dived into the depths of the human soul. For the last two or three years of his life, he had a cancerous wart, which spread over one eye and across his nose to the other eye, and at last carried him off. During all his illness he remained a hard student and serious Christian. He died, November 25. 1729. On his death the English students leave the university, the attendance at which is reported by Wodrow as very thin in December; and it does not seem to improve till Hutcheson commences his lectures in the following October.

Carmichael published a small Introduction to Logic, which reached a second edition in 1722. He defines logic as the science which shews the method of discovering truth, and of expounding it to others. He represents it as having to do with judgment, but then it also treats of apprehension as necessary to judgment. Under apprehension he speaks of the doctrine of the difference of the comprehension and extension of a notion, and of the former being evolved by definition, and the latter by division, as being quite commonplace. He distinguishes between immediate and mediate judgment. Immediate is between two ideas immediately compared; mediate, in which the comparison is by means of a third judgment, is called discourse. He says all knowledge may ultimately be resolved into immediate judgments, known in their own light; and he divides immediate judgments into two classes: one abstract, in which there is no direction of the mind to the thing itself, as really existing, e.g., the whole is greater than a part; and the other intuitive, when the mind has a consciousness of the thing as present, as, for example, the proposition, Ego cogitans existo. Coming to mediate judgment, he gives as the supreme rule of affirmative syllogism the axiom, "Things which are the same with one and the same third are the same with one another;" and of negative syllogisms the axiom, "Things of which one is the same with a third, and the other not the same, are not the same with one another." These statements show a "thinking, poring" man, and will be valued most by those who have thought longest on these subjects. We see a new historical step in the transmission of the distinction between the extension and comprehension of a notion; we see that the difference between immediate and mediate judgments was known in these times; and that there was an attempt to find a supreme rule of mediate reasoning in the sameness (here lies the looseness) of two things with a third. Carmichael is aware that there are propositions seen to be true in their own light; and that there is an intuitive apprehension, in which the thing is known as present; and many will think that the ego cogitans existo is a preferable form to the cogito ergo sum of Descartes.

Gershom Carmichael.

17

Carmichael published an edition of Puffendorf, "De Officio Hominis et Civis," with Notes and Supplement, for the use of students, described by Hutcheson as more valuable than the original work. In the notes he offers many acute observations, and gives extracts from De Vries, Titius, and Grotius. In the first supplement he speaks of a divine law, to which all morality has reference, which alone obliges, and to which all obligation of human laws is ultimately to be referred. The law may be made known either by means of signs, oral or written, or by the constitution of human nature, and other things which offer themselves to the observation of men. What is known by the latter is called natural law, which has two meanings, one the faculty of reason itself as given to man by God, and the other such a power of intelligence as can discover what is in nature by ordinary diligence. He takes far higher grounds of religion than those adopted by Shaftesbury and Hutcheson. He declares that no one can be said to obey the law who does not know what the law enjoins, or who acts without reference to God and his law. At the same time, he seems to be a eudaimonist, and inclined to look on God as having an ultimate respect to happiness in his law. He has a second supplement, calm, moderate, and sensible, on the "Duties of Man towards his own Mind," and a third on "Quasi-Contracts."

His latest work, published in 1729, shortly before his death, is a Synopsis of Natural Theology. In his preface he tells us that, in teaching pneumatology, he had used two Belgian text books. He advises that the forms of the Aristotelian school be avoided, as obscure and artificial, but declares at the same time that the doctrines of the scholastics, at least of the older, are more agreeable to reason and holy Scripture than those opposed to them in his day, especially in their finding a foundation for morality and obligation in God; and he denounces some who, of late years, with a showy appearance of genius and eloquence, would separate morality from religion, referring, I should suppose, to the school of Shaftesbury, against which, therefore, he thus gives his dying testimony, as it were in the name of the old philosophy.

In establishing the existence and perfections of God, he draws arguments from a variety of sources. He would call in metaphysical principles. Thus he urges that there must be ens aliquod independens, otherwise we are landed in an infinite series of causes, which he declares (with Aristotle) self-evidently impossible. He appeals, with the French theologian Abbadie, to universal consent. But he reckons the arguments of Descartes and De Vries, and that by Samuel Clarke, as unsatisfactory. He maintains that we can argue that what we attribute to a thing in idea exists, only after we have shown that the thing

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exists. He maintains that the existence of God as an existing being is to be established, not à priori, but à posteriori, and appeals to the traces of order, beauty, and design in the universe, and to the illustrations to be found in the writings of Ray, Pelling, Cheyne, Derham, Niewentite, and in Pitcairn on the Circulation of the Blood. He refers to the properties of matter, as established by Newton, and argues, as Baxter did so resolutely afterwards, that matter cannot move of itself, but needs a new force impressed on it In regard to the dependence of creature on created power, he holds that things spiritual and corporeal exist so long as they have being from the creative efficacy of God, and speaks of the need of a divine precursus or concursus. He admits, however, that created spirits have etficacy in themselves. He refers to Leibnitz, and shews that he was well acquainted with his theory of possible worlds. It is surely interesting to observe a modest and retiring Scottish writer so thoroughly acquainted with the highest philosophy of his time, British and continental, and yet retaining his own independence in the midst of his learning. If he cannot be regarded as the founder of the new school, he has the credit of judiciously combining some of the best properties of the old and new philosophy.

ANDREW BAXTER.

