ve
been proposed of both, before I proceed to a more particular enquiry
concerning our impressions. This will not, perhaps, in the end be found
foreign to our present purpose.

SECT. III. OF THE ANTIENT PHILOSOPHY.

Several moralists have recommended it as an excellent method of becoming
acquainted with our own hearts, and knowing our progress in virtue,
to recollect our dreams in a morning, and examine them with the same
rigour, that we would our most serious and most deliberate actions.
Our character is the same throughout, say they, and appears best
where artifice, fear, and policy have no place, and men can neither be
hypocrites with themselves nor others. The generosity, or baseness
of our temper, our meekness or cruelty, our courage or pusilanimity,
influence the fictions of the imagination with the most unbounded
liberty, and discover themselves in the most glaring colours. In like
manner, I am persuaded, there might be several useful discoveries made
from a criticism of the fictions of the antient philosophy, concerning
substances, and substantial form, and accidents, and occult qualities;
which, however unreasonable and capricious, have a very intimate
connexion with the principles of human nature.

It is confest by the most judicious philosophers, that our ideas of
bodies are nothing but collections formed by the mind of the ideas of
the several distinct sensible qualities, of which objects are composed,
and which we find to have a constant union with each other. But however
these qualities may in themselves be entirely distinct, it is certain
we commonly regard the compound, which they form, as ONE thing, and
as continuing the SAME under very considerable alterations. The
acknowledged composition is evidently contrary to this supposed
simplicity, and the variation to the identity. It may, therefore, be
worth while to consider the causes, which make us almost universally
fall into such evident contradictions, as well as the means by which we
endeavour to conceal them.

It is evident, that as the ideas of the several distinct, successive
qualities of objects are united together by a very close relation, the
mind, in looking along the succession, must be carryed from one part
of it to another by an easy transition, and will no more perceive the
change, than if it contemplated the same unchangeable object. This easy
transition is the effect, or rather essence of relation; I and as the
imagination rea