J? R E F A C E. 



HOWEVER little merit there may be in this Work, or how- 

 ever much wearied the reader may be in the perufal of it, he 

 cannot blame the Author for a deceit, common enough at prefent, of 

 impofing upon him by a fpecious title ; for I have chcfen one which, 

 fo far from alluring readers, will frighten many from opening the 

 book ; nor do I believe that there is a bookfeller in Great Britain, who 

 upon the credit of my title-page, would offer me a (hilling for my 

 copy, if I had a mitsd to fell it. Indeed, the fubjedl is altogether un- 

 fafhionable, not only among the vulgar, who ridicule it under the 

 name of metaphyfic^ but even among the philofophers of the prefent 

 age, who are fo much converfant with particular and individual things, 

 as hardly to believe that there exifts a fcicnce of Univerfals. Their far- 

 theft remove from matter is to Mathematics, the fcience of which the 

 Antients very much efteemed, becaufe they thought mathematical ideas 

 wereof eafieft abftradion, and therefore proper to difentangle the Mind 

 from Matter, and teach it to rife to nobler fpeculations ; and it is from 

 this ufe of it that the fcience has its name. But our modern philofo- 

 phers feem to think, that Geometry, Arithmetic, and the application 

 of thefe fciences to body, is the whole of philofophy ; and, I doubt, 

 many of them believe that nothing exifts except body, and its attri^ 

 butes« 



The ftyle, too, I am afraid, is not of popular relifh, any more than 

 -the fubjedt ; wanting that fprucenefs and trimnefs which is fo fa- 

 fhionable at prefent in writings upon all fubjedls. Many now-a-days 

 feem to me to read, like Hamlet in the Play, ivords^ ivorJs^ with- 

 out any confideration of the matter, and to regard drefs as the princi- 

 pal quality of a book, as well as of a perfon. It is but fair to let all 



a fuch 



