Theology, Economics, Politics, Logic and Rhetoric. In the section on Natural Theology, he expresses approval of Clarke's a priori argument for the existence of God, but addresses himself to the argument from design as the most obvious proof. His Moral Philosophy attributes the distinction between moral good and evil to the faculty of Conscience, including both judgment and feeling. His view here is substantially that of Butler. He passes lightly over the differences of moral judgments, admitting only that conscience is liable to be, to some extent, influenced by habit. "The objects of duty," he remarks," are the Deity, our fellow-creatures, and ourselves. Give a rational being right notions of these, and his moral faculty will not permit him to be ignorant of the duty he owes them."

Enough has been said to show the decided inferiority of Beattie to Reid. It is doubtless true that a sceptical philosophy cannot be the goal of the human intellect. It is true also that philosophy seeks for ultimate truths; but any quest for these in the current convictions of the time, and with a fine scorn for the analysis of philosophy, is a ready way to encourage the indolence and the perversion of reason. Beattie attaches importance to general assent; but even the tests of necessity and universality are set aside when he speaks of common sense as varying in different minds, owing to their various constitutions or the circumstances of their lives. If this be so, the socalled common sense is personal to each individual, and there is no criterion to which all may appeal. Philosophical decisions," as Hume had truly said,

"are nothing but the reflections of common life, methodized and corrected." What Beattie did was to serve up the reflections of common life, unanalysed, uncorrected, and with the slightest possible pretence to methodical treatment. His vehement scolding of the sceptics was little to the purpose. He was incapable of appreciating the service which a sceptical philosophy may render to the progress of thought, and he failed to see that only through a more penetrating philosophy can we extricate ourselves from the puzzles to which philosophy has led.

Beattie's poems have at least outlived his prose. The first part of The Minstrel especially is animated by an ardent love of Nature which was then rare, and its interest is heightened by the acknowledgment that his description of the minstrel's boyhood was drawn from the memory of his youthful days. The following lines, which have often been quoted, may illustrate his love of natural beauty and show that he was not insensible to "the glory of words":

Oh, how canst thou renounce the boundless store
Of charms which Nature to her votary yields?

The warbling woodland, the resounding shore,

Th pomp of groves, and garniture of fields;

All that the genial ray of morning gilds,

And all that echoes to the song of even,

All that the mountain's sheltering bosom shields,

And all the dread magnificence of heaven,

Oh, how canst thou renounce, and hope to be forgiven?

A stanza from the more artificial poem of The Hermit may also be given, not only for its intrinsic beauty, but also because Thomas Brown, who like Beattie united the accomplishment of verse with the teaching

of philosophy, could not repeat it without emotion, and quoted it in the last lecture which he delivered to his students.

'Tis night, and the landscape is lovely no more;

I mourn, but, ye woodlands, I mourn not for you ;
For morn is approaching, your charms to restore,
Perfumed with fresh fragrance, and glittering with dew :
Nor yet for the ravage of winter I mourn;
Kind Nature the embryo blossom will save.
But when shall spring visit the mouldering urn?
O when shall it dawn on the night of the grave?

CHAPTER X.

JAMES BURNET, LORD MONBODDO (1714-1799).

IT was the fate of Lord Monboddo to attract the attention of his contemporaries by opinions which seemed to them them fantastic or absurd. Walking familiarly in the footsteps of Plato and Aristotle, he believed that the only hope for philosophy lay in the study of the great thinkers of antiquity. As for those who pretended to write philosophy without the assistance of ancient thought and learning, he roundly declared that he thought their works despicable, both for matter and style. These were hard sayings to men who plumed themselves on their freedom from the follies of the schools and on their discovery of "the inductive philosophy of the human mind." And he was met with a shout of ridicule when he announced his belief in the ascent of human beings from the condition of animals, probably with tails, and when he maintained, further, that the progress of man in arts and sciences had led to his degeneracy in bodily strength, stature, and longevity. We should now be disposed to view his reverence for

the thinkers of Greece with kindlier eyes, to appreciate more fully his conception of philosophy as the science of first principles, and to regard his account of the progress of mankind from a merely animal state as a crude anticipation of one phase of the theory of evolution.

James Burnet, born in 1714, at the family seat of Monboddo in Kincardineshire, after passing through the parish school was taught by Dr. Francis Skene, who was afterwards a professor in the University of Aberdeen. As a student of that University, young Burnet paid particular attention to Greek literature and philosophy. Subsequently, he studied civil law for three years at Groningen. Throughout life he retained affectionate recollections of his parents, and of his father he wrote in later years: "He sold a part of his estate to give me an education, the fruits of which I now, in my old age, enjoy; and they make me happier than if he had left me a dukedom with the greatest fortune."

Admitted to the Scottish bar, he gained a leading position through his success in the famous Douglas Cause, and in 1767 was appointed a Lord of Session under the title of Lord Monboddo. Though frequently dissenting from the decisions of his colleagues, he maintained the character of a good lawyer and an upright judge. His duties at the bar and on the bench did not deter him from prosecuting the study of philosophy with earnestness. In 1773 he published the first volume of his work of the Origin and Progress of Language, afterwards completed in six volumes; and in 1779 appeared the first volume of his Antient Metaphysics, five other volumes following at

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