of that object, and represents them as one and the same thing, such doctrine is altogether repugnant to all that I am able to discover of the operations of my own mind; and it is repugnant to the common sense of mankind, expressed in the structure of all languages.

CHAPTER XII.

THE SENTIMENTS OF MR. HUME.

Two volumes of the Treatise of Human Nature were published in 1739, and the third in 1740. The doctrine contained in this treatise was published anew in a more popular form in Mr. Hume's Philosophical Essays, of which there have been various editions. What other authors, from the time of Des Cartes, had called ideas, this author distinguished into two kinds, to wit, impressions and ideas; comprehending under the first, all our sensations, passions, and emotions; and under the last, the faint images of these, when we remember or imagine them.

He sets out with this as a principle that needed no proof, and of which therefore he offers none, That all the perceptions of the human mind resolve themselves into these two kinds, impressions and ideas.

As this proposition is the foundation upon which the whole of Mr. Hume's system rests, and from which it is raised with great acuteness indeed, and ingenuity, it were to be wished that he had told us upon what authority this fundamental proposition rests. But we are left to guess, whether it is held forth as a first principle, which has its evidence in itself; or whether it is to be received upon the authority of philosophers.

Mr. Locke had taught us, that all the immediate objects of human knowledge are ideas in the mind. Bishop Berkeley, proceeding upon this foundation, demonstrated very easily, that there is no material world. And he thought, that for the purposes both of philosophy and religion, we should find no loss, but great benefit, in the want of it. But the bishop, as became his order, was unwilling to give up the world of spirits. He saw very well, that ideas are as unfit to represent spirits as they are to represent bodies. Perhaps he saw, that if we perceive only the ideas of spirits, we shall find the same difficulty in inferring their real existence from the existence of their ideas, as we find in inferring the existence of matter from the idea of it; and therefore, while he gives up the material world in favour of the system of ideas, he gives up one half of that system in favour of the world of spirits; and maintains, that we can, without ideas, think, and speak, and reason, intelligibly, about spirits, and what belongs to them.

Mr. Hume shows no such partiality in favour of the world of spirits.

He adopts the theory of ideas in its full extent; and, in consequence, shows that there is neither matter nor mind in the universe; nothing but impressions and ideas. What we call a body, is only a bundle of sensations; and what we call the mind, is only a bundle of thoughts, passions, and emotions, without any subject.

Some ages hence, it will perhaps be looked upon as a curious anecdote, that two philosophers of the 18th century, of very distinguished rank, were led by a philosophical hypothesis; one to disbelieve the existence of matter; and the other, to disbelieve the existence both of matter and of mind. Such an anecdote may not be uninstructive, if it prove a warning to philosophers to beware of hypotheses, especially when they lead to conclusions which contradict the principles upon which all men of common

sense must act in common life.

The Egoists, whom we mentioned before, were left far behind by Mr. Hume; for they believed their own existence, and perhaps also the existence of a Deity. But Mr. Hume's system does not even leave him a self to claim the property of his impressions and ideas.

A system of consequences, however absurd, acutely and justly drawn. from a few principles, in very abstract matters, is of real utility in science, and may be made subservient to real knowledge. This merit Mr. Hume's metaphysical writings have in a great degree.

We had occasion before to observe, that, since the time of Des Cartes, philosophers, in treating of the powers of the mind, have in many instances confounded things, which the common sense of mankind has always led them to distinguish, and which have different names in all languages. Thus, in the perception of an external object, all languages distinguish three things, the mind that perceives, the operation of that mind, which is called perception, and the object perceived. Nothing appears more evident to a mind untutored by philosophy, than that these three are distinct things, which, though related, ought never to be confounded. The structure of all languages supposes this distinction, and is built upon it. Philosophers have introduced a fourth thing in this process, which they call the idea of the object, which is supposed to be an image, or representative of the object, and is said to be the immediate object. The vulgar know nothing about this idea; it is a creature of philosophy, introduced to account for, and explain, the manner of our perceiving external objects.

