I think that the truth may be got at much more simply, and without all this parade of words. The business of the mind is twofold—to receive impressions and to perceive their relations; without which there can be no ideas. Now the first of these is the office of the senses, and is the only original function of the mind, according to the prevailing system. The second is properly the office of the understanding, and is that, the nature or existence of which is the great point in debate between the contending parties. The more complex and refined operations of this faculty, such as judging, reasoning, abstraction, willing, etc. are either totally denied, or at best resolved into simple ideas of sensation by modern metaphysical writers. I know of no better way, therefore, to establish the contrary hypothesis than to take these simple ideas of the moderns, and shew that they contain the same necessary principles of the understanding, the same operations of judging, comparing, distinguishing, abstracting, which they discard with so much profound contempt, or treat as accidental and artificial results of some higher faculty. If it can be proved that the understanding, in the strict and exclusive sense, is necessary to our having any _ideas_ whatever,—that the very terms are synonymous and inseparable—that in the first original conception of the simplest object of nature there is implied the same principle, a power of perceiving the relations of different things, which is only exerted in a more perfect and comprehensive manner in the most complex and difficult processes of the human intellect, one would think that there must be an end of the question. AN ENGLISH METAPHYSICIAN. THE SAME SUBJECT CONTINUED _The Morning Chronicle._] [_March 3, 1814._ ‘For men to have recourse to subtleties in raising difficulties, and then to complain that they should be taken off by minutely examining these subtleties, is a strange kind of proceeding.’ I cannot better explain the modern theory of the understanding (which it will be the object of this letter to consider) than in the words of one of the best and ablest commentators of that school, Mr. Horne Tooke.