certain obsolete notions of common essences that are probably foreign to their thoughts. What, e.g., is the substance meant, when we speak of the power of the magnet to attract iron? It is not surely intended that there is really but one identical substance in all matter, or in all loadstones, or that the particular loadstone before us, accidentally cut to certain particular dimensions, becomes, by being sepa. rated from the block, a new singular substance. This latter may be the popular notion, but it can hardly be the scientific one. The truth is, that, in a vulgar way of thinking, the mind deals very much pro arbitrio with material substances, narrowing or extending their limits as suits its own convenience; and seems able and apt to consider any portion of matter which it can take in at one view, and shut off for a time from other things by any noticeable limits, as a particular substance. Speaking scientifically, however, the substance, or rather aggregate of substances, intended, must be some original atoms, of whose existence it must be allowed that we have no direct sensible evidence, and of which, unquestionably, the mind takes no conscious cognizance, when it places the cause of attraction in the magnet. But still, upon what ground, it may be asked, are even these atoms assertTheir ed to be simple substances?

little parts may cohere, if you please, with a force which defies the known powers of nature to separate them :— still they are parts separable by Omnipotence and, when the mind considers any one part by itself, must it not regard that as a separate substance as truly as one solid inch in a glass decanter is really a different thing from all the contiguous solid inches?—or, to put the matter in another light, would such a force of cohesion as would make the decanter practically an atom, make it also a distinct singular substance? But if we take refuge in Boscovich's points of attraction and repulsion, is not this really to drop the idea of matter, without confessing it? These and many other (perhaps more important) difficulties will probably induce some readers to prefer the doctrine laid down by Mr. Stewart upon this question:

"When it is said," he observes, "that every change in nature indicates the operation VOL. XXXVI.-NO, CCXIV.

of a cause, the word cause expresses something which is supposed to be necessarily connected with the change; and without which it could not have happened. This may be called the metaphysical meaning of the word, and such causes may be called In natumetaphysical or efficient causes.

ral philosophy, however, when we speak of one thing being the cause of another, all that we mean is, that the two are constantly conjoined, so that when we see the one we may expect the other. These conjunctions we learn from experience alone, and without an acquaintance with them we could not accommodate our conduct to the established course of nature. The causes which are the objects of our investigation in natural philosophy may, for the sake of distinction, be called physical causes. In stating the arguments for the existence of the Deity, several modern philosophers have been at pains to illustrate that law of our nature which leads us to refer every change we perceive in the universe to the operation of an efficient cause. This reference is not the result of reasoning, but necessarily accompanies the sensation, so as to render it impossible for us to see the change without feeling a conviction of the operation of some cause by which it was produced; much in the same manner in which we find it to be impossible to conceive a sensation without being impressed with a belief of the existence of a sentient being. Hence, I apprehend, it is that when we see two events constantly conjoined, we are led to associate the idea of causation or efficiency with the former, and to refer to it that power or energy by which the change was produced. It is by an association somewhat similiar that we connect our sensations of colour with the primary qualities of body. A moment's reflection must satisfy any one that the sensation of colour can only reside in a mind; and yet our natural bias is surely to connect colour with extension and figure, and to conceive white, blue, and yellow, as something spread over the surfaces of bodies. same way we are led to associate with inanimate matter the idea of power, force, energy, and causation, which are all attributes of mind, and can exist in a mind only." -Elements of P. of H M., Chap. I. sec. ii. pp. 54, 56.

In the

In a word, the person of whom we speak will be apt to argue thus:-Mind is confessedly a cause, a substantial cause, of which, as a cause, we have direct evidence in cur consciousness. We are compelled by the law of our nature to conclude the existence of a causal substance where we perceive a change. But that this is a material substance we have no evidence whatever. For it is confessed

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that the bias of our minds which leads us, in a particular case, to treat the immediately contiguous physical antecedent as the true cause, is illusory. All we can truly affirm, upon any hypothesis, with respect to any physical conjunction, is, that upon the presence of it certain effects will ensue that it is either the cause, or a certain mark of the presence of the cause. Since, even upon the supposition of true material efficient causes, how can we be sure that the material agent which produces any given effect may be not the sensible object with which it is conjoined, but a subtle being which has hitherto, and will for ever, elude human observation? There is, then, no one material substance which we can, upon any direct evidence, pronounce to be a cause in this sense at all; and, therefore, it is more philosophical to recognise, in such cases, the agency of such a substance as we know to be capable of causation.

