external sensation, consciousness, memory, imagination, dreaming, speech, abstraction, reason Judgment or understanding), conscience.I rather think he is right in giving speech a place among the native faculties, but we wonder to find dreaming there.His account of consciousness is loose and popular, but he avoids the error of Dugald Stewart in making it look merely at qualities, and of Kant in making it look merely at phenomena." Of the things perceived by this faculty, the chief is the mind itself,"&c.He has often valuable remarks on the faculties.Thus, under memory: " What we perceive by two senses at once has a good chance to be remembered.Hence, to read aloud slowly and with propriety, when one is accustomed to it, contributes greatly to remembrance; and that which we write in a good hand, without contractions, with dark-colored ink, exactly pointed and spelled, in straight lines, with a moderate space between them, and properly subdivided into paragraphs as the subject may require, is better remembered than what we throw together in confusion.For by all these circumstances attention is fixed, and the writing, being better understood, makes a deeper impression.Those things, also, which are related in two or more respects are more easily remembered than such as are related in one respect only.Hence, by most people verse is more easily remembered than prose, because the words are related in measure as well as in sense; and rhyme, than blank verse, because the words are related not only in sense and measure, but also by similar sounds at the end of the lines." Some will think that the students who listened to such prelections ranging over all the faculties, {236} and touching on a great variety of topics, esthetical and moral, might be as much benefited as those who had to listen to the more scholastic discussions of the German universities.He says that "laughter is occasioned by an incongruity or unsuitableness of the parts that compose, or seem to compose, any complex idea or object."The philosophical work by which Beattie was best known in his own day, and by which be is still known by students, is his " Essay on the Nature and Immutability of Truth, in Opposition to Sophistry and Scepticism." He quotes approvingly Reid's " Inquiry," and Campbell's " Philosophy of Rhetoric." In an edition published in 1776 he replies to some who had blamed him for borrowing some hints without acknowledgment from Dr.Price, Dr.Oswald, and Buffier." Ibeg to say that I am to this hour totally unacquainted with that work of Dr.Price which is alluded to, and that when Ipublished the first edition of the `Essay on Truth' I was totally unacquainted with the writings of Buffier and Dr.
Oswald.I had heard, indeed, that the French philosopher used the term I common sense' in a way similar to that in which I use it; but this was only hearsay, and I have since found that, though between his fundamental opinions and mine there is a striking resemblance, his application of that term is not entirely the same." All I have to remark on this statement is, that if he had not read those well-known works on the subject of which he was treating he ought to have done so.
The work is pleasantly and pointedly written, and it had an immediate and wide circulation.It wants the depth and shrewdness of Reid's "Inquiry," but on that account was better relished by many readers, such as George III.The book is, throughout, a popular, rather than a scientific one.His somewhat <ad captandum> appeals gained the ear of those who had never been troubled with doubts, but rather turned away those who wished to find the great sceptic met by an opponent worthy of him.
