they proceed."

Having thus defined his subject, the lecturer goes on, in his second and
third lectures, to trace the history of Moral Philosophy, from Pythagoras
to Mrs. Trimmer. Plato is praised for beauty of style, and blamed for
mistiness of doctrine. Aristotle is contrasted, greatly to his
disadvantage, with Bacon. "Volumes of Aristotelian philosophy have been
written which, if piled one upon another, would have equalled the Tower of
Babel in Height, and far exceeded it in Confusion." But to Bacon "we are
indebted for an almost daily extension of our knowledge of the laws of
nature in the outward world; and the same modest and cautious spirit of
enquiry, extended to Moral Philosophy, will probably give us clear,
intelligible ideas of our spiritual nature."

The remaining lectures of this course are those which suffered most
severely from the flames, and are indeed in so fragmentary a condition as
to render any close criticism of them impossible. But enough has been
quoted to show that Sydney Smith, so far as he was in any sense concerned
with philosophy, was a sworn foe to mysticism and ideality, and a
worshipper of Baconian common-sense even in the sphere of mind and soul.

He was never tired of poking fun at his philosophical friends in Edinburgh.
When sending some Scotch grouse to Lady Holland, he said--"I take the
liberty to send you two brace of grouse--curious, because killed by a
Scotch metaphysician: in other and better language, they are mere ideas,
shot by other ideas, out of a pure intellectual notion called a gun." In
another letter to the same correspondent he says--"I hope you are reading
Mr. Stewart's book, and are far gone in the Philosophy of Mind--a science,
as he repeatedly tells us, still in its infancy. I propose, myself, to wait
till it comes to years of discretion."

To his friend Jeffrey he wrote in 1804:--

"I exhort you to restrain the violent tendency of your nature for
analysis, and to cultivate synthetical propensities. What is virtue?
What's the use of truth? What's the use of honour? What's a guinea but
a d----d yellow circle? The whole effort of your mind is to destroy.
Because others build slightly and eagerly, you employ yourself in
kicking down their houses, and contract a sort of aversion for the
more honourable, useful, and difficult task of building well yourself."

He reports a saying of his little boy's, "which in Scotland would be heard
as o