14 Biographical Menioh- of Sir John Leslie. 



May, after a memorable debate of two days,* satisfied ihem 

 that persecution had now exhausted its resources, and that its 

 hopes must, however sorrowfully, be relinquished. 



Dismissing every supposition of interested designs, and even 

 allowing that Mr Leslie's expressed opinion as to Causation, 

 if taken apart from the subject-matter of his book, or left un- 

 explained, was calculated to occasion some alarm in the minds 

 of the pious, still, impartial history ever must brand the pro- 

 ceedings of his opponents as alike uncharitable, unfair, and 

 arrogant; and as deeply injurious to the character of that 

 Church with whose name and authority they clothed them- 

 selves. It was on all hands admitted, that if Mr Leslie had, 

 by a single word, limited his observations to Pltysical causes, 

 his doctrine would have been wholly free from objec- 

 tion ; and, surely, it required a most perverse and intolerant 

 construction to insist on extending to any but such causes, the 

 observations of an illustrative note to a work purely physical, 

 and which were obviously levelled at those theories which re- 

 sort to certain invisible intermedia, in order to account for the 

 connection of physical sequences. But this was not all. Mr 

 Leslie, on being informed of the charge, immediately declared, 

 in a very pointed Letter laid before the junto, that his obser- 

 vations " referred entirely to the relation between cause and 

 effect, considered as an object of physical examination."*!- Yet 

 was this prompt explanation disregarded — nay suppressed ; 

 whilst his persecutors — owing to an ignorant blunder in their own 

 statement of what they conceiv^ed to be the true notion of Causa- 

 tion — were themselves obliged to have recourse to explanation, 

 in order to show that their doctrine was not identical with that 

 of the Fatalists and Spinoza I* 



* See Report of the Debate, published at Edinburgh in October 1 805. 



•J- See Professor Stewart's Short Statement, p. 36, and Report of the Debate in 

 the General Assembly p. 16. 



X See Short Statement, p. 77-04, and Report of the Debate, passim. This re- 

 markable controversy gave rise to a number of other publications ; but none 

 of them, with the exception of these two, an admirable Letter to the author 

 ofa Reply to the former, by Professor Playfair, and Dr Thomas Brown's 

 Observaiiotis on the nature and tendency of the doctrine of Mr Hume concerning 

 cause and effect, with other two pieces by that most acute metaphj'sician, have 