But in pursuing the "springs of knowledge," we have almost lost ourselves in the clouds." Let us return to regions more level to our capacities. Laws of nature, then, are to be considered as laws imposed by God upon nature; and, through an instructive and entertaining chapter, the author proceeds to point out instances of the adaptation of the general laws of nature to the constitution of the human mind. The mind is naturally fitted to love the combination of variety and sameness, and the number of elements in the collocations of things around is sufficient to produce variety without confusion. The mind is furnished with an intuition of connexions between phenomena a natural vaticination, as Berkeley calls it, of an expected order ; and the prophecy is fulfilled by a causal connexion between all events. The mind is fitted to gather knowledge by experience, and an experience is provided for it. Phenomena have causes; substances are so adjusted as to act; causes adjusted so as to produce general laws of succession. We have faculties enabling us to generalise and classify for the attainment of knowledge, practical and speculative; and the principle of order is maintained throughout the world in number, form, colour, &c., both in more obvious lines for practical direction, and in more intricate and various, where only the eye of the philosopher can detect them. The

mind is made apt to love the beautiful, and beauty, both moral and physical, is presented to it.

But there is one circumstance connected with the laws of nature which thinking men have, in all ages, remarked with some surprise-that the ascertainable stability and universality of those laws increases as we recede from earth, and man's practical concerns. The simplicity of the laws of the heavenly bodies, e. g., enables us to calculate with certainty their motions for ages back and for ages to come; while the multiplicity of the laws which regulate human affairs renders the effects often as irregularly variable as if every cause had not been subjected to precise conditions. Thus, in a rough way, it may be said, that what is put within our foresight is beyond our power; and what is within our power is beyond our foresight. It was this view of things which led Aristotle to exclude Providence from sublunary affairs, and compare the universe to a great household, in which the provi dent care of the master extends itself but slightly to the crowd of slaves and cattle.

The common account of the irregularities of earthly affairs is, that it is a necessary defect arising from the unavoidable crossing of the complex general laws by which they are ordered, and which Omnipotence itself could not prevent, consistently with the use of any ge neral laws at all. But this author is dissatisfied with that explanation. The final end of these irregularities is to be sought in the discipline which they provide for parts of our intellectual and moral nature, which would otherwise lack their due culture. "The recurrences of nature surround us by [with] friends and familiar faces; and we feel that we can walk with security and composure in the scenes in which our Maker has placed us. The occurrences of nature, on the other hand, bring us into contact with new objects and strangers, and quicken our energies by means of the feelings of cu riosity and astonishment which are awakened." But the great reason of these apparent irregularities is, that the interferences of general laws are so calculated as to make the course of things administer a particular providence suitable to the ever-changing moral characters and conditions of beings undergoing a discipline for an

other life. The author, in short, adopts, to some extent, Leibnitz's grand conception of a pre-established harmony between the moral and the physical world, and regards Providence as manifested in the designed interferences of laws with one another, not in suspension of those laws by direct acts of a controlling Divine power. There are several interesting remarks upon this view of things as applied to the great question of the efficacy of prayer; but it will probably be still felt by many, that one great moral difficulty remains untouched. If this be the true theory of prayer, the more fully, it will be said, we understand what we are really about when we pray, the better. It cannot be necessary for the right use of means that we should put out of mind the true account of their utility. How can one feel that it is other than an impediment to the earnestness of prayer, to have a full conviction present to his mind, that he is not now by his supplication exercising any influence on the Being whom he addresses, but that the answer which he is to expect is the pre-arranged result of causes, set in motion once for all at the creation of the world? It may, indeed, tend to lessen this dif ficulty, to observe, that the present sympathy, so to speak, of the Deity with the suppliant, is just the same as if he were now answering the prayer which He long ago foresaw; but we doubt whether it will wholly remove it; and many minds will prefer recurring to the mysterious truth that time has no relation to the Deity's own existence; and considering that the representation of His acting now upon a present supplication, and his having foreseen things from the beginning, are both only analogical representations of a thing inconceivable to our minds -that what takes place, with reference to us in successive duration, has no succession in reference to the Deity. What seems to be really meant by the terms foresight, pre-arrangement, &c. in such cases is that the causes which (relating to us) are antecedent in time to a given effect, are arranged with a view to the prayer which (relatively to us) is long posterior to them.

