all its power, it would use it in the manner most conformable to the views of so popular a minister.

Such seems to me the most rational judgment which those who knew Mr. Necker could form of his conduct. To him, certainly, the disasters of the revolution are chiefly imputable; but they must be set down to the account of his vanity and want of ability, not to that of his wickedness. I am as far from believing, with the admirers of Mr. Necker, that he was the ablest of ministers and the most virtuous of men, as from admitting, with his detractors, that he wished to destroy the monarchy, the nobility, and the clergy, because he was himself a republican of low extraction, and protestant. Posterity, which will appreciate him without prejudice, will see in him a man, selfish, ambitious, and vain; foolishly intoxicated with the merit which he believed himself to possess, and jealous of that of others desirous of excess of honour and of power; virtuous in words and through ostentation more than in reality. In a word, he was a presumptuous empiric in politics and morals; but he was conscientiously so, for he was always the first dupe of his own empiricism.

'He was attached to France, if not by affection, at least from always having considered it as the theatre of glory to which he thought himself summoned.

Fifty years sooner, when France was in tranquillity, his admini stration would have proved no more hurtful to that nation, than the magnetism of Mesmer to men of firmness and sound understanding.

As a minister, he had no other merit than that of having acquired a perfect knowledge of what is called the mechanism of finances; but he was perfectly ignorant of the laws of the kingdom, and of the principles of administration. As a literary man, although his works are laboriously composed, and written with affected emphasis, yet the useful truths which some of them contain will secure him a place among the distinguished writers of the age.'

M. Bertrand then proceeds to give an account of the troubles in Brittany. This relation is interesting, as it manifests the state of the public mind in one of the greatest provinces of France at the beginning of the Revolution, and the fermentation of a great provincial metropolis at the moment of the explosion of the national volcano. This part of the work, we find, has given offence to some of the Breton emigrants. A gentleman, who subscribes himself Le Chevalier de G. addressed to M. Bertrand a letter on the subject, in M. Peltier's Journal; and the author has replied by a letter addressed to M. Peltier. With these particulars, however, we shall not detain our readers; and, indeed, we must now interrupt our examination of this curious work, with the intention of resuming it in the ensuing month.

[To be continued.]

ART.

ART. II. Four Essays; on the Ordinary and Extraordinary Ope rations of the Holy Spirit; on the Application of Experience to Religion, and on Enthusiasm and Fanaticism: To which is prefixed a Preliminary Dissertation, on the Nature of clear Ideas, and the Advantage of distinct Knowledge. In these Essays the Nature of the Opinions maintained, the Justness of the Reasonings employed, and the Propriety of the Language adopted, in the Scripture Characters of the Rev. Thomas Robinson, are fully considered. By Thomas Ludlam, A. M. Rector of Foston, Leicestershire. 8vo. pp. 115. 2s. 6d. Rivingtons. 1797.

N°

o chemist, nor alchemist, ever undertook a more arduous task than that logician or metaphysician attempts, who endeavours to analyse the ideas and decompose the language of fanatics. Yet this is the undertaking in which Mr. Ludlam has ventured to engage in these essays, and, we add with pleasure, which he has accomplished with a considerable degree of success. The work is evidently the produce of a mind inured to investigation, and well skilled in the art of reasoning. The author has been, moreover, an attentive observer of the modes of thinking, feeling, and speaking, which prevail among that class of religionists-to use the fashionable term-which have been distinguished by the appellation of methodists, and among other sects of fimilar descriptions. Adopting the established belief concerning the doctrine of divine assistance, ordinary and extraordinary, Mr. L. infers the nature and limits of both, from the end which they are respectively intended to answer; and he maintains that the former is no longer to be expected, and that the latter may subsist without conveying any original knowlege unattainable by the use of our natural faculties, and even without being distinguishable from the operations of a man's own mind. In order to unravel that confusion of ideas which produces fanaticism, the nature of experimental knowlege is considered, in connection with the nature of religious truth; and it is distinctly and clearly shewn that belief and experience are different things, and that fanatics mistake the confidence of expectation for the certainty of experience, and the positiveness of opinion for the conviction of reason. The experience of belief, or a consciousness of believing, it is well remarked, is a proof of the reality of the belief of him who entertains it, but not of the truth of what he believes.

