ent and welcome to people's
passions and appetites, they gladly accept the indulgence, without
desiring to detect the fallacy or the reasoning: and indeed many, I might
say most people, are not able to do it; which makes the publication of
such quibblings and refinements the more pernicious. I am no skillful
casuist nor subtle disputant; and yet I would undertake to justify and
qualify the profession of a highwayman, step by step, and so plausibly,
as to make many ignorant people embrace the profession, as an innocent,
if not even a laudable one; and puzzle people of some degree of
knowledge, to answer me point by point. I have seen a book, entitled
'Quidlibet ex Quolibet', or the art of making anything out of anything;
which is not so difficult as it would seem, if once one quits certain
plain truths, obvious in gross to every understanding, in order to run
after the ingenious refinements of warm imaginations and speculative
reasonings. Doctor Berkeley, Bishop of Cloyne, a very worthy, ingenious,
and learned man, has written a book, to prove that there is no such thing
as matter, and that nothing exists but in idea: that you and I only fancy
ourselves eating, drinking, and sleeping; you at Leipsig, and I at
London: that we think we have flesh and blood, legs, arms, etc., but that
we are only spirit. His arguments are, strictly speaking, unanswerable;
but yet I am so far from being convinced by them, that I am determined to
go on to eat and drink, and walk and ride, in order to keep that MATTER,
which I so mistakenly imagine my body at present to consist of, in as
good plight as possible. Common sense (which, in truth, very uncommon) is
the best sense I know of: abide by it, it will counsel you best. Read and
hear, for your amusement, ingenious systems, nice questions subtilly
agitated, with all the refinements that warm imaginations suggest; but
consider them only as exercitations for the mind, and turn always to
settle with common sense.

I stumbled, the other day, at a bookseller's, upon "Comte Gabalis," in
two very little volumes, which I had formerly read. I read it over again,
and with fresh astonishment. Most of the extravagances are taken from the
Jewish Rabbins, who broached those wild notions, and delivered them in
the unintelligible jargon which the Caballists and Rosicrucians deal in
to this day. Their number is, I believe, much lessened, but there are
still some; and I myself have known two; who studied and