METAPHYSICAL WRITERS. 251 friends of King James II. But in 1688 the fleet that brought William III. from Holland to England brought also the illustrious John Locke; and, great as was the king, it brought no richer gift. Locke had been known as a philosopher and as a prominent defender of civil and religious liberty; in Holland he had published a letter in Latin "On Toleration." This was immediately afterwards printed in French, Dutch, and English, and brought Locke much praise. In 1690 he published his most celebrated work, on which he had long been engaged in Holland, the "Essay on the Human Understanding;" in the same year two treatises on Civil Government," being a defence of the revolution against the Tories; and his chief other works are (1693) "Thoughts concerning Education," (1695) the "Reasonableness of Christianity," (1696) "Two Vindications" of the last work, and after his death a work, perhaps his best, "On the Conduct of the Understanding.” Now the question for the self-improver is, how far he ought to read the writings of Locke, and whether they are suited to him; for a man may be very great in his day, and yet not much in ours. The effect that Locke's works had was very great; but then the resistance to his mild and easy doctrines was intense. It is difficult now to ascertain how any one could oppose some of his tenets; though it is certain that many of his doctrines were then looked upon as revolutionary, and that, studied as they were by Voltaire and the French philosophers, they produced enormous results on the Continent. "Educated," says Sir James Macintosh, "amongst English Dissenters, during the short period of their ascendancy, he imbibed the deep piety and ardent political liberty of those men. By the Independent divines, who were his instructors, he was taught those principles of religious liberty which they were the first to disclose to the world." And Locke had the merit of doing this in simple language, for he hated scholastic jargon, and never sought by artifice to strengthen his weaker thoughts, but clothed all in sinewy, simple English, so that everybody might read them. His "Essay on the Human Understanding," and his modest defence of our Holy Faith, with the slightly sarcastic title, a "Vindication of the Reasonableness of Christianity," are especially worth reading, even when people are busy, and when they may even think them dry. They are full of thought, and full, too, of the spirit of toleration and love for religious freedom. Mackintosh declares that no books have done more with the learned and the leading minds "to rectify prejudice, to undermine established errors, to diffuse a just mode of thinking, to excite a fearless spirit of inquiry, and yet to contain it within the boundaries which Nature has prescribed to the human understanding." That is noble praise. There is yet nobler in its way: Ebenezer Elliott, the Corn Law Rhymer of our times, makes one of his working men enjoy his leisure by lying on a sofa and reading Locke and Plato. Of course the working man is a model working man; but it says much for him, and much for Locke, that his sober, excellent, thoughtful works should become the handbook of the intelligent toiler. "If," says a reviewer, "Locke made few discoveries, Socrates made none; yet both did more for the improvement of the understanding, and not less for the progress of knowledge, than the METAPHYSICAL WRITERS. 253 authors of the most brilliant discoveries." Locke died in the year 1704, at the age of seventy-two. A very different writer from Locke now claims our attention-David Hume, a capital historian so far as style and outline of facts go, and a philosophical writer of some acuteness and power, although opposed to Locke's principles of thinking, and most certainly to those which the writer would seek to advocate. But it is incumbent in literature to study fairly what an opponent says; and even in the literature of religion to welcome inquiry, and to stimulate the sharpness and alertness of those who, by opposing, really bring out into greater contrast the beauties of the truth. In 1710 Dr. George Berkeley, Bishop of Cloyne, (1684-1753,) one of the best men who ever lived, to whom Pope ascribed "every virtue under Heaven," published a tract on the " Principles of Human Knowledge," in which the ideal system was first promulgated, which may be most clearly explained as that which refers everything around us to sensations or effects produced on the brain by appearances, and not by realities. Hence the saying that there was ter," only form, embodied in Byron's lines,- 66 When Berkeley said there was no matter, It was no matter what he said; no mat and hence the somewhat vulgar refutation, though only a false refutation after all, of Dr. Johnson, who kicked a stone, and said he had thus refuted Berkeley. But as sensations proceed from the touch as well as the sight, and as stone might be calcined, and pass off in smoke and impalpable ashes, and then would offer no resistance to a kick, although the matter would yet remain in the world, the great dictionary Doctor had only touched the outer works of the Berkeleian citadel; and the theory of external appearances being all-powerful, and of there being "no nothing," no existent reality either in morals, in being, or in belief, spread, in spite of all contradiction. Now nothing could have been further from the excellent Bishop of Cloyne's intention than to favour scepticism and disbelief, for his was a life of practical Christianity. He spent his fortune in preaching that faith at home and abroad, and left London, preferment, friends, and comfort, to found a college for the conversion of the American Indians. He refused to remove from a poor see to a rich one, and by every act in his kind and good life, showed himself to be a simple, honest gentleman, and a true Christian ; and yet this Berkeleian theory was destined to work mischief to the Faith! The theory existed of course before George Berkeley propounded it. One of the chief mysteries of existence relates to matter: What is it? Whence comes it? Is it soluble? It is, as far as human knowledge can ascertain, indestructible; and so on. It is the true Proteus: it changes from form to form, from shape to shape. Hamlet's philosophical thought that "the noble dust of Alexander might be found stopping a bung-hole," is in the true Berkeleian spirit; only Shakespeare is so clear, so simple, that he discourses things of the deepest moment, and the very clowns of the ring understand him, while it may be so-called philosophers despise him. Here, then, is this wondrous Protean change of matter traced at once, "with modesty enough, and likelihood to lead it:" As thus: "Alexander died, Alexander was buried, Alexander returneth to dust; ICAL METAPHYSICAL WRITERS. 255 the dust is earth; of earth we make loam: and why of that loam whereto he was converted might not a beer-barrel be stopped? Imperious Cæsar, dead and turn'd to clay, O that that earth, which kept the world in awe, Super-subtly looked at, this constant change of form, seen around us every day, from the budding hyacinth, which grows up in a few weeks out of a dry bulb and a glass of water, to the oak which springs from an acorn, or the rust which eats away the polished steel, induced many intellects to regard matter as nothing. "Given chaos to make a world," is the problem for modern constructive philosophers; but those of the old KnowNothing party bothered the cause like an Irish advocate, by declaring that in this world of shows there was no matter to begin with. Hume's system of morality, then, is a very natural production of Berkeley's system of physics. In 1738 he published his "Treatise of Human Nature," in which the leading theory seems to be, that all our knowledge is derived from two branches of supply--impressions and ideas. As neither of these is very certain, the philosopher contended that we must never hope to know much, whether we were right, or whether we were wrong; and in short, as Robert Hall says, "by perplexing the relations of cause and effect, he boldly aimed to introduce a universal scepticism, and to pour a more than Egyptian darkness into the whole region of morals." This charge is perhaps too sudden and too severe. The effect of Hume's scepticism is unusually well de |