But here again we become aware that we have followed the author too far into the clouds. The author passes now from the world without to the world within-from a survey of exter

nal nature to a survey of the human mind; and here again we are doomed to stumble at the very threshold over metaphysics.

The question of the freedom of the will is a controversy which at all times, and in all places, has divided men's opinions, wherever and whenever the human mind has raised itself in any degree to abstract speculation. Pagan science, when it expired, bequeathed this as a fatal legacy to the Christian schools, where, blended with the deeper interests of theological dispute, it has arrayed the divines of Christendom on either side as stern, if not angry, combatants in a protracted warfare, which has found a battle-field in every Church throughout the world; and which, whatever tendency it may have to enlarge our knowledge, has certainly done little to improve our charity. Mr. M'Cosh, we need hardly say, for he is a clergyman of the Free Kirk of Scotland, declares for necessity; but he makes large and candid admissions to the maintainers of liberty. He readily gives up, as an empty truism, Edwards' dogma, that "the strongest motive determines the will;" judiciously observing that the strongest motive can be fixed no otherwise than by determining the will; and (which is still more remarkable) he frankly allows the same writer's objections to a self-determining power to be no better than childish cavils. However, upon explanation, it appears that he holds the will to be self-determined in no other way than as the understanding is-i. e., to act always in accordance with its own fixed laws. Any other freedom than this he regards as involving a surrender of the great axiom, that every event must have a cause-meaning thereby a fixed antecedent, which will always necessarily be followed by the same effect. There is, we apprehend, some confusion of thought in the way in which this axiom is used as an argument against the freedom of the will-a confusion regarding both the character of the axiom itself, and the nature of the causes which it speaks of. The axiom is treated as if, in its general expression, it were engraven as an innate maxim on the mind; whereas the correct account seems to be, that its abstract form is only a generalisation of the particular intuitive references which, on the occurrences of particular events, we make severally in each case

to a particular cause. The value of the general expression consists in its correctly representing the particular intuitions of the mind, and therefore cannot legitimately be made a standard to control them. If an event can be specified which the mind does not intuitively refer to a necessary fixed cause, the axiom is thereby sufficiently shown not to cover that case. Now the maintainers of liberty assert that in the case of volitions there is no such reference; nay more, that in the phenomenon of self-reproach there is involved a consciousness that, all antecedents remaining the same, the act of volition might have been different from what it was; and that this is so necessarily involved in the moral judgment, that as soon as such a conviction is expunged, and the mind taught to regard the volition as the necessary result of laws imposed by some other being, the sense of responsibility vanishes. That, in order to moral responsibility, the will must be viewed as an agx-a self-acting principle-this author seems to admit; but in his sense the understanding is an agx. Yet no one blames himself for defects or errors of understanding.

It is vain to allege in answer to this that we practically do discover laws necessarily regulating the will. The thing is true, but it is no answer; for so far as the will is thus regulated, it affords no matter for moral judgments. No one praises a man for preferring pleasure to pain, where everything else is equal; and though the habitual indulgence of criminal desires may produce a character (i. e., a relation between those desires and the will) of incurable proclivity to vice, our censure of such a character always proceeds on the notion of its having been formed by voluntary indulgence; and the natural strength of passion and natural weakness of understanding are always allowed as excuses diminishing guilt. Thus, in proportion as the will approaches the state of mechanical action, it ceases to be the object of the peculiar sentiments of praise or blame. The agent may be disliked or admired, but not commend ed or censured. Indeed, it seems strange that those who speak so much of the character determining the will, should forget that the character, as

distinguished from mere natural disposition, is the creature of the will.

