wo or three random sermons," he
says, "I have discharged, and thought I perceived that the greater part of
the congregation thought me mad. The clerk was as pale as death in helping
me off with my gown, for fear I should bite him." He wants money to furnish
his house. A benevolent friend obtains him the opportunity of lecturing. It
is not uncharitable to suppose that he chooses a subject in which accurate
knowledge and close argument will be less requisite than fluency, fancy,
bold statement, and extraordinarily felicitous illustration. The five years
spent in Edinburgh can now be turned to profitable account. Dugald Stewards
lectures can be exhumed, decorated, and reproduced. The whole book reeks of
Scotland. The lecturer sets out by declaring that Moral Philosophy is
taught in the Scotch Universities alone. England knows nothing about it. At
Edinburgh Moral Philosophy means Mental Philosophy, and is concerned with
"the faculties of the mind and the effects which our reasoning powers and
our passions produce upon the actions of our lives." It has nothing to do
with ethics or duty. And the definition used in Edinburgh is also used in
Albemarle Street. Dugald Stewart and Thomas Brown[30] and Adam Smith, Hume
and Reid and Oswald and Beattie and Ferguson, are names which meet us on
every page. The lecturer has learnt from Scotsmen, and reproduces what the
Scotsmen taught him. Mind and Matter are two great realities. When people
are informed that all thought is explained by vibrations and
"vibratiuncles" of the brain, and that what they consider their arms and
legs are not arms and legs but ideas, then, says the lecturer, they will
pardonably identify Philosophy with Lunacy. "Bishop Berkeley destroyed this
world in one octavo volume; and nothing remained after his time but Mind;
which experienced a similar fate at the hand of Mr. Hume in 1737.... But is
there any one out of Bedlam who _doubts_ of the existence of matter? who
doubts of his own personal identity? or of his consciousness? or of the
general credibility of memory?"

From this rough-and-ready delimitation of the area within which Moral
Philosophy must work, if it is to escape the reproach of insanity, the
lecturer goes on, as becomes a divine, to champion his study against the
reproach of tending to Atheism. He groups all our senses, faculties, and
impulses together, and says: "All these things Moral Philosophy observes,
and, observing, adores the Being from whence