Do we flatter ourselves that the Logomachies of the Nominalists and the Realists terminated with these scolding schoolmen? Modern nonsense, weighed against the obsolete, may make the scales tremble for awhile, but it will lose its agreeable quality of freshness, and subside into an equipoise. We find their spirit still lurking among our own metaphysicians! "Lo! the Nominalists and the Realists again!" exclaimed my learned friend, Sharon Turner, alluding to our modern doctrines on _abstract ideas_, on which there is still a doubt whether they are anything more than _generalising terms_.[42] Leibnitz confused his philosophy by the term _sufficient reason_: for every existence, for every event, and for every truth there must be a _sufficient reason_. This vagueness of language produced a perpetual misconception, and Leibnitz was proud of his equivocal triumphs in always affording a new interpretation! It is conjectured that he only employed his term of _sufficient reason_ for the plain simple word of _cause_. Even Locke, who has himself so admirably noticed the "abuse of words," has been charged with using vague and indefinite ones; he has sometimes employed the words _reflection_, _mind_, and _spirit_ in so indefinite a way, that they have confused his philosophy: thus by some ambiguous expressions, our great metaphysician has been made to establish doctrines fatal to the immutability of moral distinctions. Even the eagle-eye of the intellectual Newton grew dim in the obscurity of the language of Locke. We are astonished to discover that two such intellects should not comprehend the same ideas; for Newton wrote to Locke, "I beg your pardon for representing that you struck at the root of morality in a principle laid down in your book of Ideas--and that I took you for a Hobbist!"[43] The difference of opinion between Locke and Reid is in consequence of an ambiguity in the word _principle_, as employed by Reid. The removal of a solitary word may cast a luminous ray over a whole body of philosophy: "If we had called the _infinite_ the _indefinite_," says Condillac, in his _Traite des Sensations_, "by this small change of a word we should have avoided the error of imagining that we have a positive idea of _infinity_, from whence so many false reasonings have been carried on, not only by metaphysicians, but even by geometricians." The word _reason_ has been used with different meanings by different writers; _reasoning_ and _reason_ have been often confounded; a man may have an endless capacity for _reasoning_, without being much influenced by _reason_, and to be _reasonable_, perhaps differs from both! So Moliere tells us, Raisonner est l'emploi de toute ma maison; Et le raisonnement en bannit la raison!