postle, and allow no man to "spoil us through vain philosophy." The
business of human life is serious; the useful investigations in which
we may engage are multiplied. It is excellent to see a rational being
conscious of his genuine province, and not idly wasting powers adapted
for the noblest uses in unmeasured essays and ill-concocted attempts.

ESSAY XXII. OF THE MATERIAL UNIVERSE.

In the preceding Essay I have referred to the theory of Berkeley, whose
opinion is that there is no such thing as matter in the sense in which
it is understood by the writers on natural philosophy, and that the
whole of our experience in that respect is the result of a system of
accidents without an intelligible subject, by means of which antecedents
and consequents flow on for ever in a train, the past succession
of which man is able to record, and the future in many cases he is
qualified to predict and to act upon.

An argument more palpable and popular than that of Berkeley in favour of
the same hypothesis, might be deduced from the points recapitulated
in that Essay as delivered by Locke and Newton. If what are vulgarly
denominated the secondary qualities of matter are in reality nothing but
sensations existing in the human mind, then at any rate matter is a very
different thing from what it is ordinarily apprehended to be. To which
I add, in the second place, that, if matter, as is stated by Newton,
consists in so much greater a degree of pores than solid parts, that
the absolute particles contained in the solar system might, for aught we
know, he contained in a nutshell(77), and that no two ever touched each
other, or approached so near that they might not be brought nearer,
provided a sufficient force could be applied for that purpose,--and if,
as Priestley teaches, all that we observe is the result of successive
spheres of attraction and repulsion, the centre of which is a
mathematical point only, we then certainly come very near to a
conclusion, which should banish matter out of the theatre of real
existences(78).

(77) See above, Essay XXI.

(78) See above, Essay XXI.

But the extreme subtleties of human intellect are perhaps of little
further use, than to afford an amusement to persons of curious
speculation, and whose condition in human society procures them leisure
for such enquiries. The same thing happens here, as in the subject of
my Twelfth Essay, on the Liberty of Human Actions. The speculator in