
ATTENDING THE EXERCISE OF THE SENSES. 525 
being ambiguous, and therefore inconvenient. But we have already seen, that 
Mr Iiume expressly asserted that the existences which we consider when we speak 
of objects of sense, are “fleeting copies and representations of other existences which 
remain uniform and independent ;” and his notion as to the nature of these fleet- 
ing copies is farther shewn in another passage, as follows,—* No external object 
ean make itself known to the mind without the intervention of an image, and of 
these images the most obvious of the qualities is extension.” —( Treatise on Human 
Nature, vol. ii., p. 416.) Has not Mr Locke expressly told us, says Mr Stewart, 
“ that the ideas of primary qualities of matter are resemblances of them ; and that 
their patterns do really exist in the bodies themselves ;’ and did not Mr Hume under- 
stand this doctrine in the most strict and literal meaning of words when he 
stated, ‘‘ as one of its necessary consequences, that the mind either is no sub- 
stance, or is an extended and divisible substance, because the idea of eatension can- 
not be in a substance which is indivisible and unewtended ?”—(Phil. Essays, p. 5538.) 
This is surely enough to shew that what LockE and Hume called Ideas, had, 
according to them, a physical (not merely metaphorical) existence, and were 
essentially distinct from the mere acts or states of the mind itself. And as to 
BERKELEY, we have the distinct admission of Dr Brown himself, that he evidently 
considered ideas “‘ not as states of the individual mind, but as separate things ex- 
isting in it, and capable of existing in other minds, but in them alone.”—(Lect. 
vol. 1., p. 523.) On which he very justly afterwards observes, that “‘ a mind con- 
taining, or capable of containing, something foreign within itself, and not only one 
foreign substance, but a multitude of foreign substances at the same minute, is 
no longer that simple indivisible existence which we term spirit.”—(Lect., vol. i., 
p- 525.) But these statements are obviously and irreconcileably inconsistent with. 
Dr Brown’s subsequent assertion, that the word Idea was used by all previous 
_ authors only metaphorically, and that in proving ideas not to be self-existent 
things, Rem had merely assumed as real what was intended as metaphorical. 
It is still more remarkable, that the notion which was taken up by Dr Brown, 
of the language of Humz and Brerxetry having been only metaphorical or figura- 
tive, is the very same as had been previously hazarded by PriesrLey, and pre- 
viously answered, and shewn to be inconsistent, both with the language of these 
and other philosophers, and with his own language, by Mr Stewart in his Philo- 
sophical Essays. ‘ 
« The following strictures,” says Mr Stewart, “on Rertp’s reasonings against 
the Ideal Theory, occur in a work published by Dr Prirstiey in 1774 :— 
-“ Before our author had rested so much upon this argument, it behoved him, 
I think, to have examined the strength of it a little more carefully than he seems 
to have done; for he appears to me to have suffered himself to be misled in the 
very foundation of it, merely by philosophers happening to call Ideas the images 
of external things ; as if this was not known to be a figurative expression, denoting, 
VOL. XX. PART IV. 7c 
