‘The business of the mind,’ he says ‘appears to me to be very simple. It extends no farther than to receive impressions, that is, to have sensations or feelings. What are called its operations are merely the operations of language. The greatest part of Mr. Locke’s Essay, that is, all which relates to what he calls _the composition_, _abstraction_, _complexity_, _generalization_, _relation_, etc. of ideas, does indeed merely concern language. If he had been sooner aware of the inseparable connection between words and knowledge, he would not have talked of the composition of ideas, but would have seen that the only composition was in the terms, and consequently, that it was as improper to talk of a complex idea as of a complex star! I will venture to say that it is an easy matter, upon Mr. Locke’s own principles and a physical consideration of the senses and the mind, to prove the impossibility of the composition of ideas, and that they are not ideas, but merely terms, which are general and abstract.’—Diversions of Purley, Vol. i. p. 39, 51, &c.[10] Now this is very explicit, and, I also conceive, very logical. For I am ready to grant that ‘Mr. Locke’s own principles and a physical consideration of the mind’ do lead to the conclusions here stated; and it is on that account that I shall attempt to shew that those principles and the consideration of the mind, as a physical thing, are in themselves absurd. These writers taking up the principle, that to have sensations or feelings was the only real faculty of the mind, and perceiving that the having sensations merely was a different thing from having an idea or consciousness of their relations (inasmuch as no sensation as such can include a knowledge of or reference to any other) have inferred very rationally that all the operations of the mind founded on a principle of general consciousness or common understanding, _viz._ _compounding_, _comparing_, _discerning_, _judging_, _reasoning_, etc. were excluded from their physical theory of sensation, and must be referred to some trick or deception of the mind, the mechanism of language or habitual association of ideas. According to this theory, besides the sensible impressions of individual objects, and their distinct traces left in the memory—the rest is merely words. In supposing that we combine these different impressions together, that we compare different objects, that we reason upon them, it seems we only deceive ourselves, and mistake a rapid and mechanical transition from one idea to another for the actual perception of the relations between them. Thus have these philosophers sacrificed all the known facts and conscious operations of the mind to a literal deduction from a gross verbal fallacy. For what are these single objects or individual ideas, of which the senses are competent to take cognizance, and beyond which the understanding can never advance a step? Neither more nor less than