there exists, it has been asserted, an important exception most
honourable to the moderns, and in the merit of which our own country
claims the largest share. Sir James Mackintosh,--(who, amid the
variety of his talents and attainments, is not of less repute for the
depth and accuracy of his philosophical inquiries than for the
eloquence with which he is said to render their most difficult results
perspicuous, and the driest attractive,)--affirmed in the Lectures,
delivered by him in Lincoln's Inn Hall, that the law of association as
established in the contemporaneity of the original impressions, formed
the basis of all true psychology; and that any ontological or
metaphysical science, not contained in such (that is, an empirical)
psychology, was but a web of abstractions and generalizations. Of this
prolific truth, of this great fundamental law, he declared Hobbes to
have been the original discoverer, while its full application to the
whole intellectual system we owed to Hartley; who stood in the same
relation to Hobbes as Newton to Kepler; the law of association being
that to the mind, which gravitation is to matter.

Of the former clause in this assertion, as it respects the comparative
merits of the ancient metaphysicians, including their commentators,
the School-men, and of the modern and British and French philosophers
from Hobbes to Hume, Hartley, and Condillac, this is not the place to
speak. So wide indeed is the chasm between Sir James Mackintosh's
philosophical creed and mine, that so far from being able to join
hands, we could scarcely make our voices intelligible to each other:
and to bridge it over would require more time, skill, and power than I
believe myself to possess. But the latter clause involves for the
greater part a mere question of fact and history, and the accuracy of
the statement is to be tried by documents rather than reasoning.