I am aware that the long digression on the formation of our ideas, with which I troubled you in my last, will be looked upon as rhapsody and extravagance by the strictest sect of those who are called philosophers. The understanding has been set aside by these ingenious persons as an awkward incumbrance, since they conceived it practicable to carry on the whole business of thought and reason by a succession of individual images and sensible points. The fine network of the mind, the intellectual cords that bind and hold our scattered perceptions together, and form the living line of communication between them, are dissolved and vanish before the clear light of modern metaphysics, as the gossamer is dissipated by the sun. The adepts in this system smile at the contradictions involved in the supposition of perceiving the relations between different things, and say that the common theory of the understanding leads to the absurdity that the mind may attend to two ideas at once, which is with them impossible. What I have endeavoured to establish, is, that if the mind cannot have more than one idea at a time, it can never have any, since all the ideas we know of consist of more than one; and though the conviction we have of attending to different impressions at once, when we compare, distinguish, judge, reason, &c. has been gratuitously resolved into a deception of the mind, mistaking a rapid succession of objects for a joint conception of them, yet it will hardly be pretended that we deceive ourselves in thinking we have any ideas at all. Whether the advocates for this hypothesis will sit down contented under the total dissipation of all thought, the utter privation of all ideas, to which, by their own arguments, they will have reduced themselves, it remains for them to determine. We have seen that Mr. Tooke resolves the complexity of our ideas into the complexity of the terms made use of. How a term can be complex, otherwise than from the complexity of its meaning, that is, of the idea attached to it, is by no means easy to understand. Other writers, to avoid the seeming contradiction of supposing the mind to divide its attention between different objects, have suggested the instant of its passing from one to the other as the true point of comparison between them; or that the time when it had the idea of both together, was the time when it had an idea of neither. To such absurdities are ingenious men driven by setting up argument against fact, and denying the most obvious truths for which they cannot account, like the sophist who denied the existence of motion, because he could not understand its nature. It might perhaps be deemed a sufficient answer to those who build systems and lay down learned propositions on the principle that the mind can comprehend but one idea at a time, to say that they consequently can have no meaning in what they write, since when they begin a sentence, they cannot have the