Philosophy of the Human Mind. 2 1 



Lord Monboddo analyzes sensible objects into 

 matter and form, and teaches, like most of the 

 disciples of the Stagirite, the eternity of both. 

 He insists that there are in man four distinct minds, 

 viz. the elemental, the vegetable, the animal, and 

 the intellectual ; that of these, the intellectual only 

 is immortal; that the soul is not created for any 

 particular body, but transmigrates from one to 

 another ; that there are different grades of minds'; 

 those which occupy earths and stones, and those 

 which reside in plants and the inferior animals up 

 to man ; that gravitation is nothing more than the 

 activity of a soul residing in, and animating masses 

 of earth ; and that it is more honourable to the Deity 

 to consider him as operating in all the departments 

 of nature, by the instrumentality of inferior minds, 

 than to represent him as acting on matter immedi- 

 ately. Whether the souls of men transmigrate to 

 the bodies of brutes he is doubtful; but that the 

 souls of vegetables and inferior animals each trans- 

 migrate from one to another of their own species, 

 and perhaps from a lower to a higher, and vice 

 versa, he thinks there is abundant reason to be- 

 lieve. 



So far as Lord Monboddo agrees with the Aris- 

 totelian philosophy, he talks with a semblance of 

 reason, and may be read with patience. But the 

 extraordinary consequences which he draws from 

 this ancient system of pneumatology, the capricious 

 use which he makes of it, and his visionary and fan- 

 tastic additions to it, render his work as singular a 

 mass of good sense and absurdity, erudition and n-. 

 diculous credulity, as any age ever produced. Mr, 



o See Ancient Metaphysics, 5 vols. 4to. From the singular opinions 

 which abound in this learned and extensive work, the following selection 

 is offered to the reader as a specimen. That the Ourang Gutang is a man 

 not civilized; that men originally wore tails, and went upon all fours ; but 

 that the one dropt off, and they rose from the other to an erect posture by 

 the progress of civilization ; d.at the natural state of man is to live without 



