It is for this reason that I have paid no attention to the hypothesis of the Scotch Doctors, Reid, Beattie and Oswald, and have given no detailed account of Dr. Priestley’s examination of their writings. Indeed the perfect oblivion into which these writers have fallen, and the utter insufficiency of such young gentlemen and lady’s philosophy as they have adopted, has secured them from further animadversion. The facility with which ignorance can refer all difficulties relating to the phenomena of mind, to instinctive principles and common sense, might answer the purpose of popular declamation for a while, but it could not last; and these writers have fallen into merited obscurity, notwithstanding the national prejudice in favour of each other, so prevalent among the Literati of North Britain. Some passages in Dr. Reid, however ought to exempt him from the contempt which is due to the common system advanced by him and his coadjutors: and his last book on the Active powers of man, is a work of undeniable merit on a very important subject, which has not yet been discussed with half the labour it so eminently deserves. The Synthesis and Analysis of our ideas, the history and process of their formation, and the detail of facts attending and connected with their rise and progress, is comparatively a new subject. Des Cartes, Buffier and Condillac among the French, Locke, Berkeley and Hartley among the English, and Hume, Reid, and Adam Smith among the Scotch, are almost the only authors worth notice who have treated it expressly, and most of them only partially.[74] Something may be found to the purpose in Hobbes, and in the first part of Dr. Priestley’s examination of Reid, Oswald and Beattie, and more in the first volume of Zoonomia, § 14 and 15.[75] The common sense of Dr. Reid and Co. seems to have been employed as the _clavis universalis on_ this subject by Buffier, in his “First Truths.” Hutcheson’s theory of the Moral Sense hardly merits notice, nor does that of Dr. Price promise to add much to the stock of real knowledge. We have had enough (_sat superque_) of occult principles, innate principles, and instinctive principles, which illustrate nothing, but the ignorance of those who employ them. [74] Dr. Dugal Stewart in Scotland, and the Revd. Mr. Belsham in England, have published Elements of the Philosophy of the mind, the first inclining to the Scotch School of Metaphysics, the latter to the System of Hartley; both of them of merit in their way, particularly (as I think that of Mr. Belsham). [75] I cannot help thinking Dr. Darwin’s obligations to Dr. Hartley and Dr. Brown ought to have dictated more acknowledgement than he has condescended to make.