facts hold in any other world than this;—all this is undeniable. The distinction may or may not be thought delusive; but once more we say that he who thinks it no delusion, he who admits the existence of such necessary and universal truths, ought not to be lightly charged with making all knowledge dependent on sense and experience in any other sense than that these are an invariable condition of the evolution of any and of all mental activity.

3. We think the same conclusion ought to be inferred from Locke's favourite argument for the existence of God, which he declares to be best proved from the mind itself; not indeed in the form of Descartes' celebrated argument from the very idea of such a Being (which Locke confutes), but still from the consciousness of our own existence. Here the idea of cause and effect is clearly involved as an original and fundamental law of thought, and its activity is represented as awakened purely by the intervention of internal phenomena. His strongest statement on the subject may be found in a remarkable fragment published in Lord King's life. After refuting Descartes' celebrated paradox, and showing that the mind has no warrant for believing in the objective existence of an idea merely because we have that idea, he says, 'The real existence of other things without us can be evidenced to us only by our senses; but our own existence is known to us by a certainty yet higher than our senses can give us of the existence of other things, and that is internal perception, a self-consciousness, or intuition; from whence, therefore, may be drawn, by a train of ideas, the surest and most incontestable proof of the existence of a God.'

4. But perhaps the clearest collateral proof of Locke's never having dreamt of patronising the great

dogma of the sensational school may be found in his Letters to Stillingfleet; and we wonder that those remarkable productions have not been more frequently Icited in the criticism of Locke. It is true, indeed, that they are rather tedious in form, because Locke has honestly followed the worthy Bishop paragraph by paragraph, and almost sentence by sentence. All such honest polemical pieces are apt to be tedious. Probably very few of the ordinary students of Locke ever read more of these letters than the citations from them, appended as footnotes to the common editions of the Essay on the Understanding;' and yet they must be carefully studied if any one would impartially consider Locke's true relations to the subsequent sensational schools. Thus he again and again declares his belief that, in reality, the excellent prelate's 'certainty by principles of reason' does not, except in name, contradict his own theory; he admits, that though he does not concede maxims as innate in a certain sense, yet that the mind is so constituted, that it is 'repugnant to our conceptions' that we should not think so and so. He admits this especially in relation to our idea of substance, which had been so much litigated between them, and which Stillingfleet charged him with having 'banished out of the rational world,' because he had affirmed that we have only an obscure notion of it.

What Locke says, in the Essay, on the subject of 'Intuition' does, as Sir W. Hamilton has observed, involve, in effect, the concession of the principles he has been supposed to deny. The critic says, 'What Locke here' (in the passage of the first book, already referred to,) calls "common sense," he elsewhere, by another ordinary synonyme, denominates Intuition. Accordingly in the controversy with Stillingfleet,

Locke again and again refers to what he has written on Intuition as justifying his belief that at bottom there is no difference between the way of certainty by reason,' or the way of certainty by principles of reason,' as Stillingfleet terms his own theory, and 'the way of certainty by ideas,' as he styles that of Locke. Two or three brief extracts will show how sincerely Locke thought that there was no radical difference between his views and those of his opponent.

The understanding as a faculty,' he says, (in reply to an objection that he had not treated of reason in all the senses he had himself assigned it), 'being the subject of my Essay, it carried me to treat directly of reason no otherwise than as a faculty. But yet reason, as standing for true and clear principles, and also as standing for clear and fair deductions from those principles, I have not wholly omitted; as is manifest from what I have said of self-evident propositions, intuitive knowledge, and demonstration in other parts of my essay.'

*

He emphatically reminds his opponent of what he had said in the Essay, of self-evident propositions; 'That whether they come in view of the mind earlier or later, this is true of them, that they are all known by their native evidence, are wholly independent, receive no light, nor are capable of any proof one from another;' and vehemently complains that Stillingfleet had grossly misrepresented his meaning, by misquoting this passage. If it be said that Locke places all self-evident propositions on the same footing, at whatever period they are seen to be so, and asserts that if all such be called 'maxims' in the sense of those who pleaded for innate ideas, there will be

* Vol. iii. p. 424.

† Vol. iii. p. 400. He exhibits in parallel columns his own words and the bishop's paraphrase. The whole context is well worth considering.

plenty of such 'maxims' - this does not affect the principle of his admission; his putting all self-evident propositions, however and whenever they become so, in the same category, may be, as doubtless it is, an instance of defective analysis; but his admission clearly concedes the point that the laws of the mind itself impose upon us ultimate principles of thought, which are evident by their native light, can derive none from without, or from one another, and are the basis of all demonstration. He merely denies that any such self-evident propositions are 'innate' in the sense attached to them in his first book, that chimera against which he is always superfluously guarding. Accordingly, having told his opponent, in his Second Reply, that he could see no opposition between what the Bishop calls the method of certainty by ideas,' and the method of certainty by reason,' he reiterates the statement, after having perused Stillingfleet's rejoinder. He says, 'I crave leave to say, that if by principles and maxims, your Lordship means all selfevident propositions, our ways are even in this part the same; for as you know, my Lord, I make selfevident propositions necessary to certainty, and found all certainty only in them.'*

But perhaps the passages in which he speaks of the ideas of cause' and 'substance' in the same controversy, most clearly evince the substantial identity of his sentiments with those of his opponent. In speaking of the necessity of such notions, and of the repugnancy to the nature of the mind, that we should not arrive at them, his language may well satisfy even M. Cousin, that Leibnitz was right in surmising that the differences between Locke and himself were not irreconcilable. He affirms the principle of causality

* Vol. iii. p. 421.

in terms very similar to those of M. Cousin, in the lecture in which he charges Locke with ignoring it*; while the language in which he declares that it is repugnant to our conceptions that modes and properties should not involve the idea of substance—though we have no clear or distinct idea of substance-is, as Locke himself says, identical with Stillingfleet's own. We subjoin two or three brief passages:

'Every thing that has a beginning must have "a cause is a true principle of reason, or a proposition certainly true; which we come to know by the same way, i. e. by contemplating our ideas, and perceiving that the idea of beginning to be is necessarily connected with the idea of some operation; and the idea of operation with the idea of something operating, which we call a cause; and so the beginning to be is perceived to agree with the idea of a cause, as is expressed in the proposition, and thus it comes to be a certain proposition; and so may be called a principle of reason even as every true proposition is to him that perceives the certainty of it. This, my Lord, is my way of ideas, and of coming to a certainty by them; which, when your Lordship has again considered, I am apt to think your Lordship will no more condemn, than I do except against your Lordship's way of arguments or principles of reason.' (Locke's Works, vol. iii. pp. 60, 61.)

Whether the general idea of substance be one of the first or most natural ideas in our minds, I will not dispute with your Lordship, as not being, I think, very material to the matter in hand. But as to the idea of substance, what it is, and how we come by it, your Lordship says, it is a repugnancy to our conceptions of things, that modes and accidents. should subsist by themselves; and, therefore, we must conceive a substratum wherein they are.

And, I say, "because we cannot conceive how simple ideas of sensible qualities should subsist alone, or in one another, we suppose them existing in and supported by some

*Lecture xix.