Baxter cannot be justly described as a leader or a follower of the Scottish school. His method is not really nor professedly that of inductive observation. He belongs rather to the school of Samuel Clarke, to whom he often refers, and always with admiration. But he was a Scotchman, and an independent thinker: he does not belong to the old philosophy; but he was a contemporary of the men who founded the Scottish school, and treated of many of the same topics. He had readers both in England and Scotland in his own day, and for some years after his death, and he deserves a passing notice as the representative of a style of thought which met with considerable favour in his time, but had to give way before the new school.

We have a life of him in Kippis's Biographia Britannica, drawn up from materials supplied by his son. He was the son of a merchant in Old Aberdeen, where he was born in 1686 or 1687. His mother was Elizabeth Frazer, descended from a considerable family in the north. He was educated at King's College, Aberdeen, where, at the beginning of last century, he would be trained in the old logic and metaphysics. But, as we shall see more fully in future articles, a considerable amount of a fresh literary taste, and of a spirit of philosophical inquiry, began to spring up in Aberdeen in connection with the two

Universities pretty early in that century. Baxter, besides being a good mathematician, was well acquainted with the discoveries of Sir Isaac Newton, and with the theories of Leibnitz as to matter and motion. He was familiar with the Essay on the Human Understanding, but had a deeper appreciation of the speculations of Clarke.

The chief professional employment of his life was that of tutor to young men of good family. The boys who, in our days, would be sent to the great public schools of England taught by Oxford or Cambridge masters, were very often, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, put under tutors, who went about with them to the colleges at home, or travelled with them abroad. The occupation of teaching and travelling tutor was one coveted by young men of limited means and of a reading taste, who did not wish officially to enter the Church, and had no other office open to them than that referred to, fitted to furnish them with means of study. When the tutor had trained and travelled with the heir of a good estate, the family felt bound to make provision for him for life. It was thus that, in the seventeenth century, Hobbes had been tutor to two successive Earls of Devonshire; that, in the eighteenth century, Thomson the poet became tutor to the Lord Chancellor Talbot's son on the Grand Tour; that Hume coveted the office of travelling tutor to Murray of Broughton; and Turnbull and A. Smith gave up chairs in the Scottish colleges to become tutors, the one to the Wauchopes of Niddrie (?) and the other to the Duke of Buccleuch. Baxter was tutor, among others, to Lord John Gray, Lord Blantyre, and Mr Hay of Drummelzier.

In the spring of 1741, he went abroad with Mr Hay, having also Lord Blantyre under his care. He resided some years at Utrecht, and thence made excursions into Flanders, France, and Germany. Carlyle met him-" Immateriality Baxter," as he calls him-at Utrecht in 1745, and says of him, "though he was a profound philosopher and a hard student, he was at the same time a man of the world, and of such pleasing conversation as attracted the young." His son had described him as being at polite assemblies in Holland, and a favourite of ladies; but a writer in the Corrigenda of the following volume of the Biographia, after mentioning that he saw him daily for more than two years at Utrecht, declares :-" His dress was plain and simple, not that of a priggish Frenchman, but of a mathematician who was not a sloven. I am pretty well persuaded. that, while in the Low Countries, he never had any conversation with women of higher or lower degree, unless it were to ask for the bill at an ordinary, or desire the servant maid to bring up the turf for his chimney." The same writer describes him as a "plain, decent, good-humoured man, who passed all his

time, but what was Lestowed at his meals, in meditation and study." His son describes him as social and cheerful, and extremely studious, sometimes sitting up whole nights reading and writing.

In 1724, he had married the daughter of Mr Mebane, a minister in Berwickshire, and while he was abroad, his wife and family seem to have resided at Berwick-on-Tweed. In 1747, he returned to Scotland, and resided till his death at Whittingham, in East Lothian, where he employed himself in country affairs, and in his philosophic studies. In his latter years, le was much afflicted with gout and gravel. In January 29. 1750, he wrote to (the afterwards notorious) John Wilkes, with whom he had formed a friendship in Holland, "I am a trouble to all about me, especially my poor wife, who has the life of a slave night and day in helping to take care of a diseased carcase. He had long, he states, considered the advantages of a separate state, but "I shall soon know more than all men I leave behind He died April 13. 1750, and was buried in the family vault of Mr Hay at Whittingham.

me.'

He published his principal werk, " An Inquiry into the Nature of the Human Soul," in 1733,* and it reached a second edition in 1737. In 1750, shortly after his death, was published, "An Appendix to his Inquiry into the Nature of the Human Soul." He had taken a great body of manuscripts with him to Holland; in the letter referred to, he speaks fondly of his unfinished manuscripts, in which he had discussed "a great many miscellaneous subjects in philosophy of a very serious nature, few of them ever considered before, as I know of." In 1779, the Rev. Dr Duncan of South Warnborough published from his manuscripts, after correcting the style, "The Evidence of Reason in proof of the Immortality of the Soul," and at the close is his letter to Wilkes. Another work of his, entitled

Histor," discussing, on the English side, the controversy between the British and Continental writers as to force, and on the side of Clarke, the controversy between Clarke and Leibnitz, was offered to Millar the bookseller; but the new generation did not appreciate his life-labours; his day was over, and the offer was declined.

The avowed design of Baxter, in all his works, is to establish the existence of an immaterial power. Such a defence seemed to him to be required, in consequence of the new views of the

* Stewart was not "able to discover the date of the first editio"," and others have been as unsuccessful. It is criticised in Jackson's "Dissertation on Mater and Spirit," 1735, and referred to in Bibliotheque Raisonnée des Ouvrages des Savans, for April, May, and June 1735. But the question is settled by its appearing (as a friend has shown us) in The Gentleman's Magazine, in the register of books published Cet›ber 1733.