“It required nothing less,”—says this ingenious writer,—“than the united splendour of the discoveries brought to light by the new chemical school, to tear the minds of men from the pursuit of a simple and primary element; a pursuit renewed in every age, with an indefatigable perseverance, and always renewed in vain. With what feelings of contempt would the physiologists of former times have looked down on the chemists of the present age, whose timid and circumscribed system admits nearly forty different principles in the composition of bodies! What a subject of ridicule would the new nomenclature have afforded to an alchemist!
“The Philosophy of Mind has its alchemists also; men whose studies are directed to the pursuit of one single principle, into which the whole science may be resolved; and who flatter themselves with the hope of discovering the grand secret, by which the pure gold of truth may be produced at pleasure.”[134]
This secret of the intellectual opus magnum, Condillac conceived himself to have found; or, rather, as I have already said, he ascribed the grand discovery to our own illustrious countryman. In this reference the whole school of French metaphysicians have very strangely agreed; conferring on Mr Locke a praise which they truly meant to do him honour, but praise which the object of it would have hastened to disclaim. He certainly was not that alchemist in the science of mind which they conceived him to be; though he was a chemist in it, unquestionably, and a chemist of the highest rank.
Footnotes
[133] D. Heinsius. De Contemptu Mortis, Lib. i.
[134] Chap. I. Sect. ii. p. 15, 16. 4to. Edit.
[LECTURE XXXIII.]
ON THE CLASSIFICATION OF THE MENTAL PHENOMENA, BY LOCKE—BY CONDILLAC—BY REID—A NEW CLASSIFICATION.
Gentlemen, in the conclusion of my last Lecture, I alluded to the system of the French metaphysicians, as an instance of error from extreme simplification in the analysis of that class of our feelings which we are now considering.