friend obtains him the opportunity of lecturing.  It is not uncharitable to suppose that he chooses a subject in which accurate knowledge and close argument will be less requisite than fluency, fancy, bold statement, and extraordinarily felicitous illustration.  The five years spent in Edinburgh can now be turned to profitable account.  Dugald Stewards lectures can be exhumed, decorated, and reproduced.  The whole book reeks of Scotland.  The lecturer sets out by declaring that Moral Philosophy is taught in the Scotch Universities alone.  England knows nothing about it.  At Edinburgh Moral Philosophy means Mental Philosophy, and is concerned with “the faculties of the mind and the effects which our reasoning powers and our passions produce upon the actions of our lives.”  It has nothing to do with ethics or duty.  And the definition used in Edinburgh is also used in Albemarle Street.  Dugald Stewart and Thomas Brown[30] and Adam Smith, Hume and Reid and Oswald and Beattie and Ferguson, are names which meet us on every page.  The lecturer has learnt from Scotsmen, and reproduces what the Scotsmen taught him.  Mind and Matter are two great realities.  When people are informed that all thought is explained by vibrations and “vibratiuncles” of the brain, and that what they consider their arms and legs are not arms and legs but ideas, then, says the lecturer, they will pardonably identify Philosophy with Lunacy.  “Bishop Berkeley destroyed this world in one octavo volume; and nothing remained after his time but Mind; which experienced a similar fate at the hand of Mr. Hume in 1737....  But is there any one out of Bedlam who doubts of the existence of matter? who doubts of his own personal identity? or of his consciousness? or of the general credibility of memory?”

From this rough-and-ready delimitation of the area within which Moral Philosophy must work, if it is to escape the reproach of insanity, the lecturer goes on, as becomes a divine, to champion his study against the reproach of tending to Atheism.  He groups all our senses, faculties, and impulses together, and says:  “All these things Moral Philosophy observes, and, observing, adores the Being from whence they proceed.”

Having thus defined his subject, the lecturer goes on, in his second and third lectures, to trace the history of Moral Philosophy, from Pythagoras to Mrs. Trimmer.  Plato is praised for beauty of style, and blamed for mistiness of doctrine.  Aristotle is contrasted, greatly to his disadvantage, with Bacon.  “Volumes of Aristotelian philosophy have been written which, if piled one upon another, would have equalled the Tower of Babel in Height, and far exceeded it in Confusion.”  But to Bacon “we are indebted for an almost daily extension of our knowledge of the laws of nature in the outward world; and the same modest and cautious spirit of enquiry, extended to Moral Philosophy, will probably give us clear, intelligible ideas of our spiritual nature.”