Mr. Tooke lays it down as a maxim, that the mind has neither complex nor abstract ideas. He was in some things a zealot, and his zeal had led him to believe that his system of etymology would in some way or other establish this metaphysical principle, and overturn the established notions of law, morality, philosophy, and divinity. The full development and execution of this project is reserved for a future volume, but there are perpetual hints and intimations of it in the two first, something like the aerial music and flying noises in Prospero’s island. The author seems constantly in his own mind on the point of detecting all imposture and delusion with the Ithuriel spear of etymology, but he as constantly draws back, and postpones his triumph. The second volume of the ‘Diversions’ consists chiefly of about two thousand instances of the etymology of words, to prove that there can be no abstract ideas: scarcely one of which two thousand meanings is anything else but a more abstract idea than the word was in general supposed to convey: for example, the word _loaf_ commonly stands for a pretty substantial, solid, tangible kind of an idea, and is not suspected of any latent, very refined, abstracted meaning. The author shows, on the contrary, that the word has no such palpable, positive meaning, as the particular object to which we apply it, but merely signifies something, any thing, raised or _lifted_ up. A singular method, surely, of reducing all general and abstract signs to individual, physical objects! Yet we find this tiresome catalogue of derivations concluded in this manner. ‘And on this subject of _subaudition_ I will at present exercise your patience no farther: for my own begins to flag. You have now instances of my doctrine in, I suppose, about a thousand words. Their number may be easily increased. But I trust these are sufficient to discard that imagined operation of the mind, which has been termed _abstraction_: and to prove that what we call by that name, is merely one of the contrivances of language, for the purpose of more speedy communication.’—Page 396, vol. ii. How a thousand instances of words, signifying a common quality or abstract idea, with something understood (_subauditum_), can be supposed to discard that imagined operation of the mind called abstraction, or in what subaudition differs from abstraction, or whether there is not something _subintellectum_, as well as _subauditum_,—that is, certain circumstances left out by the mind for the necessary progress of thought, as well as in language, for its more speedy communication,—it is not easy to guess. This farcical mummery, this inexplicable dumb show, this emphatical insignificance, neither admits nor deserves any answer.