and views, precluded from any general knowledge of human nature, or the virtues of the human heart, it is an uncivil irony to propose them as consummate judges of the abstract nature of man. If, on the other hand, in spite of their employment, they retain the same notions and liberality of feeling as other men, there is no reason to suppose that they would subscribe to the sentiment of our author, that morality ‘is an affair of the five senses:’ a proposition which any minister of state, or police officer, or man of the world, possessed of the least common sense, would treat with as much contempt and incredulity as Shaftesbury or Hutcheson. Our author’s observation, that the notion of a moral sense or natural disposition to sympathise with others, is only the doctrine of innate ideas in disguise, is another misconception of the nature of the question. The actual feeling of compassion is not, as he says, innate; but this no more proves that the disposition to compassion or benevolence is not innate, than the fact that the ideas or feelings of pleasure and pain are not innate and born with us, proves that physical sensibility is not an original faculty of the mind. Moral sensibility, or the capacity of being affected by the ideas of certain objects, is as much a part of our nature as physical sensibility, or the capacity of being affected in a certain manner by the objects themselves. Helvetius says, physical sensibility is the only quality essential to the nature of man: I answer, that physical sensibility is _not_ the only quality essential to the nature of man. To show how senseless and insignificant is this kind of reasoning, I will refer back to Helvetius’s concise profession of his metaphysical faith, which is that he can form an idea of the five senses and of the organs of them, but of nothing else. Now, I may ask, how he comes by this _idea_? Which of his senses or which of the organs of them is it that gives him an idea of the other four? Has the eye an action of words, or the ear of colours, or either of the impressions of taste, smell, or feeling? Which of them is the common sense? or if none, must we not suppose some superintending faculty to which all the other impressions are subject, and which alone can give him an idea of his own senses or their organs? Another instance of the utter want of logical and consecutive reasoning which characterizes the French philosophers, might be given in their singular proof of the selfishness of the human mind from the incompatibility of a state of desire and a state of indifference. The English philosophers are charged with representing a man in a state of indifference, ‘seated in his arm-chair,’ as desiring the good of others. This arm-chair it should seem, no less than his state of indifference, presents certain insurmountable barriers to his desires, which they cannot pass so as to affect him with the slightest concern for any thing beyond it.