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Updated: May 20, 2025
Agree, then, O Theologians! Acknowledge, then, ye subtle metaphysicians!
In his Essay, he comforts himself with the belief "that he had enabled every person of common sense to defeat the more important fallacies of the sceptical metaphysicians, even though he should not possess acuteness, or metaphysical knowledge, sufficient to qualify him for a logical refutation of them."
The theological attributes with which metaphysicians decorated these divinities, were in fact nothing but pure negations of the qualities found in man, or in those beings of which he has a knowledge; by these attributes their gods were supposed exempted from every thing which they considered weakness or imperfection in him, or in the beings by whom he is surrounded: they called every quality infinite, which has been shewn is only to affirm, that unlike man, or the beings with whom he is acquainted, it is not circumscribed by the limits of space; this, however, is what he can never in any manner comprehend, because he is himself finite.
The student in philosophy will perceive that I allude to the distinction on which so much stress was laid by the schoolmen, and which has been retained either under the same or under other names by most metaphysicians to the present day, viz. between what were called essential, and what were called accidental, propositions, and between essential and accidental properties or attributes.
One of the most usual of these modes of expression, but also one of the most inadequate, is that which has been brought into familiar use by the metaphysicians of the school of Reid and Stewart.
It will not be surprising after this, if I deliver a maxim, which is condemned by several metaphysicians, and is esteemed contrary to the most certain principles of hum reason. This maxim is that an object may exist, and yet be no where: and I assert, that this is not only possible, but that the greatest part of beings do and must exist after this manner.
Nobody except metaphysicians will acknowledge that psychology is a more precise and certain science than physics or chemistry. The criterion furnished by the development of the respective sciences would prove just the contrary. The observations of psychology are always rather unprecise.
A writer on this subject has said: "Those occultists and metaphysicians who have thought long and deeply upon the ultimate facts and nature of the universe, have dared to think that there must exist some absolute consciousness some absolute mind which must perceive the past, present, and future of the universe as one happening; as simultaneously and actively present at one moment of absolute time.
In spite of that you are not deceived, and I would probably censure you, if I were not so sure, that, in the present state of your heart, the heroines of the theater are not dangerous to you. But the Countess is less indulgent, you say. Her jealousy does not astonish me, she confirms my ideas concerning female metaphysicians. I know how much credit is due their sincerity.
Those natural peculiarities of disposition that work so incessantly and potently in this human business, those 'points of nature, those predetermining forces of the human life, must come under observation here, and the whole nature of the passions also, and a science of 'the will, very different from that philosophy of it which our metaphysicians have entertained us with so long.
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