it is, existed entire in all its general principles in Hobbes before him; this was never unequivocally or explicitly avowed by the author of the ‘Essay on the Human Understanding.’ Locke merely endeavoured to accommodate Hobbes’s leading principle to the more popular opinions of the time; and all that succeeding writers have done to improve upon his system, and clear it of inconsistent and extraneous matter, has only tended to reduce it back to the purity and simplicity in which it is to be found in Hobbes. The immediate and professed object of both these writers is indeed the same, namely, to account for our ideas and the formation of the human understanding from sensible impressions. But in the execution of this design, Mr. Locke has deviated widely and at almost every step from his predecessor. This difference would almost unavoidably arise from the natural character of their minds, which were the most opposite conceivable. Hobbes had the utmost reliance on himself, and was impatient of the least doubt or contradiction. He saw from the beginning to the end of his system. He is always therefore on firm ground, and never once swerves from his object. He is at no pains to remove objections, or soften consequences. Granting his first principle, all the rest follows of course. There is an air of grandeur in the stern confidence with which he stands alone in the world of his own opinions, regardless of his contemporaries, and conscious that he is the founder of a new race of thinkers. Locke, on the other hand, was a man, who without the same comprehensive grasp of thought had a greater deference for the opinions of others, and was of a much more cautious and circumspect turn of mind. He could not but meet with many things in the peremptory assertions of Hobbes that must make him pause, that he would be at a loss to reconcile to an attentive observation of what passed in his own mind, and that would equally shock the prevailing notions both of the learned and the ignorant. He was therefore led to consider the different objections to the system which had been left unanswered and unnoticed, to make a compromise between the received doctrines, and the violent paradoxes contained in the ‘Leviathan’ and the ‘Treatise of Human Nature,’ or to admit these last with so many qualifications, with so much circumlocution and preparation, and after such an appearance of the most mature and candid examination, and of willingness to be convinced on the other side of the question, as to obviate the offensive and harsh effect which accompanies the abrupt dogmatism of the original author. It was perhaps necessary that the opinions of Hobbes should undergo this sort of metamorphosis before they could gain a hearing: as the direct rays of the sun must be blunted and refracted by passing through some denser medium in order to be borne by common eyes. So sheathed and softened, their sharp, unpleasant points taken off, his doctrines almost immediately met with a favourable