All particulars are nothing but generals, more or less defined according to circumstances, but never perfectly so. Lastly, as the ideas of sensible objects can only be general notions, so the ideas of sensible qualities are properly abstract ideas of likeness or of something common between a number of sensible impressions of the same class or sort. For example, the idea I have of the whiteness of a marble statue is not the idea of a point, nor of any number of points, with all their differences and circumstances, but a relative idea of the colour of the whole statue. Now in arriving at this general result, or in classing its sensible impressions together as of the same sort or quality, the mind certainly is not conscious of every stain in the colour of the marble, or streak that may happen to vary it, or of its shape or size, or of every difference of light and shade, arising from inequality of surface, &c. Yet if the idea falls any thing short of this minute and absolute knowledge, it can only be an imperfect and abstract one. The idea of whiteness in the same object (or as a sensible quality) necessarily implies the same power of _abstracting from particulars_ in the mind, as the general idea of whiteness taken from different objects, from a white horse, a white cloud, a white wall, a white lily, or from all the other white objects I have ever seen. The precise differences of form, size, and every other actual circumstance in these particular images, are as little necessary to be attended to in forming the general idea of whiteness, as the differences of shape, size, and colour in every particle of the statue of white marble are to the general impression of colour in the whole object. I will only add, that the mind has not been fairly dealt with in this and other questions of the same sort. The difficulties belonging to the abstraction, complexity, generalization, &c. of our ideas, it is, perhaps, impossible ever to clear up; but that is no reason why we should discard these operations from the human mind, any more than we should deny the existence of motion, of extension, or of curve lines, because we cannot explain them. Matter alone seems to have the privilege of presenting difficulties and contradictions at every turn, which pass current under the name of _facts_: but the moment any thing of this kind is observed in the understanding, all the petulance of logicians is up in arms against it. The mind is made the mark on which they vent all the moods and figures of their impertinence; and metaphysical truth has, in this respect, fared like the milk-white hind, the emblem of pure faith, in Dryden’s fable, which ‘had oft been chased— With Scythian shafts, and many winged wounds Aimed at her heart, was often forced to fly, And doomed to death, though fated not to die.’ AN ENGLISH METAPHYSICIAN. FINE ARTS. BRITISH INSTITUTION