singular proposition stated a sensible event or the occurrence of a feeling, such substitution would be inexplicable: for if that were the true account of the singular proposition, a general one could but express such expectation of the recurrence of the event as repeated experience of it can alone give. But a relation is not contingent with the contingency of feeling. It is permanent with the permanence of the combining and comparing thought which alone constitutes it; and for that reason, whether it be recognised as the result of a mathematical construction or of a crucial experiment in physics, the proposition which states it must already be virtually universal. Traces of progress in his idealism. 185. Of such a doctrine Berkeley is rather the unconscious forerunner than the intelligent prophet. It is precisely upon the question whether, or how far, he recognised the constitution of things by intelligible relations, that the interpretation of his early (which is his only developed) idealism rests. Is it such idealism as Hume’s, or such idealism as that adumbrated in some passages of his own ‘Siris’? Is the idea, which is real, according to him a feeling or a conception? Has it a nature of its own, consisting simply in its being felt, and which we afterwards for purposes of our own consider in various relations; or does the nature consist only in relations, which again imply the action of a mind that is eternal--present to that which is in succession, but not in succession itself? The truth seems to be that this question in its full significance never presented itself to Berkeley, at least during the period represented by his philosophical treatises. His early idealism, as we learn from the commonplace-book brought to light by Professor Fraser, was merely a cruder form of Hume’s. By the time of the publication of the ‘Principles of Human Knowledge’ he had learnt that, unless this doctrine was to efface ‘spirit’ as well as ‘matter,’ he must modify it by the admission of a ‘thing’ that was not an ‘idea,’ and of which the ‘esse’ was ‘percipere’ not ‘percipi.’ This admission carried with it the distinction between the object felt and the object known, between ‘idea’ and ‘notion’--a distinction which was more clearly marked in the ‘Dialogues.’ Of ‘spirit’ we could have a ‘notion,’ though not an ‘idea.’ But it was only in the second edition of the ‘Principles’ that ‘relation’ was put along with ‘spirit,’ as that which could be known but which was no ‘idea:’ and then without any recognition of the fact that the whole reduction of primary qualities to mere ideas was thereby invalidated. The objects, with which the mathematician deals, are throughout treated as in their own nature ‘particular ideas,’ into the constitution of which relation does not enter at all; in other words, as successive feelings. His way of dealing with physical truths.