conceived that error had bound them. This, however, brings me to the history of my mind. “An innate love of truth, which shewed itself on the first developement of my reason, and a consequent perseverance in the pursuit of it to the extent of my knowledge, that has attended me through life, saved me from sinking into the dregs of Aristotelic philosophy, which, though discountenanced by the Spanish government, are still collected in a few filthy pools, fed by the constant exertions of the Dominicans. Unfortunately for me, these monks have a richly endowed college at Seville, where they give lectures on Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas, to a few young men whom they recruit at the expense of flattering their parents. My father’s confessor was a Dominican, and he marked me for a divine of his own school. My mother, whose heart was with the Jesuits, would fain have sent me to the University, where the last remnant of their pupils still held the principal chairs. But she was informed by the wily monk, that _heresy_ had began to creep among the new professors of philosophy--heresy of such a horrible tendency, that it nearly amounted to polytheism. The evidence on which this charge was grounded, seemed, indeed, irresistible; for you had only to open the second volume of one Altieri, a Neapolitan friar, whose Elements of philosophy are still used as a class-book at the University of Seville, and you would find, in the first pages, that he makes _space_ uncreated, infinite, and imperishable. From such premises the consequence was evident; the new philosophers were clearly setting up a rival deity.