us the word _indifferent_ has entirely changed: an historian, whose work was _indifferently_ written, would formerly have claimed our attention. In the Liturgy it is prayed that "magistrates may _indifferently_ minister justice." _Indifferently_ originally meant _impartially_. The word _extravagant_, in its primitive signification, only signified to digress from the subject. The Decretals, or those letters from the popes deciding on points of ecclesiastical discipline, were at length incorporated with the canon law, and were called _extravagant_ by _wandering out_ of the body of the canon law, being confusedly dispersed through that collection. When Luther had the Decretals publicly burnt at Wittemberg, the insult was designed for the pope, rather than as a condemnation of the canon law itself. Suppose, in the present case, two persons of opposite opinions. The catholic, who had said that the decretals were _extravagant_, might not have intended to depreciate them, or make any concession to the Lutheran. What confusion of words has the _common sense_ of the Scotch metaphysicians introduced into philosophy! There are no words, perhaps, in the language which may be so differently interpreted; and Professor Dugald Stewart has collected, in a curious note in the second volume of his "Philosophy of the Human Mind," a singular variety of its opposite significations. The Latin phrase, _sensus communis_, may, in various passages of Cicero, be translated by our phrase _common sense_; but, on other occasions, it means something different; the _sensus communis_ of the schoolmen is quite another thing, and is synonymous with _conception_, and referred to the seat of intellect; with Sir John Davies, in his curious metaphysical poem, _common sense_ is used as _imagination_. It created a controversy with Beattie and Reid; and Reid, who introduced this vague ambiguous phrase in philosophical language, often understood the term in its ordinary acceptation. This change of the meaning of words, which is constantly recurring in metaphysical disputes, has made that curious but obscure science liable to this objection of Hobbes, "with many words making nothing understood!" Controversies have been keenly agitated about the principles of morals, which resolve entirely into _verbal disputes_, or at most into questions of arrangement and classification, of little comparative moment to the points at issue. This observation of Mr. Dugald Stewart's might be illustrated by the fate of the numerous inventors of systems of thinking or morals, who have only employed very different and even opposite terms in appearance to express the same thing. Some, by their mode of philosophising, have strangely unsettled the words _self-interest_ and _self-love_; and their misconceptions have sadly misled the votaries of these systems of morals; as others also by such vague terms as "utility, fitness," &c.