that there is any such body as the sun really existing out of the mind. I will now return to Berkeley, and endeavour to answer his chief objections to the doctrine of abstract ideas. First, then, I conceive that he has himself virtually given up the question, when he allows that the mind may be affected with the promise of a good thing, or terrified by the apprehension of danger, without thinking of any particular good or evil that is likely to befal us. What this idea of good or evil, which is not particular, can be, other than abstract, I cannot conceive; and to say that it is not an idea, but a mere feeling excited by custom, is an answer very little to the purpose. For this feeling, this custom, is itself a general impression, and could not, without a power of abstraction in the mind, think, without a power of being acted upon by a number of different impulses of pleasure and pain, concurring to produce a general effect, abstracted from the particular feelings themselves, or the objects first exciting them. All abstract ideas are several impressions of the same kind, and are merely customary affections of the mind, not distinct images of things. But if it be said that the word idea properly signifies an image, and must be something distinct, then I answer, first, that this would only restrict the use of the word _idea_ to particular things, and not affect the real question in dispute, and secondly, that there is no such thing as a distinct and particular image in the mind. The manner in which Berkeley explains the nature of mathematical demonstrations, according to his system, shews its utter inadequateness to any purposes of general reasoning, and is a plain confession of the necessity of abstract ideas. For all the answer he gives to the question, how can we know any proposition to be true in general, from having found it so in a particular instance, comes to this, that though the diagram we have in view includes a number of particulars, yet we know the principle to be true generally, because _there is not the least mention made of these particulars in the proof of the proposition_. But I would ask also, whether there is not the least thought of them in the mind? The truth is, that the mind upon Berkeley’s principle must think of the particular right angled, isosceles, triangle in question, or it can have no idea at all, for it has no general idea of a triangle to which it can apply the name generally. If we suppose that there is any such general form, or notion to which the other particular circumstances are merely superadded, and which may be left standing, though they are taken away, we then run immediately to all the absurdities of abstraction, which he so much wishes to avoid. If we then demonstrate the proposition of the particular diagram before us, as of a determinate size, shape, &c., this demonstration cannot hold good generally. If we are supposed to omit all