But again, it is probable that many advocates of the freedom of the will may complain that the meaning of this famous axiom is mistaken when it is thus applied. They will say that the cause which that axiom contemplates is an efficient cause-a will; whereas the antecedents to which it is applied in the argument are mere antecedents. They will accordingly be ready with a distinction. We grant, they will say, that every volition must have an antecedent of some sort-namely, the presence of one or more motives; but we deny that such antecedents are invariable antecedents, having a necessary connexion with the act of will, so as that, with the same antecedents, we shall always have the same consequents. Even in the world of matter, they will urge, this necessary connexion does not exist between physical antecedents and consequents, but only between effects and efficients. No cause but the efficient strictly fulfils the condition of absolutely invariable antecedence. All others are but causes analogically. There is nothing more than a high probability that the best ascertained physical antecedents will always be attended with the same consequents. We must, then, either hold that the Deity, as a strict efficient, produces every particular volition of our minds, or else give up the axiom as inapplicable to the present question.

Desiring that this review should lead our readers to obtain and peruse the book itself, we have been led on to dwell more largely upon the incidental errors which the student might not perceive of himself, than upon the merits and beauties which he cannot fail to discover. The issue has been, that we have exhausted our space before our work is done. But before we conclude, let us express our opinion once for all. This argument is the effort of no common mind. The author cannot stir any question he treats of without throwing up the deeply-seated seeds of thought. He is in general a powerful and convincing reasoner, and like his master, Chalmers, he is apt to clothe his severest logic in a gorgeously embroidered robe of imagery and eloquence.

FULLER accounts for the strange alterations which surnames undergo, till their original form can be longer recognised, by the consolatory reflection, that "they are not the best families who spell best." In our experience as reviewers, we are often led to observe that they are not the best men who write the best books. Still, whether his book be good or not, it is something for an author to impress his readers with the feeling that he is himself an amiable and well-meaning man. It is something, too, to have such a resource as literature to fill up hours which would otherwise be passed perhaps idly and unprofitably. The volume before us is plainly the work of a person having but little practice in the arts of book-making. He regards Johnson with great admiration, and is anxious to call attention to some points in his character, but is every now and then misled by one or other of the idols of the heathen. A sentence of Carlyle's, or Sidney Smith's, or Leigh Hunt's, is sure to lead him right or wrong whereever the meteor light may shed its glimmer. We wish he would write without his books. He is best when he most relies on his own natural good sense, and is alone with Johnson or Boswell. The book would be a better book than it is, if he had not the weak, though kindly, habit of praising everybody and everything. It is unfortu nate for him that he thinks it desirable, before telling us his own impression of Johnson, to read all that Macaulay, or Sidney Smith, or anybody else has written on the subject.

Still the book is an entertaining book, and will be found an exceeding. ly pleasant travelling companion on a journey. It has a hundred agreeable stories-some of them resting on the best grounds of authenticity-several doubtful enough, still not by any means to be altogether rejected, as the stories invented about a great man are in general framed from a true conception of his character, and believed

because likely to be true. We cannot expect the author of a volume of ana to sift the evidence of every story he tells, and, as a volume of and this book is to be regarded.

Trotter's "Memoirs of Fox" supply our author with a motto to his first chapter-"We continued our reading of Johnson's 'Lives of the Poets.' How often at midnight, as Mr. Fox listened with avidity, he apologised to me for keeping me from my rest! but still, delighted with our reading, he would say, 'Well, you may go on a little more. Some half-dozen testimonials, which might have been spared, follow. They are certificates of character for Johnson, written in the tone and temper of an Edinburgh or London man of some notoriety recommending an obscure friend to some situation in Ireland or the Colonies, and furnishing him with as many virtues as he can remember or invent. This chapter might have been spared. Johnson is not in want of the praises of Mr. Anderson, or Mrs. More, or others whom we find quoted, and whose gifts and graces are recorded in notes which, in some cases, communicate to us, for the first time, the very existence of the parties called as witnesses for Johnson. The next chapter is better. It is called "Johnson's Early Religious Life." Something is told us of the formal and austere habits of Johnson's mother. Religion was made unpleasant to him; still it was impressed on his memory, and the lessons learned in earliest childhood influenced his after life. This topic is pursued through three or four chapters, and then we pass to a division of the book entitled "Johnson's Humanity," which is dealt with somewhat more successfully than the former. These formal divisions give an author but little aid, and are of no use whatever to the readers in any but a work of pure science. If in this book the leading incidents of Johnson's life had been told with some reference to dates of time and place, it would