has appeared to him four times as large through a glass as to his naked eye, and four times as small through another glass. Hence he concludes, that, since a body cannot be at the same time four feet, sixteen feet, and but one foot in extent, there is no extent; therefore there is nothing. He had only to take any measure, and say of whatever extent this body may appear to me to be, it extends to so many of these measures.

He might very easily see that extent and solidity were quite different from sound, colour, taste, smell, &c. It is quite clear that these are sensations excited in us by the configuration of parts; but extent is not a sensation. When this lighted coal goes out, I am no longer warm; when the air is no longer struck, I cease to hear; when this rose withers, I no longer smell it: but the coal, the air, and the rose, have extent without me. Berkeley's paradox is not worth refuting.

Thus argued Zeno and Parmenides of old; and very clever they were: they would prove to you that a tortoise went along as swift as Achilles, for there was no such thing as motion: they discussed a hundred other questions equally important. Most of the Greeks made philosophy a juggle; and they transmitted their art to our schoolmen. Bayle himself was occasionally one of the set, and embroidered cobwebs like the rest. In his article Zeno, against the divisible extent of matter and the contiguity of bodies, he ventures to say what would not be tolerated in any six months' geome

trician.

It is worth knowing how Berkeley was drawn into this paradox. A long while ago, I had some conversation with him; and he told me that his opinion originated in our being unable to conceive what the subject of this extension is; and certainly, in his book, he triumphs, when he asks Hylas what this subject, this substratum, this substance, is? It is the extended body, answers Hylas. Then the bishop, under the name of Philonous, laughs at him: and poor Hylas, finding that he has said that extension is the subject of extension, and has therefore talked nonsense, remains quite confused, acknowledges that he understands no

thing at all of the matter, that there is no such thing as body, that the natural world does not exist, and that there is none but an intellectual world.

Hylas should only have said to Philonous:-We know nothing of the subject of this extension, solidity, divisibility, mobility, figure, &c.; I know no more of it than I do of the subject of thought, feeling, and will; but the subject does not the less exist, for it has essential properties of which it cannot be deprived.

We all resemble the greater part of the Parisian ladies, who live well without knowing what is put in their ragoûts: just so do we enjoy bodies without knowing of what they are composed. Of what does a body consist? Of parts; and these parts resolve themselves into other parts. What are these last parts? They, too, are bodies; you divide incessantly, without making any progress.

In short, a subtle philosopher, observing that a picture was made of ingredients of which no single ingredient was a picture, and a house of materials of which no one material was a house, imagined that bodies are composed of an infinity of small beings which are not bodies, and these are called monades. This system is not without its merits; and, were it revealed, I should think it very possible. These little beings would be so many mathematical points, a sort of souls, waiting only for a tenement: here would be a continual metempsychosis. This system is as good as another: I like it quite as well as the declination of atoms, the substantial forms, the versatile grace, or the vampires.

BOOKS.

SECTION I.

You despise books; you, whose whole lives are absorbed in the vanities of ambition, the pursuit of pleasure, or in indolence; but remember that all the known world, excepting only savage nations, is governed by books. All Africa, to the limits of Ethiopia and Nigritia, obeys the book of the Koran, after bowing to

2

the book of the Gospel. China is ruled by the moral book of Confucius, and a great part of India by the Vedah. Persia was governed for ages by the books of one of the Zoroasters.

In a law-suit, or a criminal process, your property, your honour, perhaps your life, depends on the interpretation of a book which you never read.

It is, however, with books as with men: a very small number play a great part; the rest are confounded with the multitude.

By whom are mankind led, in all civilized countries? By those who can read and write. You are acquainted with neither Hippocrates, nor Boerhaave, nor Sydenham; but you place your body in the hands of those who have read them. You leave your soul entirely to the care of those who are paid for reading the Bible; although there are not fifty of them who have read it through with attention.