• When we are told that many Christians, by their heavenly tempers, and lively joys at the hour of their departure, put it beyond a doubt that their system is not a cunningly-devised fable, the argument has no foundation. These tempers and these joys are a proof of their own confidence in what they believe, but they neither are Seripture Characters, vol. IV. p. 292, or 352.'

nor

nor can be a proof of the truth or the excellence of their religion, as we are told. The Mussulman who exults in his belief of the Ma hometan paradise, and the papist who thews by his lively joys his be lief in the masses which are to deliver his soul from purgatory, give just as good a proof of the truth and excellence of their respective religions. Exactly of the same sort is that notion, that the numbers who hold abstract, or are influenced by practical, opinions, are a proof of the truth of those opinions; and this is sometimes called "God's giving his testimony." But, surely, that can never be considered as the testimony of God which may be produced, with equal force, in behalf of falsehood as well as truth, and which has been continually urged in behalf of Popery and Mahometanism. Piety and truth have no necessary connexion.-But the piety of certain persons is right because their faith is true; and their faith is true because their piety is right.'

Enthusiasm, or fanaticism, Mr. L. correctly defines to be "an unsupported claim to immediate and sensible intercourse with God." The unreasonableness of expecting any such intercourse, and the weakness of imagining or the dishonesty of pretending to any such intercourse in the present state of the Christian world, are forcibly argued, both on scriptural grounds, and from general principles. In short, it is the clear result of these Essays, that the great foundation of enthusiasm and fanaticism is an absurd confusion of the ideas of faith and experience.

The Preliminary Dissertation is an accurate inquiry concerning the causes of confusion, or of distinctness, of ideas; from which we shall extract, as a specimen of the author's correctness of conception and language, a passage on the ideas formed by the intellect:

The ideas formed by our intellectual powers are the mere creatures of the mind, the offspring of the imagination: the language concerning them is, "conceive so and so." These ideas are, and must be, the same in all mankind: they are not only the same; they are equally clear and distinct in all men. The relations existing between these ideas are, and must also be, equally clear; for these relations arise cut of the formation, or conception, of the original idea; and therefore all men must, and in fact do, agree in the truths which arise from the knowledge of these relations. There is no difference in opinion respecting the validity of Euclid's demonstrations, or the certainty of his propositions. When you bid a man conceive a curve of such a sort that a point can be taken within the curve equidistant from every part of such curve, you include in your conception or formation of this curve all the properties of the circle; and, when you describe the diameter as a right line passing from one side of the curve to the other, and drawn through the point aforesaid, whoever understands

Scripture Characters, vol. I. p. 228, 427, or 281, 517.' + Ib. p. 247, or 298.'

these

these words sees immediately that the diameter is, and must be, double the radius. These ideas, formed by the mind itself, have no arche type: the figures designed to illustrate mathematical propositions, by aiding the imagination, are drawn from the original conception, not the conception taken from any archetype*; and, as all ideal images are formed through the sight, were mathematical ideas formed from an archetype, blind persons would be incapable of mathematical reasoning; but it is well known some of the clearest reasoners upon these subjects never enjoyed the benefit of sight. The words also, annexed to these ideas formed by the mind, are from the nature of the ideas, as distinct in their meaning as the ideas are clear in themselves; for, they are merely the names of simple ideas and when an idea which is not compounded of other ideas, and consequently has no parts, is itself clearly ascertained, no other obscurity can arise respecting its name, or the sound of the letters expressing it, but á mistake of the name, i. e. the application of a wrong name to it, a mistake of all others most easy to be detected.'

:

Though we do not expect that this publication will make many converts from fanaticism, it may be of great use in preventing the increase of this mental disease.

