deriving the various forms and modes of government from human prudence, and of deeming that to be just which experience has proved to be expedient. From this charge of inconsistency* I shall best exculpate myself by the full statement of the third system, and by the exposition of its grounds and consequences. * Distinct notions do not suppose different things. When I make a threefold distinction in human nature, I am fully aware, that it is a distinction, not a division, and that in every act of mind the man unites the properties of sense, understanding, and reason. Nevertheless it is of great practical importance, that these distinctions should be made and understood, the ignorance or perversion of them being alike injurious; as the first French constitution has most lamentably proved. It was the fashion in the profligate times of Charles II. to laugh at the Presbyterians, for distinguishing between the person and the king; while in fact they were ridiculing the most venerable maxims of English law;-the king never dies-the king can do no wrong,—and subverting the principles of genuine loyalty, in order to prepare the minds of the people for despotism. Under the term "sense," I comprise whatever is passive in our being, without any reference to the question of materialism or immaterialism; all that man is in common with animals, in kind at least-his sensations, and impressions, whether of his outward senses, or the inner sense of im agination. This, in the language of the schools, was called the vis receptiva, or recipient property of the soul, from the original constitution of which we perceive and imagine all things under the forms of space and time. By the "understanding," I mean the faculty of thinking and forming judgments on the notices furnished by the sense, according to certain rules existing in itself, which rules constitute its distinct nature. By the pure "reason," I mean the power by which we become possessed of principles,—the eternal verities of Plato and Descartes, and of ideas, not images—as the ideas of a point, a line, a circle, in mathematics;* and of justice, holiness, free-will, and the like, in morals. Hence in works of pure science the definitions of necessity precede the reasoning, in other works they more aptly form the conclusion. To many of my readers it will, I trust, be some recommendation of these distinctions, that they are more than once expressed, and everywhere supposed, in the writings of St. Paul. I have no hesitation in undertaking to prove, that every heresy which has disquieted the Christian Church, from Tritheism to Socinianism, has originated in and supported itself by arguments rendered plausible only by the confusion of these faculties, and thus demanding for the objects of one, a sort of evidence appropriated to those of another faculty. These disquisitions have the misfortune of being in illreport, as dry and unsatisfactory; but I hope, in the course of the work, to gain them a better character—and if elucidations of their practical impor * In the severity of logic, the geometrical point, line, surface, circle, and so forth, are theorems, not ideas. The third and last system, then, denies all rightful origin to government, except as far as it is derivable from principles contained in the reason of man, and judges all the relations of man in society by the laws of moral necessity, according to ideas. I here use the word in its highest and primitive sense, and as nearly synonymous with the modern word ideal,—according to arche typal ideas co-essential with the reason, the consciousness of these ideas being indeed the sign and necessary product of the full development of the reason. The following then is the fundamental principle of this theory: Nothing is to be deemed rightful in civil society, or to be tolerated as such, but what is capable of being demonstrated out of the original laws of the pure reason. Of course, as there is but one system of geometry, so according to this theory there can be but one constitution and one system of legislation, and this consists in the freedom, which is the common right of all men, under the control of that moral necessity, which is the common duty of all men. Whatever is not everywhere necessary, is nowhere right. On this assumption the whole theory is built. To state it nakedly is to confute it satisfactorily. So at least it should seem. But in how winning and specious a manner this system may be represented even to minds of the loftiest order, if undisciplined and unhumbled by practical experience, has been proved by the general impassioned admiration and momentous effects of Rousseau's Du Contrat Social, and the writings of the French economists, or, as they more appropriately entitled themselves, physiocratic philosophers: and in how tempting and dangerous a manner it may be represented to the popu lace, has been made too evident in our own country by the temporary effects of Paine's Rights of Man. Relatively, however, to this latter work it should be observed, that it is not a legitimate offspring of any one theory, but a confusion of the immortality of the first system with the misapplied universal principles of the tance from the most momentous events of history, can render them interesting, to give them that interest at least. Besides, there is surely some good in the knowledge of truth, as truth-we were not made to live by bread alone-and in the strengthening of the intellect. It is an excellent remark of Scaliger's-Hurum indagatio subtilitatum, etsi non est utilis ad machinas farinarias conficiendas, exuit animum tamen inscitiæ rubigine, acuitque ad alia.-Exerc. 307. §§ 3. The investigation of these subtleties, though of no use to the construction of machines for grinding corn, yet clears the mind from the rust of ignorance, and sharpens it or other things. last and in this union, or rather lawless alternation, consists the essence of Jacobinism, as far as Jacobinism is any thing but a term of abuse, or has any meaning of its own distinct from democracy and sedition. A constitution equally suited to China and America, or to Russia and Great Britain, must surely be equally unfit for both, and deserve as little respect in political, as a quack's panacea in medical, practice. Yet there are three weighty motives for a distinct exposition of this theory,* and of the ground on which its pretensions are bottomed and I dare affirm, that for the same reasons there are few subjects which in the present state of the world have a fairer claim to the attention of every serious Englishman, who is likely, directly or indirectly, as partisan or as opponent, to interest himself in schemes of reform. not any tion. The first motive is derived from the