home all in a ferment, runs up and down, roves from room to room, till at length he finds his beloved master in his closet, and then expresses his joy in softer cries, gesticulations, and fawnings.

This dog, so very superior to man in affection, is seized by some barbarian virtuosos, who nail him down on a table, and dissect him while living, the better to shew you the meseraic veins. All the same organs of sensation which are in yourself you perceive in him. Now, Machinist, what say you ? answer me, has nature created all the springs of feelings in this animal, that it may not feel? Has it nerves to be impassible? For shame! charge not nature with such weakness and inconsistency.

But the fcholastic doctors ask what the soul of beasts is? This is a question I don't understand. A tree has the faculty of receiving sap into its fibres, of circulating it, of unfolding the buds of its leaves and fruits. Do you now ask me what the soul of a tree is? It has received these properties as the animal above has received those of sensation, memory, and a certain number of ideas. Who formed all those properties, who has imparted all these faculties ? He who causes the grass of the field to grow, and the earth to gravitate towards the sun.

The souls of beasts are substantial forms, says Aristotle, who has been followed by the Arabian school, and this by the Angelic school, and the Angelic school by the Sorbonne, and the Sorbonne by no body in the world.

The souls of beasts are material, is the cry of other philosophers, but as little to the purpose as

the

the former; when called upon to define a material soul, they only perplex the cause: they must neceffarily allow it to be sensitive matter. But whence does it derive this sensation? from a material soul; which must mean, that it is matter giving sensation to matter; beyond this circle they have nothing to say.

According to others, equally wise, the soul of beasts is a spiritual essence, dying with the body; but where are your proofs? What idea have you of this spiritual being? which with its sensation, memory, and its share of ideas and combinations, will never be able to know so much as a child of six years. What grounds have you to think, that this incorporeal being dies with the body? But still more stupid are they who affirm this soul to be neither body nor spirit. A fine system truly! By spirit we can mean only something unknown, which is not body; so that the upshot of this wise system is, that the soul of beasts is a substance, which is neither body, nor something which is not body.

Whence can so many contradictory errors arise? From a custom which has always prevailed among men, of investigating the nature of a thing before they knew whether any such thing existed. The sucker, or clapper, of a bellows is likewise called the soul of the bellows. Well, what is this soul? it is only a name I have given to that sucker, or clapper, which falls down, lets in the air, and rising again, propels it through a pipe on my working the bellows.

Here is no soul distinct from the machine itself; but who puts the bellows of animals in motion? I have already told you: he who puts the heavenly bodies in motion. The philosopher

who said "Deus est anima brutorum," was in the right but he should have gone farther1.

BEAUTY, BEAUTIFUL.

ASK a toad what is beauty, the supremely beautiful, the TO-KALON, he will answer you, that it is his female, with two large round eyes projecting out of its little head; a broad and flat neck, yellow belly, and dark brown back. Ask a Guinea Negro; and with him beauty is a greasy black skin, hollow eyes, and a flat nose.

Put the question to the devil, and he will tell you, that beauty is a pair of horns, four claws, and a tail. Consult the philosophers likewise, they will give you some unintelligible jargon for answer, they must have something correspondent to BEAUTY IN THE ABSTRACT, to the TOKALON.

. I once sat next to a philosopher at a tragedy; that's beautiful, said he! How beautiful? said I! because the author has attained his end. The next day he took a dose of physic, which had a very good effect; that's a beautiful physic, said I, it has attained its end: he perceived that a medicine is not to be called beautiful, and that the word beauty is applicable only to those things which give a pleasure accompanied with admiration; that tragedy, he said, had excited these two sensations in him, and that was the TO-KALON, the beautiful.

We

1 This is the Pythagorean system, "Quod Deus sit anima mundi." See Ruæus on Virg. Æn. lib. vi. ver. 726.

We went to England together, and happened to be at the same play, perfectly well translated; but the spectators, one and all, yawned. Oh-ho! said he, the TO-KALON, I find, is not the same in England as in France; and, after several pertinent reflections, he concluded that beauty is very relative; that what is decent at Japan is indecent at Rome, and what is fashionable at Paris is otherwise at Pekin; and thus he saved himself the trouble of composing a long treatise on the beautiful.

BODY.

As we know nothing of spirit, so are we alike

ignorant of body: we perceive some properties; but what is this subject in which these properties reside? All is body, said Democritus and Epicurus; there is no body at all, said the disciples of Zeno the Elæan.

Berkeley, bishop of Cloyne, is the last who has gone about to prove the non-existence of bodies; and he deals chiefly in captious sophisms: there is, says he, neither colour, smell, nor heat, in them; these modalities are in your sensations and not in the objects; a truth, which being before sufficiently known, he needed not to have taken the trouble of proving. But from thence he proceeds to extension and solidity, which are essential to body, and is for proving that there is no extension in a piece of green cloth, because this cloth, in reality, is not green; this sensation of green is only in you, therefore the sensation of extension is likewise only in you: and having overthrown extension, he concludes,

D 2

that

that solidity being annexed to it, falls of itself, and thus there is nothing in the world but our ideas. So that, according to this philosopher, ten thousand men killed by as many cannon shot, are, in reality, only ten thousand conceptions of our minds.

My lord of Cloyne might have avoided exposing himself to such ridicule; he fancies that he proves that there is no such thing as extension, because a body through a glass appeared to him four times larger than to his naked eye, and four times smaller through another glass: thence he concludes, that as the extension of a body cannot, at the same time, be four feet, six feet, and only one foot, such extension exists not; then there is nothing. He needed only to have taken a measure, and say, however extended a body may appear to me, its actual extension is so many

of these measures.

He might easily have seen that extension and solidity are very different from sounds, colours, tastes, and smells, &c. These are manifestly sensations excited by the configuration of the parts. But extension is not a sensation : though on the going out of a fire I no longer feel heat; on the agitation of the air ceasing I hear nothing; and from a withered rose I smell nothing; yet the fire, the air, and the rose, have all their extension, without any relation to me. Berkeley's paradox really does not deserve a formal refutation.

But the cream of the jeft is to know what led him into this paradox. A long time ago I had some talk with him, when he told me, that his opinion originally proceeded from the inconceivableness of what the subject of extension is;

and