precious interval, this moment of leisure from both, this lucky vacancy of thought, is pitched upon as that in which the mind performs all its functions, and contemplates its various ideas in their absence, as from some vantage ground the traveller stops to survey the country on both sides of him. To such absurdities are ingenious men driven by setting up argument against fact, and denying the most obvious truths for which they cannot account, like the sophist who denied the existence of motion, because he could not understand its nature. It might be deemed a sufficient answer to those who build systems and lay down formal propositions on the principle that the mind can comprehend but one idea at a time, to say that they consequently can have no meaning in what they write, since when they begin a sentence they cannot have the least idea of what will be the end of it, and by the time they get to the end of it must totally forget the beginning. ‘Peace to all such!’ To show, however, that I am not quite singular in my notions on this subject of consciousness, and to remove, as I think, every shadow of doubt upon it, I beg leave to refer my readers to two passages, the one in Rousseau, and the other in Abraham Tucker, in support of the almost obsolete prejudice which I have here endeavoured to defend. The one is an argument to prove that judgment and sensation are not the same, in the Vicar’s profession of faith in ‘Emilius,’ and the other is the chapter on the independent existence of mind in the ‘Light of Nature Pursued.’ The passage in Rousseau seems evidently to have been intended as an answer to the maxim of Helvetius that _to feel is to judge_, and to his reasoning on this maxim, which is as follows:—