are frequently nothing more than children, who are incapable of either
foreseeing or deducing the consequence of their own data.

LOCKE, as well as all those who have adopted his system, which is so
demonstrable,--or to the axiom of ARISTOTLE, which is so clear, ought to
have concluded from it that all those wonderful things with which
metaphysicians have amused themselves, are mere chimeras; mere
wanderings of the imagination; that an immaterial spirit or substance,
without extent, without parts, is, in fact, nothing more than an absence
of ideas; in short, they ought to have felt that the ineffable
intelligence which they have supposed to preside at the helm of the
world, is after all nothing more than a being of their own imagination,
on which man has never been in accord, whom he has pictured under all
the variety of forms, to which he has at different periods, in different
climes, ascribed every kind of attribute, good or bad; but of which it
is impossible his senses can ever prove either the existence or the
qualities.

For the same reason, moral philosophers ought to have concluded, that
what is called moral sentiment, _moral instinct_, that is, innate ideas
of virtue, anterior to all experience of the good or bad effects
resulting from its practice, are mere chimerical notions, which, like a
great many others, have for their guarantee and base only metaphysical
speculation. Before man can judge, he must feel; before he can
distinguish good from evil, he must compare. _Morals_, is a science of
facts: to found them, therefore, on an hypothesis inaccessible to his
senses, of which he has no means of proving the reality, is to render
them uncertain; it is to cast the log of discord into his lap, to cause
him unceasingly to dispute upon that which he can never understand. To
assert that the ideas of morals are _innate_, or the effect of