It is pleasant to observe, that while philosophers, for more than a century, have been labouring, by means of ideas, to explain perception, and the other operations of the mind, those ideas have by degrees usurped the place of perception, object, and even of the mind itself, and have supplanted those very things they were brought to explain. Des Cartes reduced all the operations of the understanding to perception; and what can be more natural to those who believe that they are only different modes of perceiving ideas in our own minds? Locke confounds ideas sometimes with the perception of an external object, sometimes with the external object itself. In Berkeley's system, the idea is the only object, and yet is often confounded with the perception of it. But in Hume's, the idea or the impression, which is only a more lively idea, is mind, perception, and object, all in one: so that, by the term perception in Mr. Hume's system, we must understand the mind itself, all its operations both of understanding and will, and all the objects of these operations. Perception taken in this sense he divides into our more lively perceptions, which he calls impressions, and the less lively, which he calls ideas. To prevent repetition, I must here refer the reader to some remarks made

upon this division, Essay 1, chap. 1, in the explication there given of the words perceive, object, impression.

Philosophers have differed very much with regard to the origin of our ideas, or the sources whence they are derived. The Peripatetics held, that all knowledge is derived originally from the senses; and this ancient doctrine seems to be revived by some late French philosophers, and by Dr. Hartley and Dr. Priestley among the British. Des Cartes maintained, that many of our ideas are innate. Locke opposed the doctrine of innate ideas with much zeal, and employs the whole first book of his Essay against it. But he admits two different sources of ideas; the operations of our external senses, which he calls sensation, by which we get all our ideas of body, and its attributes; and reflection upon the operations of our minds, by which we get the ideas of every thing belonging to the mind. The main design of the second book of Locke's Essay, is to show, that all our simple ideas, without exception, are derived from the one or the other, or both, of these sources. In doing this, the author is led into some paradoxes, although, in general, he is not fond of paradoxes: and had he foreseen all the consequences that may be drawn from his account of the origin of our ideas, he would probably have examined it more carefully.

Mr. Hume adopts Locke's account of the origin of our ideas, and from that principle infers, that we have no idea of substance corporeal or spiritual, no idea of power, no other idea of a cause but that it is something antecedent, and constantly conjoined to that which we call its effect; and, in a word, that we can have no idea of any thing but our sensations, and the operations of mind we are conscious of.

This author leaves no power to the mind in framing its ideas and impressions; and no wonder, since he holds that we have no idea of power; and the mind is nothing but that succession of impressions and ideas of which we are intimately conscious.

He thinks, therefore, that our impressions arise from unknown causes, and that the impressions are the causes of their corresponding ideas. By this he means no more but that they always go before the ideas; for this is all that is necessary to constitute the relations of cause and effect.

As to the order and succession of our ideas, he holds it to be determined by three laws of attraction or association, which he takes to be original properties of the ideas, by which they attract, as it were, or associate themselves with other ideas which either resemble them, or which have been contiguous to them in time and place, or to which they have the relations of cause and effect.

We may here observe, by the way, that the last of these three laws seems to be included in the second, since causation, according to him, implies no more than contiguity in time and place.

It is not my design at present to show how Mr. Hume, upon the principles he has borrowed from Locke and Berkeley, has with great acuteness reared a system of absolute scepticism, which leaves no rational ground to believe any one proposition rather than its contrary: my intention in this place being only to give a detail of the sentiments of philosophers concerning ideas since they became an object of speculation, and concerning the manner of our perceiving external objects by their means.

CHAPTER XIII.

THE SENTIMENTS OF ANTONY ARNAULD.

In this sketch of the opinions of philosophers concerning ideas, we must not omit Antony Arnauld, doctor of the Sorbonne, who, in the year 1683, published his book of True and False Ideas, in opposition to the system of Malebranche, before mentioned. It is only about ten years since I could find this book, and I believe it is rare.

Though Arnauld wrote before Locke, Berkeley, and Hume, I have reserved to the last place some account of his sentiments, because it seems difficult to determine whether he adopted the common theory of ideas, or whether he is singular in rejecting it altogether as a fiction of philosophers.

The controversy between Malebranche and Arnauld necessarily led them to consider what kind of things ideas are, a point upon which other philosophers had very generally been silent. Both of them professed the doctrine universally received, that we perceive not material things immediately, that it is their ideas that are the immediate objects of our thought, and that it is in the idea of every thing that we perceive its properties.

