few years before, in the great work of Spinosa, ominous indications had been given; and the second part of the “Living Temple” of John Howe bore immediately upon the coming questions. Watts’ essay penetrates into the stronghold of Pantheism. Newton and Pascal, both looking up into the infinite spaces, felt their nature called on to reply to the questions suggested. The silence terrified Pascal; Newton’s calmer nature gathered up even infinite space into the great idea, that it was but a mode, or attribute, of God. Some such doctrines govern the Essays of Watts: Space, he argues, cannot be God; we cannot indeed conceive that infinite space ever began to be, we have an idea of it as eternal and unchangeable; according to Watts it seems to contain what existence it has in the very idea, nature, or essence of it, which is one attribute of God, and whereby we prove His existence. It appears to be a necessary being and has a sort of self-existence, for we cannot tell how to conceive it not to he. It seems to be an impassible, indivisible, immutable essence, and therefore according to the ghastly pantheistic philosophy it is argued that space is God. This idea Watts concisely set aside, because it involves the absurdity of making the blessed God a Being of infinite length, breadth, and depth, and ascribing to Him parts of this nature measurable by inches, yards, and miles. Perhaps this is not so clear to all readers as it was to the writer himself; but the close seems more satisfactory when he says, “Strongest arguments seem to evince this, that it must be God, or it must be nothing.” Watts, then, was an Idealist, and the remark of Johnson arises from a misapprehension of the drift of the essay. He argues that space is only the shadow cast by substance—we are sure that shadow or darkness is a mere nothing, and space is nothing but the absence of body, as shade is the absence of light, and both are explicable without supposing either to be real beings: it is therefore merely an abstract idea, or, as we should say, a “thought-form;” it will follow from this that such an idea of space dissolves one of the charming illusions of Pantheism, and that there rises from the midst of this universe of unidentical being the personality of man.