The remaining lectures of this course are those which suffered most severely from the flames, and are indeed in so fragmentary a condition as to render any close criticism of them impossible.  But enough has been quoted to show that Sydney Smith, so far as he was in any sense concerned with philosophy, was a sworn foe to mysticism and ideality, and a worshipper of Baconian common-sense even in the sphere of mind and soul.

He was never tired of poking fun at his philosophical friends in Edinburgh.  When sending some Scotch grouse to Lady Holland, he said—­“I take the liberty to send you two brace of grouse—­curious, because killed by a Scotch metaphysician:  in other and better language, they are mere ideas, shot by other ideas, out of a pure intellectual notion called a gun.”  In another letter to the same correspondent he says—­“I hope you are reading Mr. Stewart’s book, and are far gone in the Philosophy of Mind—­a science, as he repeatedly tells us, still in its infancy.  I propose, myself, to wait till it comes to years of discretion.”

To his friend Jeffrey he wrote in 1804:—­

“I exhort you to restrain the violent tendency of your nature for analysis, and to cultivate synthetical propensities.  What is virtue?  What’s the use of truth?  What’s the use of honour?  What’s a guinea but a d——­d yellow circle?  The whole effort of your mind is to destroy.  Because others build slightly and eagerly, you employ yourself in kicking down their houses, and contract a sort of aversion for the more honourable, useful, and difficult task of building well yourself.”

He reports a saying of his little boy’s, “which in Scotland would be heard as of high metaphysical promise.  Emily was asking why one flower was blue, and another pink, and another yellow.  ‘Why, in short,’ said Douglas, ’it is their nature; and, when we say that, what do we mean?  It is only another word for mystery; it only means that we know nothing at all about the matter.’  This observation from a child eight years old is not common.”

The second and third courses of lectures would force us (even if we had not the lecturer’s confession to guide us) irresistibly to the conclusion that he had said all he knew about Moral Philosophy, and rather more, in the first course.  It is only by the exercise of a genial violence that his dissertations on Wit and Humour, Irish Bulls, Taste, Animals, and Habit, can be forced to take shelter under the dignified title of Moral Philosophy.  But, philosophical defects apart, they are excellent lectures.  They abound in miscellaneous knowledge and out-of-the-way reading, and they bristle with illustrations which have passed into the common anecdotage of mankind.