PROFESSOR RENNIE

In excusing himself from any charge of unnecessarily mixing up religious matter with science he maintained that they were inseparable, the study of science naturally leading the mind on to the first great and moving Principle, and as examples he said :

This doctrine, which I have always advocated in every course of Lectures I have given, is in accordance with the example of the greatest philosophers, who have been the glory of science. In Greece, Aristotle, a man of the most transcendant genius that the world has ever seen, in his Treatise De Mundo, says it would be impious to speak of the world without speaking of its author ; and Socrates, the greatest Grecian moralist, directly referred to Providence in all his beautiful deductions. In Britain, it is enough to refer to the three great names of Bacon, Newton, and Locke as striking examples of the same. Newton concludes his Principia by saying it is the very "business of philosophy to reason from phenomena to God;" and Lord Bacon in his celebrated Cambridge address, says:

" I exhort you to study earnestly before all other books—first, the Sacred Volume of the Word of God in the Scriptures, and secondly the great volume of the Works of God in the Creation."

Now where, I would ask, will the gainsayers—the absurd discarders of religion from secular instruction—find three such illustrious names as those. Locke, indeed, was wofully mistaken in his system; but he was notwithstanding a very great philosopher ; he began at the wrong end of his subject—by the synthetic rather than the analytic method :—he built his house upon the sand ; the rain descended and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat upon his goodly house—his Essay on the Human Understanding—and it fell. Yet Locke was unquestionably a great philosopher, though he furnished to the shrewd Bishop Berkeley the means of disproving upon his principles the very existence of the world ; and to the keen sceptical logician, Hume, the means of denying the existence of everything but ideas— the existence even of the human soul itself and the great God who formed it;—and to Helvetius, and Aurabean, and Darwin, and Cabaris, and a whole host of Materialists including the chief believers in phrenology, the ground-work of their most absurdly unphilosophical opinions. All these errors and wonderings of Locke and his disciples have been set aside by the plainest and profoundest of living philosophers—aye, or of any philosophers who ever lived—Cousin, of Paris, now or lately the Minister of Public Instruction in France, who has utterly demolished the sound-founded edifice of Locke, and all the sceptical additions of which it has been the pattern and the paragon. I hope I shall be able to demonstrate to you this important subject in a little more detail ; but as I have already trespassed, I fear upon your patience.

Hobart 10 March 1846, The Observer,