The world is now so entirely governed by books, that they who command in the city of the Scipios and the Catos, have resolved that the books of their law shall be for themselves alone; they are their sceptre, which they have made it high treason in their subjects to touch without an express permission. In other countries it has been forbidden to think in print without letters-patent.*

There are nations in which thought is considered merely as an article of commerce, the operations of the human understanding being valued only at so much per sheet. If the bookseller happens to desire a privi lege for his merchandize, whether he is selling Rabelais or the Fathers of the Church, the magistrate grants the privilege without answering for the contents of the book.

"Oh, glorious thought, by heaven I will enjoy it!" exclaims Bajazet in the play, as will possibly Dr. Southey out of the play, on reading the foregoing sentence. Not only so; there is also reason to believe that, with great meekness and humility, the accomplished doctor might be prevailed upon to regulate the dispensation of the said letters-patent in his proper person, to the pious encouragement of his own visions," and the profitable annihilation of those of other people.

In another country, the liberty of explaining yourself by books is one of the most inviolable prerogatives. There you may print whatever you please, on pain of being tiresome, and of being punished if you have too much abused your natural right.

Before the admirable invention of printing, books were scarcer and dearer than jewels. There were scarcely any books in our barbarous nations, cither before Charlemagne or after him, until the time of Charles V. king of France, called the Wise; and from this Charles to Francis I. the scarcity was extreme.

The Arabs alone had them, from the eighth to the thirteenth century of our era.

China was full of them, when we could neither read nor write.

Copiers were much employed in the Roman empire, from the time of the Scipios until the irruption of the

barbarians.

1

This was a very ungrateful employment. The dealers always paid authors and copiers very ill. It required two years of assiduous labour for a copier to transcribe the whole Bible well on vellum; and what time and trouble to copy correctly in Greek and Latin the works of Origen, Clement of Alexandria, and all the other writers called Fathers!

St. Hieronymas, or Hieronymus, whom we call Je rome, says, in one of his satirical letters against Rufinus,* that he has ruined himself with buying the works of Órigen, against whom he wrote with so much bitterness and violence. "Yes," says he, "I have read Origen if it be a crime, I confess that I am guilty, and that I exhausted my purse in buying his works at Alexandria."

The Christian societies of the three first centuries had fifty-four gospels, of which, until Dioclesian's time, scarcely two or three copies found their way among the Romans of the old religion.

Among the Christians, it was an unpardonable crime to show the gospels to the Gentiles; they did not even lend them to the catechumens.

* Letter from Jerome to Pammachus.

When Lucian (insulting our religion, of which he knew very little) relates that " a troop of beggars took him up into a fourth story, where they were invoking the Father through the Son, and foretelling misfortunes to the emperor and the empire," he does not say that they showed him a single book. No Roman historian, no Roman author whatsoever, makes mention of the gospels.

When a Christian, who was unfortunately rash and unworthy of his holy religion, had publicly torn in pieces and trampled under foot an edict of the emperor Dioclesian, and had thus drawn down upon Christianity that persecution which succeeded the greatest toleration, the Christians were then obliged to give up their gospels and written authors to the magistrates, which before then had never been done. Those who gave up their books through fear of imprisonment, or even of death, were held by the rest of the Christians to be sacriligious apostates: they received the surname of traditores, whence we have the word traitor; and several bishops asserted that they should be rebaptised, which occasioned a dreadful schism.

The poems of Homer were long so little known, that Pisistratus was the first who put them in order and had them transcribed at Athens, about five hundred years before the Christian era.

Perhaps there are not at this time in all the East a dozen copies of the Vedah and the Zendah-Vestah.

In 1700, you would not have found a single book in all Rome, excepting the missals, and a few Bibles in the hands of papas drunk with brandy.*

The complaint now is of their too great abundance. But it is not for readers to complain: the remedy is in their own hands; nothing forces them to read. Nor for authors: they who make the multitude of books have not to complain of being pressed. Notwithstanding this enormous quantity, how few people read! But if they read, and read with advantage, should we have

* This very striking passage will speak volumes to a reflective mind. What has not a century produced? What may not another century produce?