In opposition to this author’s assertion, that we have neither complex nor abstract ideas, I think it may be proved to a demonstration that we have no others. If our ideas were absolutely simple and individual, we could have no idea of any of those objects which in this erring, half-thinking philosophy are called individual, as a table or a chair, a blade of grass, or a grain of sand. For every one of these includes a certain configuration, hardness, colour, &c. _i.e._ ideas of different things, and received by different senses, which must be put together by the understanding before they can be referred to any particular thing, or form one idea. Without the cementing power of the mind, all our ideas would be necessarily decomposed and crumbled down into their original elements and flexional parts. We could indeed never carry on a chain of reasoning on any subject, for the very links of which this chain must consist, would be ground to powder. No two of these atomic impressions could ever club together to form even a sensible point, much less should we be able ever to arrive at any of the larger masses, or nominal descriptions of things. All nature, all objects, all parts of all objects would be equally ‘without form and void.’ _The mind alone is formative_, to borrow the expression of a celebrated German writer, or it is that alone which by its pervading and elastic energy unfolds and expands our ideas, that gives order and consistency to them, that assigns to every part its proper place, and that constructs the idea of the whole. Ideas are the offspring of the understanding, not of the senses. In other words, it is the understanding alone that perceives relation, but every object is made up of a bundle of relations. In short, there is no object or idea which does not consist of a number of parts arranged in a certain manner, but of this arrangement the parts themselves cannot be conscious. A ‘physical consideration of the senses and the mind’ can never therefore account for our ideas, even of sensible objects. Mr. Locke’s own principles do indeed exclude all power of understanding from the human mind. The manner in which Hobbes and Berkeley have explained the nature of mathematical demonstration upon this system shows its utter inadequacy to any of the purposes of general reasoning, and is a plain confession of the necessity of abstract ideas. Mr. Hume considers the principle that abstraction is not an operation of the mind, but of language, as one of the most capital discoveries of modern philosophy, and attributes it to Bishop Berkeley. Berkeley has however only adopted the arguments and indeed almost the very words of Hobbes. The latter author in the passage which has been already quoted says, ‘By this imposition of names, some of larger, some of stricter signification, we turn the reckoning of the consequences of things imagined in the mind into a reckoning of the consequences of appellations. For example, a man