Ellis in his Enquiry, &c. language cannot be contrived without thought and knowledge; but the mind cannot have thought and knowledge,

constitute an incitement, where the very notion of the subject matter to be communicated has never yet been conceived? For it must be remembered, that as we are now speaking of language as subsequent to reasoning, and of reasoning as sub. sequent to abstraction, we must conceive abstraction to be exerted, without any notion actually acquired either of reason. ing or language, or any direction or forecast suggested by a reference to either. Abstraction, in short, in this view of the case, is a random and unintelligible movement, which is excited by no design, proposes no object, and admits no regulation. So irrational a foundation for a rational superstrucz ture, cannot be deliberately maintained.

Dr. Price, whose system imposed on him the necessity of upholding the existence of abstract ideas, as essential to all the operations of the understanding, and as being implied in every act of our judgment," felt himself at the same time obliged, from the foregoing considerations, to deny that such ideas can be acquired by any mental process, such as that of abstraction. Were abstract ideas (he observes) formed by the mind in any such manner, "it seems unavoidable to con. ceive, that it has them, at the very time, that it is supposed to be employed in forming them. Thus, from any particular idea of a triangle, it is said we can form the general one: but does not the very reflection said to be necessary to this, on a greater or lesser triangle, imply, that the general idea is already in the mind?" (Review of the principal difficulties in morals, p. 37.) The learned Cudworth, in like manner, speaking of the understanding, as an artificer that is to fabricate abstract notions out of sensible ideas, demands, whe ther, "when this artificer goes about his work, he knows what he is to make of them beforehand, and unto what shape

till it has language; therefore language must be previously taught, before man could become a rational creature; and none could teach him but

to bring them. If he do not, he must needs be a bungling. workman: but if he do, he is prevented in his design, his work being already done to his hand; for he must needs have the intelligible idea of that which he knows or understands, already within himself." (Treatise concerning Eternal and Immutable Morality, pp. 220, 221.) Mr. Harris, also, is led, as he says, by the common account of the mode, in which our ideas are generated in the mind, "to view the human soul in the light of a crucible, where truths are produced by a kind of logical chemistry." Hermes, pp. 404, 405. These writers are accordingly forced into the gratuitous supposition, of a distinct faculty, for the origin of abstract ideas in the human mind. This Dr. Price pronounces to be the "faculty, whose natural object is truth." (Rev. p. 37.) And Cudworth, from whom he has largely drawn, and whose mysterious solution of this difficulty he does not altogether reject, ascribes the origin of our abstract ideas to a certain perceptive power of the Noetical part of the soul, which acting by itself, exerts from within the intelligible ideas of things virtually contained in its own cognoscitive power, that are universal and abstract notions, from which, as it were, looking down wards, it comprehends individual things." Treatise, pp. 217, 218. Mr. Harris, again, accounts for the existence of abstract ideas, by a connective act of the soul, by means of which, by an energy as spontaneous and familiar to its nature as the seeing of colours is to the eye, it discerns at once, what in many is one; what, in things dissimilar and different, is simi lar, and the same:" and this "connecting or unifying power” of the mind, he makes to be the same with that which discerns. truth and by means of this alone it is, that he considers, that individuals themselves can become the objects of knowledge

66

God. (Scholar Armed. vol. i. p. 140.) Locke's principles concerning the nature of language, although he did not see his way with suffici ent clearness to lead him to the right conclu sion, the last named writer proves to be per fectly correspondent to the above reasoning. (Ibid. pp. 138, 139.) And in an able work published at Berlin by Süsmilchius in 1766, the same principles are successfully applied to establish the same conclusion; namely, that the ori

in which he seems to coincide with the mystical notions of Cudworth. See Hermes, p. 360–372.

Into such extraordinary straits, and unjustifiable assump tions, have these learned and able writers been drawn, whilst they maintained the existence of universal ideas, and at the same time found it impossible to accede to the notion of their production by the process of abstraction. They would have reasoned more justly, if from the impossibility of acquiring universal ideas by such a process, they had inferred that no such ideas do actually exist in the mind: and that the general, abstract notion, which is at the same time to include all and none of the circumstances of individual existence, is a fiction which never can be realized. They would have arrived at a conclusion still more comprehensive and important, if they had drawn this farther consequence; that there is not in nature any Universal really existing; and that since no idea can be other than the idea of an individual, to terms alone can a universal or general nature be ascribed.-From all which it must follow as a necessary result; that without language neither can knowledge be acquired, nor reasoning exerted, by the human intellect: and that since language must precede these, it cannot have been discovered by them, and therefore cannot be deemed the offspring of human invention,

gin of language must have been divine. Even Hobbes admits, that "the first author of speech was God himself, that instructed Adam how to name such creatures as he presented to his sight." (Leviath. ch. iv. p. 12.)

From the impossibility of conceiving how lan guage could have been invented, some have been led, in opposition to all just reasoning, to pronounce it innate.* Many even of the anci ents, totally unaided by revelation, were obliged to confess, that the discovery of this art exceeded all human powers. Thus Socrates, in the Cratylus of Plato, is represented as saying, "the first names were framed by the Gods:" and in the same work we are told, that "the imposition of names on things, belonged to a na→ ture superior to that of man," and that it could "pertain only to him, who hath a full discernment of their several natures."-Pol. Syn. on Gen. ii. 19.Stilling. Orig. Sac. B. i. ch. i, §. 3. and Euseb. Præp. Evang. lib. xi. cap. 6.

It must be remarked, that they who hold the opinion, that language is of mere human invention, are for the most part obliged to proceed on suppositions of the original state of man,

* See Shuckf. Connect, vol, i, p. 109. and also an essay of Count de Fraula, (Mem, de l'Acad. Imper. & Roy, Brussels. vol. 14.) in which language is represented as an instinctive quality of man, constituting a part of his very creation,

totally inconsistent with the Mosaic history. Thus, amongst the ancients, Diodorus Siculus, (Biblioth. lib. i.) Vitruvius, (De Archit. lib. ii. cap. 1, 2.) Lucretius, &c. ground their reason→ ings upon an idea, (derived from the atomic cos mogony of Moschus, Democritus, and Epicurus, which represented human beings, as springing from the earth, like vegetables,) that men first lived in woods and caves like brute beasts, utter ing only cries and indistinct noises, until gradual association for mutual defence, brought with it at length conventional signs for communication, And the respectable and learned, though strangely fanciful, author of the Origin and Progress of Language, who is among the latest that have written in defence of this opinion, is compelled to admit, that the invention of language is too difficult for the savage state of man; and accordingly he holds, that men having been placed originally in a solitary and savage state, must have been associated for ages, and have carried on some common work, and even framed some civil polity, and must have continued for a considerable length of time in that state, so as ultimately to acquire such powers of abstraction as to be able to form general ideas, before language could possibly be formed. Now whether such theories, in supposing a mute emergence from savage barbarism to reflecting