"Two Dissertations comprises careful accounts of sense, imagination, reason and their respective contributions to cognition. The author is primarily interested in defeating what he was convinced was the pernicious influence of John Locke's 'way of ideas' and its implications for our understanding of human nature. Locke's analysis of understanding by ideas is here interpreted as obliterating any real difference between reason and sense, thus collapsing the distinction between human and brute natures. 'A Dissertation concerning the Imagination,' especially, incorporates a penetrating analysis of the shortcomings of ... Locke..." (James G. Buickerood in Dictionary of Eighteenth-Century British Philosophers). This book is generally attributed to Zachary Mayne, an Oxford-educated clergyman and religious writer who would have written it shortly after the publication of Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690), though it wasn't published until some thirty years later. Recent scholars believe it could be the work of Congreve's friend, Charles Mayne (d. 1737). The present work is scarce. ESTC lists nineteen copies, eight in North America.