up,

and ideas? Well, I am silent; but you see me come home very melancholy, and with eager anxiety look for a paper; open the bureau where I remember to have put it, take it and read it with apparent joy. You hence infer, that I have felt pain and pleasure, and that I have memory and knowledge. Make then the like inference concerning this dog, who, having lost his master, runs about every where with melancholy yellings, comes home all in a ferment, runs up and down, roves from room to room, till, at length, he finds his beloved master in his closet, and then expresses his joy in softer cries, gesticulations, and fawnings.

This dog, so very superior to man in affection, is seized by some barbarian virtuosos, who nail him down on a table, and dissect him while living, the better to show you the meseraic veins. All the same organs of sensation, which are in yourself, you perceive in him. Now, machinist, what say you? answer me, has nature created all the springs of feeling in this animal, that it may not feel? Has it nerves to be impassible? For shame! Charge not nature with such weak

ness and inconsistency.

But the scholastic doctors ask, what is the soul of beasts? This is a question I do not understand. A tree has the faculty of receiving sap into its fibres, of circulating it, of unfolding the buds of its leaves and fruits: do you now ask me what the soul of a tree is? It has received these properties, as the animal above has received those of sensation, memory, and a certain number of ideas. Who formed all those properties? who has imparted all these faculties? He who causes the grass of the field to grow, and the earth to gravitate towards the sun.

"The souls of beasts are substantial forms," says Aristotle, who has been followed by the Arabian school, and this by the Angelic school, and the Angelic school by the Sorbonne, and the Sorbonne by nobody in the world.

"The souls of beasts are material," is the cry of other philosophers, but as little to the purpose as the former: when called upon to define a material soul, they only perplex the cause they must necessarily allow it to be sensitive matter. But whence does it derive this sensation? from a material soul; which must mean, that it is matter giving sensation to matter: beyond this circle they have nothing to say.

According to others, equally wise, the soul of beasts is a spiritual essence, dying with the body; but where are your proofs? What idea have you of this spiritual being? which,

with its sensation, memory, and its share of ideas and combi nations, will never be able to know as much as a child of six years. What grounds have you to think that this incorporeal being dies with the body? but still more stupid are they who affirm this soul to be neither body nor spirit. A fine system truly! By spirit we can mean only something unknown, which is not body: so that the upshot of this wise system is, that the soul of beasts is a substance, which is neither body nor something which is not body.

Whence can so many contradictory errors arise? From a custom which has always prevailed among men, of investigating the nature of a thing, before they knew whether any such thing existed. The sucker, or clapper of a bellows is likewise called the soul of the bellows. Well; what is this soul? it is only a name I have given to that sucker or clapper which falls down, lets in the air, and, rising again, propels it through a pipe, on my working the bellows.

Here is no soul distinct from the machine itself. But who puts the bellows of animals in motion? I have already told you; he who puts the heavenly bodies in motion. The philosopher who said, "Deus est anima brutorum," was in the right but he should have gone further.

BEAUTY-BEAUTIFUL.

Ask a toad, what is beauty-the supremely beautiful-the To-kalon? he will answer you, that it is his female, with two large, round eyes, projecting out of its little head; a broad, flat neck, yellow belly, and dark-brown back. Ask a Guinea Negro, and with him, beauty is a greasy black skin, hollow eyes, and a flat nose. Put the question to the devil, and he will tell you, that beauty is a pair of horns, four claws, and a tail. Consult the philosophers likewise, and they will give you some unintelligible jargon for answer: they must have something correspondent to beauty in the abstract, to the To-kalon.

I once sat next to a philosopher at a tragedy: "That is beautiful," said he. "How beautiful?" said I. "Because the author has attained his end." The next day he took a dose of physic, which had a very good effect. "That is a beautiful physic," said I: "it has attained its end." He perceived that a medicine is not to be called beautiful, and that the word beauty is applicable only to those things which

give a pleasure, accompanied with admiration. That tragedy, he said, had excited these two sensations in him, and that was the To-kalon, the beautiful.

We went to England together, and happened to be at the same play, perfectly well translated; but the spectators, one and all, yawned. "Oh-ho!" said he, "the To-kalon, I find, is not the same in England as in France ;" and, after several pertinent reflections, he concluded, that beauty is very relative; that what is decent at Japan, is indecent at Rome; and what is fashionable at Paris, is otherwise at Pekin: and thus he saved himself the trouble of composing a long Treatise on the Beautiful!

BODY.

As we know nothing of spirit, so are we alike ignorant of body: we perceive some properties; but what is this subject in which these properties reside? "All is body," said Democritus and Epicurus:- "There is no body at all," said the disciples of Zeno, the Elæan.