It is necessary to premise, that both these authors use the word perception, as Des Cartes had done before them, to signify every operation of the understanding. "To think, to know, to perceive, are the same thing," says Mr. Arnauld, chap. 5, def. 2. It is likewise to be observed, that the various operations of the mind are by both called modifications of the mind. Perhaps they were led into this phrase by the Cartesian doctrine, that the essence of the mind consists in thinking, as that of body consists in extension. I apprehend, therefore, that when they make sensation, perception, memory, and imagination, to be various modifications of the mind, they mean no more, but that these are things which can only exist in the mind as their subject. We express the same thing by calling them various modes of thinking, or various operations of the mind.

The things which the mind perceives, says Malebranche, are of two kinds. They are either in the mind itself, or they are external to it. The things in the mind, are all its different modifications, its sensations, its imaginations, its pure intellections, its passions and affections. These are immediately perceived; we are conscious of them, and have no need of ideas to represent them to us.

Things external to the mind, are either corporeal or spiritual. With regard to the last, he thinks it possible that, in another state, spirits may be an immediate object of our understandings, and so be perceived without ideas; that there may be such an union of spirits as that they may immediately perceive each other, and communicate their thoughts mutually, without signs, and without ideas.

But leaving this as a problematical point, he holds it to be undeniable, that material things cannot be perceived immediately, but only by the mediation of ideas. He thought it likewise undeniable, that the idea must be immediately present to the mind, that it must touch the soul as it were, and modify its perception of the object.

From these principles we must necessarily conclude, either that the idea is some modification of the human mind, or that it must be an idea in the Divine Mind, which is always intimately present with our minds. The

matter being brought to this alternative, Malebranche considers first all the possible ways such a modification may be produced in our mind as that we call an idea of a material object, taking it for granted always, that it must be an object perceived, and something different from the act of the mind in perceiving it. He finds insuperable objections against every hypothesis of such ideas being produced in our minds, and therefore concludes, that the immediate objects of perception are the ideas of the Divine Mind.

Against this system Arnauld wrote his book of True and False Ideas. He does not object to the alternative mentioned by Malebranche; but he maintains, that ideas are modifications of our minds. And finding no other modification of the human mind which can be called an idea of an external object, he says, it is only another word for perception. Chap. 5. def. 3. "I take the idea of an object, and the perception of an object, to be the same thing. I do not say whether there may be other things to which the name of idea may be given. But it is certain that there are ideas taken in this sense, and that these ideas are either attributes or modifications of our minds."

This I think, indeed, was to attack the system of Malebranche upon its weak side, and where, at the same time, an attack was least expected. Philosophers had been so unanimous in maintaining that we do not perceive external objects immediately, but by certain representative images of them called ideas, that Malebranche might well think his system secure upon that quarter, and that the only question to be determined was, In what subject those ideas are placed, whether in the human or in the divine mind?

But, says Mr. Arnauld, those ideas are mere chimeras, fictions of philosophers; there are no such beings in nature; and therefore it is to no purpose to inquire whether they are in the divine or in the human mind. The only true and real ideas are our perceptions, which are acknowledged by all philosophers, and by Malebranche himself, to be acts or modifications of our own minds. He does not say that the fictitious ideas were a fiction of Malebranche. He acknowledges that they had been very generally maintained by the scholastic philosophers, and points out, very judiciously, the prejudices that had led them into the belief of such ideas.

Of all the powers of our mind, the external senses are thought to be the best understood, and their objects are the most familiar. Hence we measure other powers by them, and transfer to other powers the language which properly belongs to them. The objects of sense must be present to the sense, or within its sphere, in order to their being perceived. Hence, by analogy, we are led to say of every thing when we think of it, that it is present to the mind, or in the mind. But this presence is metaphorical, or analogical only; and Arnauld calls it objective presence, to distinguish it from that local presence which is required in objects that are perceived by sense. But both being called by the same name, they are confounded together, and those things that belong only to real or local presence, are attributed to the metaphorical.

We are likewise accustomed to see objects by their images in a mirror, or in water; and hence are led, by analogy, to think that objects may be presented to the memory or imagination, in some similar manner, by images, which philosophers have called ideas.

By such prejudices and analogies, Arnauld conceives, men have been led to believe that the objects of memory and imagination must be presented to the mind by images or ideas; and the philosophers have been more