king to herself.' The philosophy of Berkeley
is but the transposition of two words. For objects of sense he would
substitute sensations. He imagines himself to have changed the relation
of the human mind towards God and nature; they remain the same as
before, though he has drawn the imaginary line by which they are divided
at a different point. He has annihilated the outward world, but it
instantly reappears governed by the same laws and described under the
same names.

A like remark applies to David Hume, of whose philosophy the central
principle is the denial of the relation of cause and effect. He would
deprive men of a familiar term which they can ill afford to lose; but
he seems not to have observed that this alteration is merely verbal and
does not in any degree affect the nature of things. Still less did he
remark that he was arguing from the necessary imperfection of language
against the most certain facts. And here, again, we may find a parallel
with the ancients. He goes beyond facts in his scepticism, as they did
in their idealism. Like the ancient Sophists, he relegates the more
important principles of ethics to custom and probability. But crude and
unmeaning as this philosophy is, it exercised a great influence on his
successors, not unlike that which Locke exercised upon Berkeley and
Berkeley upon Hume himself. All three were both sceptical and ideal in
almost equal degrees. Neither they nor their predecessors had any true
conception of language or of the history of philosophy. Hume's
paradox has been forgotten by the world, and did not any more than the
scepticism of the ancients require to be seriously refuted. Like some
other philosophical paradoxes, it would have been better left to die
out. It certainly could not be refuted by a philosophy such as Kant's,
in which, no less than in the previously mentioned systems, the history
of the human mind and the nature of language are almost wholly ignored,
and the certainty of objective knowledge is transferred to the subject;
while absolute truth is reduced to a figment, more abstract and narrow
than Plato's ideas, of 'thing in itself,' to which, if we reason
strictly, no predicate can be applied.

The question which Plato has raised respecting the origin and nature of
ideas belongs to the infancy of philosophy; in modern times it would no
longer be asked. Their origin is only their history, so far as we know
it; there can be no other. We may trace them in la