ART. III. The Environs of London: being an historical Account of the Towns, Villages, and Hamlets, within twelve Miles of the Capital. By the Rev. Daniel Lysons, &c. &c. Vol. IV. Counties of Herts, Essex, and Kent. 4to. 11. 16s. Boards. Cadell jun. and Davies. 1796.

TH

'HE character which we have given of the former volumes of this curious and entertaining work (see Rev. vol. xi. p. 384. and vol. xviii. p. 379.) might render it unnecessary for us to do more than announce the appearance of the fourth and concluding volume: but we are unwilling to let it pass by us without laying it under due contribution, for the amusement of such of our readers as may be deterred by its bulk from a regular perusal; though we rather wish that those specimens may induce them to search farther for themselves.

The history of the Royal Observatory at Greenwich will prove interesting:

The foundation owed its origin to the following circumstance: Monsieur de St. Pierre, a Frenchman, who came to London in 1675, having demanded a reward from King Charles II. for his discovery of a method of finding the longitude by the moon's distance from a star, a commission was appointed to examine into his pretensions. Mr. Flamsteed, who was appointed one of the commissioners, furnished St. Pierre with certain data of observation by which to calculate the longitude of a given place. This he was

* See Beddoes's Observations upon the Nature of Demonstrative Evidence.'

unable

unable to do; but excused himself by asserting that the data were false; Mr. Flamsteed contended that they were true, but allowed that nothing certain could be deduced from them, for want of more exact tables of the moon, and more correct places of the fixed stars, than Tycho's observations, made with plain sight, afforded. This being made known to the King, he declared that his pilots and sailors should not want such an assistance. He resolved therefore to found an observatory, for the purpose of ascertaining the motions of the moon, and the places of the fixed stars, as a means of discovering that great desideratum, the longitude at sea; and Flamsteed, who was recommended to his Majesty by Sir Jonas Moor, was appointed Astronomer Royal *. Several places were talked of for the site of the observatory, as Hyde-park, the Polemical College at Chelsea, (now the Hospital,) &c. Mr. Flamsteed went to see Chelsea College, and approved of it; but Sir Christopher Wren having recommended Greenwich-castle, that situation was preferred. The King allowed 500l. in money towards the building; bricks from Tilbury-fort; where there was a spare stock, and materials from the castle, which was pulled down; promising to grant any thing farther that should be necessary. The foundation was laid August 10, 1675; and in the month of August the next year, Flamsteed was put in possession of the Observatory, which, from him, has acquired the name of Flamsteed-house. In September he began to make observations with a sextant of six feet radius, contrived by himself, and such other instruments as were then in use. He resided there many years, doing ample justice to the Royal choice; and fhewing himself so eminently qualified for his office that, as has very justly been observed t, he seemed born for it. Meanwhile he was walking in an almost untrodden path, being one of the first who made use of telescopic sight and it was not till 1689, that he had the advantage of a mural quadrant; and even then, it was not such as is now in use, but one contrived and divided partly by himself, without any help but the strength of his own genius t. Flamsteed died at Greenwich,

Dec. 31, 1719; when he was succeeded by Dr. Halley, who was an astronomer also of great eminence. Finding, upon his appointment, the Observatory bare both of instruments and furniture §, he began immediately to furnish it anew, and to fix a transit instrument. A mural quadrant of eight feet radius, constructed under the direction of Graham, was put up at the public expence, in 1725 ||. Dr. Halley's observations were principally directed to the motions of the moon he died at the observatory in 1742, aged 85, and was buried at Lee, near Greenwich, being succeeded as Astronomer Royal by Dr. Bradley; whose discoveries, already before the public,

( *

Prolegomena (prefixed to the third vol.) of Flamsteed's Historia Cœlestis, p. 101, 102.

Preface to Flamsteed's Observations, published after his death. 'Wollaston's Preface to the Astronomical Catalogue, p. x. These had been taken away by Flamsteed's executors, as put expence.

up at his

Biograph. Brit.'