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1. Physica.

§ 2. First, the knowledge of things, as they are in their own proper beings, their constitution, properties, and operations; whereby I mean not only matter and body, but spirits also, which have their proper natures, constitutions, and operations, as well as bodies. This, in a little more enlarged sense of the word, I call Quoin, or natural philosophy. The end of this is bare speculative truth; and whatsoever can afford the mind of man any such, falls under this branch, whether it be God himself, angels, spirits, bodies, or any of their affections, as number, and figure, &c.

§ 3. Secondly, Ipari, the skill of right 2. Practica. applying our own powers and actions for

the attainment of things good and useful. The most considerable under this head is ethics, which is the seeking out those rules and measures of human actions which lead to happiness, and the means to practise them. The end of this is not bare specula tion, and the knowledge of truth; but right, and a conduct suitable to it.

3. Enew-
T.
τική.

Σημειω

§4. Thirdly, the third branch may be called Σημειωτική, or the doctrine of signs, the most usual whereof being words, it is aptly enough termed also Acy, logic; the business whereof is to consider the nature of signs the mind makes use of for the understanding of things, or conveying its knowledge to others. For since the things the mind contemplates are none of them, besides itself, present to the understanding, it is necessary that something else, as a sign or representation of the thing it considers, should be present to it: and these are ideas. And because the scene of ideas that makes one man's thoughts cannot be laid open to the immediate view of another, nor laid up any where but in the memory, a no very sure repository; therefore to communicate our thoughts to one another, as well as record them for our own use, signs of our ideas are also necessary. Those which men have found most convenient, and

therefore generally make use of, are articulate sounds. The consideration then of ideas and words, as the great instruments of knowledge, makes no despicable part of their contemplation who would take a view of human knowledge in the whole extent of it. And perhaps if they were distinctly weighed, and duly considered, they would afford us another sort of logic and critic than what we have been hitherto acquainted with.

This is the

first division

of the objects of

§ 5. This seems to me the first and most general, as well as natural division of the objects of our understanding. For a man

can employ his thoughts about nothing, knowledge. but either the contemplation of things themselves for the discovery of truth; or about the things in his own power, which are his own actions, for the attainment of his own ends; or the signs the mind makes use of both in the one and the other, and the right ordering of them for its clearer information. All which three, viz. things as they are in themselves knowable; actions as they depend on us, in order to happiness; and the right use of signs, in order to knowledge, being toto cælo different, they seemed to me to be the three great provinces of the intellectual world, wholly separate and distinct one from another.

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A

DEFENCE

OF

MR. LOCKE'S OPINION

CONCERNING

PERSONAL IDENTITY.

THE candid author of the late Essay upon Personal Identity cannot justly be offended with any attempt to explain and vindicate Mr. Locke's hypothesis, if it is carried on in the same spirit, though it should be attended with the overthrow of some of his own favourite notions; since he owns that it is of consequence to form right opinions on this point: which was indeed once deemed an important one, how little soever such may be regarded now-a-days. I shall proceed therefore, without farther apology, to settle the terms of this question, and endeavour to state it so as to bring matters to a short and clear determination.

Now the word person, as is well observed by Mr. Locke (the distinguishing excellence of whose writings consists in sticking close to the point in hand, and striking out all foreign and impertinent considerations) is properly a forensic term, and here to be used in the strict forensic sense, denoting some such quality or modification in man as denominates him a moral agent, or an accountable creature; renders him the proper subject of laws, and a true object of re

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