a very tragic event which occurred in Spain, and of whose authenticity he ventures to assure the reader. To this number, in the late editions, have been added three letters on loquacity and masquerading, intended by Hughes for the Guardian, and which were first published in Duncombe's Collection of Letters, printed in 1772.

All the periodical Essays of Hughes are written in a style which is, in general, easy, correct, and elegant; they occasionally exhibit wit and humour; and they uniformly tend to inculcate the best precepts moral, prudential, and religious.

3. GEORGE BERKELEY, D. D. the celebrated Bishop of Cloyne in Ireland, was the son of William Berkeley of Thomastown, in the county of Kilkenny, and was born on the twelfth of March, 1684, at Kilcrin, near the native town of his father. After receiving a competent education at Kilkenny school, under the care of Dr. Hinton, he was entered, at the age of fifteen, a pensioner of Trinity College, Dublin, under the tuition of Dr. Hall; and, on the 9th of June, 1707, he was admitted a fellow.

In the same year that he attained this promotion in his college, he published his first literary effort, entitled, Arithmetica absque Algebra aut Euclide demonstrata; a little tract which he had

written at the age of twenty, and which strongly evinces an early partiality for mathematical science, and the subtleties of metaphysical discussion.

It may be considered as an able prelude to his elaborate work on "The Theory of Vision," which made its appearance in 1709, and is the first attempt, observes Mr. Nicholson, "to distinguish the immediate operations of the senses from the conclusions we habitually deduce from our sensations. The author clearly shews, that the connection between the sight and touch is the effect of habit; insomuch that a person born blind, and suddenly made to see, would at first be utterly unable to foretel how the objects of sight would affect the sense of touch; or, indeed, whether they were tangible or not; and that until experience had repeatedly taught him what events were concomitant with his sensations, he would be incapable of forming any notion of proximity or distance *." These positions, which threw new light upon the nature of vision, and explained many phenomena in optics before deemed inexplicable, were singularly confirmed by the well-known case in Cheselden's Anatomy, of the young man who was born blind and couched at the age of fourteen years.

* Aikin's General Biography, vol. ii. p. 127.

The year following this successful effort he published "The Principles of Human Knowledge;" an attempt to disprove the existence of matter, and to demonstrate that all material objects are not external to, but exist in, the mind, and are, in short, merely impressions made upon it by the immediate power and influence of the Deity, who in this, as in every other agency, acts by certain rules, usually termed laws of nature, and from which he seldom, if ever, deviates. To this steady adherence of the Almighty to the laws that he has promulgated, we owe the reality of things, the ideas of which as perceived by sense, are thus so effectually distinguished from such as are the mere product of the mind itself, or of dreams, that no greater danger of confounding them can occur on this theory than on the common hypothesis of the external existence of

matter.

This theory, which is, in fact, but an extension of Mr. Locke's mode of reasoning, may be traced to the writings of Aristotle. It was the doctrine of Aristotle," says Dr. Reid, "that, as our senses cannot perceive external material objects themselves, they receive their species; that is, their images or forms, without the matter; as wax receives the form of the seal, without any of the matter of it. These images or forms, are

called sensible species; and are the objects only of the sensitive part of the mind; but by various internal powers they are retained, refined, and spiritualized, so as to become objects of memory and imagination; and, at last, of pure intellection. When they are objects of memory and imagination, they get the names of phantasms. When, by further refinement, and being stripped of their particularities, they become objects of science, they are called intelligible species: so that every immediate object, whether of sense, of memory, of imagination, or of reasoning, must be some phantasm, or species, in the mind itself."These shadows or images," continues the Doctor, " by the ancients called species, forms, phantasms, since the time of Des Cartes, have commonly been called ideas, and by Mr. Hume, impressions *"

The ideal philosophy of Aristotle, of Des Cartes, of Locke, of Berkeley, and of Hume, and which agrees in denying the immediate perception of external objects, and in affirming that the object perceived must be some image or phantasm present to the mind, has been completely overturned by the writings of Dr. Reid and Dugald Stewart. From the last-mentioned author, I shall extract a passage, which places in a clear * Reid on the Intellectual Powers of Man, p. 25-117.

point of view the fallacy of the commonly received doctrine.

"When a person little accustomed to metaphysical speculations is told, that, in the case of Volition, there are certain invisible fluids, propagated from the mind to the organ which is moved; and that, in the case of perception, the existence and qualities of the external object are made known to us by means of species, or phantasms, or images, which are present to the mind in the sensorium; he is apt to conclude, that the intercourse between mind and matter is much less mysterious than he had supposed; and that, although these expressions may not convey to him any very distinct meaning, their import is perfectly understood by philosophers. It is now, I think, pretty generally acknowledged by physiologists, that the influence of the will over the body, is a mystery which has never yet been unfolded; but, singular as it may appear, Dr. Reid was the first person who had courage to lay completely aside all the common hypothetical language concerning perception, and to exhibit the difficulty in all its magnitude, by a plain statement of the fact. To what then, it may be asked, does this statement amount?-Merely to this; that the mind is so formed, that certain impressions produced on our organs of sense by