structure of some languages, in which verbs, expressive of mere sensation, such as verbs of smelling, are followed by the case which belongs to the passive voice, whereas verbs which express both a sensation and an intellectual idea, imposed on the sensuous expression by the plastic mind, demand the case which belongs to the presence of an active and transitive force. The healthy instincts of the human race manifested in the common uses of language, are often more to be trusted in such matters than the subtleties of metaphysicians. Nature, at least, which the popular instinct follows, is always complete; speculation is apt to be one-sided. If we will have a simile that may express both sides of the wonderful fact of knowledge, we may say sensation supplies the materials, but the manufacturer of ideas is MIND. I said above that Mr. Locke was a sensible man; and it is nothing contrary to this to admit that by the incautious use of one or two strong similes--“the empty cabinet, the sheet of blank paper, and the dark room,”--he became the originator of a school which made itself famous by the ingenious maintenance of the nonsense that judgment and sensation are the same thing. A vain Frenchman, pleased to utter glittering paradoxes in gay saloons, might say this, might even go so far as to parade the proposition {279} that if horses had only possessed human hands they would have been men, and if men had been armed with equine hoofs they would have been horses; such paradoxes were, no doubt, a logical deduction from the doctrine that sensation is the father of ideas, and that all internal faculties are the result of mere external forces; but Mr. Locke was too much of a solid and sober Englishman to allow himself to be led into sheer nonsense by the charm of mere logical consistency, and chose rather to prove his good sense by his inconsistency. After asserting in the strongest terms that the only origin of ideas is sensation, he goes on to divide ideas into ideas of sensation and ideas of reflection, which division instantly suggests the question--_What is reflection, and whence comes the reflecting power?_ And by raising this question the empirical speculator at once brings in the whole of Platonism and innate ideas by a side gate, just after they had been driven out at the grand entrance; for how can this question be answered except in the well-known words of Leibnitz--“_Nihil est in intellectu quod non prius fuerit in sensu_, NISI INTELLECTUS IPSE.” Mr. Locke’s successors, however, have shown no inclination to follow his example in this respect. They have been ambitious of the cheap popular virtue of consistency, which even thieves and murderers may achieve; and verily they have had their reward. Their master may be compared to a man who held out a poison in his right hand, and administered forthwith the antidote with his left. His followers, from Helvetius to Mill, thinking--naturally enough perhaps--that the right hand