LIFE OF DR. WATTS.

tion adapted to their wants and capacities, from the dawn of reason through its gradations of ad­vance in the morning of life. Every man, ac­quainted with the common principles of human action, will look with veneration on the writer who is at one time combating Locke, and at another making a catechism for children in their fourth year. A voluntary descent from the dignity of science is perhaps the hardest lesson that humility can teach.

As his mind was capacious, his curiosity ex­cursive, and his industry continual, his writings are very numerous, and his subjects various. With his theological works I am only enough acquainted to admire his meekness of opposi­tion, and his mildness of censure. It was not only in his book but in his mind that orthodoxy was united with charity.

Of his philosophical pieces, his Logic has been received into the universities, and there­fore wants no private recommendation; if he owes part of it to Le Clerc, it must be con­sidered that no man who undertakes merely to methodise or illustrate a system, pretends to be its author.

In his metaphysical disquisitions, it was ob­served by the late learned Dr. Dyer, that he confounded the idea of space with that of empty space, and did not consider that though space might be without matter, yet matter being ex­tended, could not be without space.

Few books have been perused by me with greater pleasure than his Improvement of the Mind, of which the radical principles may, in­deed, be found in Locke's Conduct on the Un­derstanding, but they are so expanded and ramified by Watts, as to confer upon him the merit of a work in the highest degree useful and pleasing. Whoever has the care of instructing others, may be charged with deficiency in his duty if this book is not recommended.

I have mentioned his treatises of Theology as distinct from his other productions; but the truth is, that whatever he took in hand was, by his incessant solicitude for souls, converted to Theology. As piety predominated in his mind, it is diffused over his works; under his direc­tion it may be truly said, Theologia Philosophia ancillatur, philosophy is subservient to evan­gelical instruction; it is difficult to read a page without learning, or at least wishing to be better.