propensity of mankind to mistake the abhorrence occasioned by the unhappy effects or accompaniments of a particular system for an insight into the falsehood of its principles. And it is the latter only, a clear insight, vehement emotion, that can secure its permanent rejec For by a wise ordinance of nature our feelings have no abiding-place in our memory; nay, the more vivid they are in the moment of their existence, the more dim and difficult to be remembered do they make the thoughts which accompanied them. Those of my readers, who at any time of their life have been in the habit of reading novels, may easily convince themselves of this truth, by comparing their recollections of those stories which most excited their curiosity, and even painfully affected their feelings, with their recollections of the calm and meditative pathos of Shakspeare and Milton. Hence it is that human experience, like the stern lights of a ship at sea, illumines only the path which we have passed over. The horrors of the Peasants' War in Germany, and the direful effects of the Anabaptist tenets, which were only nominally different from those of * As metaphysics are the science which determines what can, and what can not, be known of being and the laws of being, à priori,—that is, from those necessities of the mind or forms of thinking, which, though first revealed to us by experience, must yet have pre-existed in order to make experience itself possible, even as the eye must exist previously to any particular act of seeing, though by sight only can we know that we have eyes— so might the philosophy of Rousseau and his followers not inaptly be en titled, metapolitics, and the doctors of this school metapoliticians Jacobinism by the substitution of religious for philosophical jar gon, struck all Europe for a time with affright. Yet little more than a century was sufficient to obliterate all effective memory of those events: the same principles budded forth anew, and produced the same fruits from the imprisonment of Charles I. to the restoration of his son. In the succeeding generations, to the follies and vices of the European courts, and to the oppressive privileges of the nobility, were again transferred those feelings of disgust and hatred, which for a brief while the multitude had attached to the crimes and extravagances of political and religious fanaticism: and the same principles, aided by circumstances and dressed out in the ostentatious garb of a fashionable philosophy, once more rose triumphant, and effected the French revolution. That man has reflected little on human nature who does not perceive that the detestable maxims and correspondent crimes of the existing French despotism, have already dimmed the recollections of the democratic phrenzy in the minds of men; by little and little, have drawn off to other objects the electric force of the feelings, which had massed and upholden those recollections; and that a favorable concurrence of occasions is alone wanting to awaken the thunder and precipitate the lightning from the opposite quarter of the political heaven. The true origin of human events is so little susceptible of that kind of evidence which can compel our belief even against our will; and so many are the disturbing forces which modify the motion given by the first projection; and every age has, or imagines it has, its own circumstances which render past experience no longer applicable to the present case; that there will never be wanting answers and explanations, and specious flatteries of hope. I well remember, that when the examples of former Jacobins, Julius Cæsar, Cromwell, &c. were adduced in France and England at the commencement of the French Consulate, it was ridiculed as pedantry and pedants' ignorance, to fear a repetition of such usurpation at the close of the enlightened eighteenth century. Those who possess the Moniteurs of that date will find set proofs, that such results were little less than impossible, and that it was an insult to so philosophical an age, and so enlightened a nation, to dare direct the public eye towards them as lights of admonition and warning. It is a common weakness with official statesmen, and with those who deem themselves honored by their acquaintance, to attribute great national events to the influence of particular persons, to the errors of one man and to the intrigues of another, to any possible spark of a particular occasion, rather than to the true cause, the predominant state of public opinion. I have known men who, with most significant nods, and the civil contempt of pitying half-smiles, have declared the natural explanation of the French revolution, to be the mere fancies of garreteers, and then, with the solemnity of cabinet ministers, have proceeded to explain the whole by anecdotes. It is so stimulant to the pride of a vulgar mind, to be persuaded that it knows what few others know, and that it is the important depository of a sort of state secret, by communicating which it confers an obligation on others! But I have likewise met with men of intelligence, who at the commencement of the revolution were travelling on foot through the French provinces, and they bear witness, that in the remotest villages every tongue was employed in echoing and enforcing the doctrines of the Parisian journalists; that the public highways were crowded with enthusiasts, some shouting the watchwords of the revolution, others disputing on the most abstract principles of the universal constitution, which they fully believed, that all the nations of the earth were shortly to adopt ; the most ignorant among them confident of his fitness for the highest duties of a legislator; and all prepared to shed their blood in the defence of the inalienable sovereignty of the self-governed people. The more abstract the notions were, with the closer affinity did they combine with the most fervent feelings, and all the immediate impulses to action. The Lord Chancellor Bacon lived in an age of court intrigues, and was familiarly acquainted with all the secrets of personal influence. He, if any man, was qualified to take the gauge and measurement of their comparative power; and he has told us, that there is one, and but one infallible source of political prophecy, the knowledge of the predominant opinions and the speculative principles of men in general, between the age of twenty and thirty. Sir Philip Sidney,-the favorite of Queen Elizabeth, the paramount gentleman of Europe, the nephew, and—as far as a good man could be-the confidant of the intriguing and dark-minded Earl of Leicester,—was so deeply convinced that the principles diffused through the majority of a nation are the true oracles from whence statesmen are to |