Berkeley, bishop of Cloyne, is the last who has gone about to prove the non-existence of bodies; and he deals chiefly in captious sophisms. "There is," says he, "neither colour, smell, nor heat, in them; these modalities are in your sensations, and not in the objects;" a truth which, being before sufficiently known, he needed not to have taken the trouble of proving. But from thence he proceeds to extension and solidity, which are essential to body, and is for proving, that there is no extension in a piece of green cloth, because this cloth, in reality, is not green; this sensation of green is only in you, therefore the sensation of extension is likewise only in you; and, having overthrown extension, he concludes, that, solidity being annexed to it, falls of itself; and thus there is nothing in the world but our ideas. So that, according to this philosopher, ten thousand men, killed by as many cannon shot, are, in reality, only ten thousand conceptions of our minds.

My lord of Cloyne might have avoided exposing himself to such ridicule. He fancies he proves, that there is no such thing as extension, because a body through a glass appeared to him four times larger than to his naked eye, and four times smaller through another glass: thence he concludes, that as the extension of a body cannot, at the same time, be four feet, six feet, and only one foot, such extension exists not; then there is nothing. He needed only to have taken a measure,

and

say, "however extended a body may appear to me, its actual extension is so many of these measures."

He might easily have seen that extension and solidity are very different from sounds, colours, tastes, and smells, &c. These are manifestly sensations excited by the configuration of the parts. But extension is not a sensation; though, on the going out of a fire, I no longer feel heat; on the agitation of the air ceasing, I hear nothing; and, from a withered flower I smell nothing: yet the fire, the air, and the flower, have all their extension, without any relation to me. ley's paradox really does not deserve a formal refutation.

Berke

But the cream of the jest is to know, what led him into this paradox. A long time ago, I had some talk with him, when he told me, that his opinion originally proceeded from the inconceivableness of what the subject of extension is; and, indeed, he triumphs, in that part of his book, where he asks Hilas, what this same subject, this substratum, this substance is. "It is," answers Hilas, "the body extended:" then the bishop, under the name of Philonous, laughs at him; and poor Hilas, perceiving that he had said extension was the subject of extension, and thus had talked silily, is quite abashed, and owns, that it is utterly inconceivable to him; that there is no such thing as body; that the world, instead of being material, as is commonly thought, is intellectual.

It would have become Philonous only to have said to Hilas, we know nothing concerning the constitution of this subject, of this extended, solid, divisible, moveable, figured substance, &c. We know no more of it, than of the thinking, feeling, and willing subject; still this subject certainly exists, since it has essential properties, from which it cannot be separated.

We are all like the Paris ladies; they live high, without knowing the ingredients in ragouts; so we make use of bodies, without knowing the composition of them. What is body made of? Of parts, and these parts reducible to other parts. What are those last parts? Still bodies. So you go on dividing, and are never nearer the mark.

At length, a subtile philosopher observing, that a picture is made of ingredients, none of which is a picture, and a house of materials, of which none is a house, fancied bodies to be constructed of innumerable little beings, which are not bodies, and these are the monades so much talked of. This system, however, has its fair side; and, had it been confirmed by Revelation, I should think it very possible. All these minute beings would be mathematical points, species of souls waiting only for a tegument, to put themselves into it. This would

make a continual metempsychosis, a monade entering sometimes into a whale, sometimes into a tree, and sometimes into a juggler. This system is full as good as another: I can relish it full as well as the declension of atoms, the substantial forms, versatile grace, and Don Calmet's vampires.

THE CHINESE CATECHISM;

OR,

Dialogues between Cu-su, a Disciple of Confucius, and Prince Kou, Son to the King of Lou, tributary to the Chinese Emperor, Gnenvan, four hundred and seventeen years before our

common era.

Translated into Latin by Father Fouquet, formerly a Jesuit. The manuscript is in the Vatican Library, Number 42759.

Kou. What is meant by my duty to worship heaven (Changti ?)

Cu-su. Not the material heaven, which we see; for this heaven is nothing but the air, and the air is composed of every kind of earthly exhalation. Now, what a folly would it be to

worship vapours!

Kou. It is, however, what I should not much wonder at ; men, in my opinion, have gone into greater follies.

Cu-su. Very true; but you, being born to rule over others, it becomes you to be wise.

Kou. There are whole nations who worship heaven and the planets.

Cu-su. The planets are only so many earths, like ours; the moon, for instance, might as well worship our sand and dirt, as we prostrate ourselves before the moon's sand and dirt.

Kou. What is the meaning of what we so often hear, heaven and earth; to go up to heaven; to be deserving of heaven?

Cu-su. It is talking very sillily: there is no such thing as heaven; every planet is environed with its atmosphere as with a shell, and rolls in the space round its sun; every sun is the centre of several planets, which are continually going their rounds there is nether high nor low, up nor down. Should the inhabitants of the moon talk of going up to the earth, of making one's self deserving of the earth, it would be talking madly; and we are little wiser in talking of deserving heaven.

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