Note 70 — NOTES (continued 2)

See his account of the terminations head and ness, or nez. in their hands, or you would fancy that our author had lately been at the Promontory of noses. Andrew Paraeus, on the solution of noses, was a novice to him. I am a little uneasy at this scheme of reducing all our ideas to points and solid substances. It is like the project to the philosopher, who contended that all the solid matter in the universe might be contained in a nutshell. This is ticklish ground to tread upon. At this rate, and if the proportion holds, each man will hardly have a single particle of understanding left to his share; and in two large quarto volumes, there may not perhaps be three grains of solid sense. Mr. Tooke, as a man of wit, may naturally wish to turn every thing to point. But this method will not hold in metaphysics: it is necessary to spin the thread of our ideas a little finer, and to take up with the flimsy texture of mental appearances. It is not easy to philosophize in solid epigrams, or explain abstruse questions by the tagging of points. I do not, however, mean to object to Mr. Tooke’s etymological system as an actual history of language, but to that superficial gloss of philosophy which is spread over it, and to the whole of his logic: I might instance in the axiom, on which the whole turns, that ‘it is as absurd to talk of a complex idea as of a complex star.’ Now this and such like phrases had better have been left out: it is a good antithesis, but it is nothing more. Or if it had been put into the mouth of Sir Francis, who is a young man of lively parts, and then gravely answered by Mr. Tooke, it would have been all very well. But as it stands, it is injurious to the interests of philosophy, and an affront to common sense. Hartley proceeded a good way in making a dissected map of the brain; and did all he could to prove the human soul to consist of a white curd. After all, he was forced to confess, that it was impossible to get at the mind itself; and he was obliged to rest satisfied with having spent many years, and wasted immense ingenuity, in ‘vicariously torturing and defacing’ its nearest representative in matter. He was too great a man not to perceive the impossibility of ever reconciling matter and motion with the nature of thought; and he therefore left his system imperfect. But it fell into good hands, and soon had all its deficiencies supplied, and its doubts cleared up, to the entire satisfaction and admiration of all the dull, the superficial, and the ignorant.