Some critics have entertained a grim joke at the expense of Watts, that having annihilated space, he proceeded in the next place to annihilate substance, anticipating at once Berkeley and Hume. Let it then be remembered that he engaged in none of these excursions in a vain or Pyrrhonistic spirit: his essays were written not to unhinge, but to rest and settle and give repose to the mind; indeed he says, “There are mysteries wherein we bewilder and lose ourselves by attempting to make something out of nothing;” substance is one of these. He goes for some distance on the way with Locke, especially in refuting the idea that substance is something real in nature; with Locke he argues that “all the ideas we have of particular, distinct sort of substances, are nothing but several combinations of simple ideas coexistent in such, the cause of their union, which makes the whole subsist of itself.” Only then comes in the important question, “what is it that supports the accidents and qualities of being?” At this point Watts parts company with Locke. His ideas of substance seem to be antagonistic to Locke, and dangerously sustaining Spinosa, who taught, as our readers know, that the whole universe, God and this world, may be the same individual substance—“How can I be sure that God and the material world have not one common substance?” But, very singularly, Watts himself in tracing the mistakes upon this matter to their origin, seems to fall into the very error he seeks to explode, the idea of a real, invisible abstract or concrete, seems to stand behind all things; he says, the mistakes which men make arise from the occult quality in the termination of names, _ity_ in solidity, _sion_ in extension, which imply a quality without including the substance; as white_ness_, without including the substance or the thing that is white; the word white is concrete, and denotes the thing or substance together with the quality, and he says, “We ought to remember that _things_ are made by God, or Nature, _words_ are made by man, and sometimes applied in a way not exactly agreeable to what things and ideas require.” The object of Watts in his discussion of the idea of substance, was the same as that in his discussion in the idea of space, to disarm Spinozism of its gross and crude ideas of God. But we do not feel that the same success closes the discussion. Perhaps it will be sufficient to admit at once that space and substance are both modes of Divine operation. Push the inquiry to any extent, and the most absolute Spinozist is compelled to halt in some such conclusion. That God is extended, that He is a mere infinite extension, is an absurdity; but it seems that no injustice is done to the most reverent and infinite thought of God by regarding Him as the essential _sub-stans_, the substance as of all souls, so of all being.