Without some principles of immediate belief, then, it is manifest, that we could have no belief whatever; for we believe one proposition, because we discover its relation to some other proposition, which is itself, perhaps, related, in like manner, to some other proposition formerly admitted, but which, carried back as far as it may, through the longest series of ratiocination, must ultimately come to some primary proposition, which we admit from the evidence contained in itself, or, to speak more accurately, which we believe from the mere impossibility of disbelieving it. All reasoning, then, the most sceptical, be it remarked, as well as the most dogmatical, must proceed on some principles, which are taken for granted, not because we infer them by logical deduction, for this very inference must then itself be founded on some other principle assumed without proof; but because the admission of these first principles is a necessary part of our intellectual constitution. The ridicule, therefore, with which Dr Priestley and some other English metaphysicians, were disposed to regard the decision of philosophical questions, on certain ultimate principles of common sense, was surely, at least in its wide degree of extension, misplaced; though the phrase _common sense_, it will be admitted, was not the happiest that could have been chosen. The controversy, indeed, was truly a verbal and insignificant one, unless as far as it had reference to the unnecessary multiplication of these principles, by the philosophers of this part of the island whom Dr Priestley opposed; since, if traced to their ultimate evidence, it could have been only from some one or more of the principles of common sense, at least from those primary universal intuitions of direct belief, which were all that Dr Reid and his friends meant to denote by the term, that the very reasonings employed against them derived even the slightest semblance of force. An argument that rejects not the phrase common sense only, which is of little consequence, but also what the phrase was intended, by its authors, to imply, is an argument confessedly founded upon nothing; which, therefore, as wholly unfounded, requires no answer, and which, at any rate, it would be vain to attempt to answer, because the answer, if it proceed on any ground whatever, must begin with assuming what the argument rejects, as inadmissible.