ble of discovering by what subtle process matter modifies itself into thought.

The word ghost is a phantasm, involving a contradiction, and means a dead body performing the functions of life. The word apparition, implies the contradiction, that one and the same body can be or exist in two places at the same time; as, when a sick man at London appears to a friend at Edinburgh, to predict the death of either of the parties; and though the prediction should happen to become true, the falsehood of the vision or phantasm would still be the same. The truth of the prediction is nothing more than an extraor dinary concurrence of circumstances which exist in the chapter of accidents or chances.

Almost every man is in the habit of thinking of his absent friends, in their relative circumstances of health, riches, happiness, sickness, adversity, death. In that part of the globe called Europe, about two hundred millions of people are living in intellectual intercourse by means of the press, thinking of the fate of absent friends in every possible com bination of circumstances. While their conjectures are false and disappointed, they are passed over in silence; but should one become true in the course of twenty years, the gazettes of the civilized world proclaim the occurrence as a miracle, when it would be more miraculous if such wonderful occurrences did not take place, considering the number of dreams and the length of time.

Let us investigate this matter closely. Every hundredth person we will suppose thinking of the fate of an absent friend; here then we have two millions of people 365 times in the year, for the course of twenty years, thinking, dreaming, and seeing visions. One has a letter from a sick friend, and thinks he is dead; another dreams he died on such a night; a third saw an apparition, that is, a stroke of fancy, come across his mind, that his friend died at a certain instant of time, which proved to be true. This occurrence, however extraordinary, is not at all unaccountable or miraculous, because, taking into estimation the number of two millions that think every day in the year upon the same subject, it would not be above ten or twenty chances to one that a series of events should occur at the same instant in the course of twenty years, as that a person should think of the

death of his friend at the very day or hour when he died, particularly if in ill health, or exposed to danger; or that a concurrence of events should take place, such as a vision or stroke of fancy, or a noise at the door by the cat which waked the dreamer about the time when his friend expired.

This plain and simple calculation of chances to account for prediction, will convince the most drivelling superstition and imbecility, that any prediction of events which cannot connect the means with its end is nothing more than a conjecture at hazard, which the table of chances may verify without causing wonder or stupefaction in rational or welldisciplined understandings.

The word witch is another phantasm, when used with the import of vulgar apprehensions, which means an old woman in possession of supernatural power; that is, having power above her nature, or having what she cannot have a pal. pable contradiction. This observation will apply to the whole vocabulary of phantasms, as magic, prophecy, inspi ration, incantation, &c. &c. which are all words of contradictory import, signifying ends without means, or power beyond possibility.

The fancy is an arbitrary creator of notions or thoughts without object; useful to amuse in poetry or instruct in fables. Its power is augmented by reading books of fiction, and its evil influence in disposing the mind to superstition and credulity might be guarded against by an avowal of its ficti tious nature by those authors who use it to personify all modes of extistence.

BELIEF.

The word Belief imports credit given to personal testimony, and cannot be applied without abuse and impropriety in any other manner.

Belief is inapplicable to unintelligibility. This important rule is the great guardian of intellectual power, from superstition, folly, and insanity. If a cruel and ignorant tyrant insisted upon a slave's believing two to be the half of five, one and three to be equal in number, or the whole to be less than the part; and this slave, through fear, should give his assent, and say, 66 I believe whatever you have asserted in the three propositions:" what, I demand, can be the action

or relation of the mind with such absurd and contradictory propositions? Mind or intelligence can have no operation or action upon such phantasms, and the expression, “I believe," signifies no more than an action of the will, a desire to appease the anger of a tyrant, by a simple assent to his assertion.

Let us suppose this tyrant to have accompanied his propositions of belief with a great display of power, as that he covered the sun with darkness, or resuscitated the dead: such power may effect the will with fear, but it cannot affect the truth or falsehood of the propositions, or change the na ture of unintelligibility to intelligence.

The astronomer who first discovered the nature of eclipses and their calculations, might have made use of them to impose upon and to subjugate the will of his fellow-creatures, by a pretended power over the sun; and it would be very easy for the most ignorant agent of the Humane Society, who can resuscitate drowned persons, to make himself a Lama, or an immortal emperor among the Tartar nations; but such power, however it might subjugate the will, could have no relation or influence upon truth or intelligence.

The abuse or want of discipline of the faculty of belief, has been a great cause of all moral evil in the world. The mind of man has been disposed, through imbecility and fear, to receive the sentiments or opinions of others without any examination of its own; and thus the power of natural or rational consciousness has been lost.

A factitious conscience every where prevails among mankind, formed by law, custom, habit, and education, and an implicit belief in superstitious doctrines. No man seeks to know or study himself and Nature. The traitor, who

would involve his country in blood and civil war, to avenge himself on an opposite faction, dies on the scaffold an applauded and conscious hero; while the poor thief, who steals a loaf to feed a starving family, dies with contrition and execration.

The criminality of human action consists in the abuse of intellectual power, and not in the abuse of the will. The motive of action is similar in all mankind; viz. the good of self. It is the province of intellect to guard the will from error; and the man who will not, cannot or dare not exa

2

mine his operations of conscience, or notions of moral duty, is the great enemy of self and Nature, and the slave of blind and undisciplined belief, which, by impeding the ac tion of reflection or inverted thought, becomes the great obstacle to the development of human energy in the wor ship of Nature, that is, in the augmentation of good and diminution of evil in the mundane system.

REASONING.

REASONING or ratiocination, is the action of the faculties collectively. Let us examine this process of mind in decid. ing the following questions: What is the nature of man; what is the end or object of human life; and what are the best means to attain it?

The nature of man, or the phenomena of the human body, we discover by perception, to be a succession of matter and power in union with all surrounding bodies morally and phy. sically; that is, in sympathy of sensation in life, and the transmutation of its atoms or particles in death.

The end of its existence appears to be the enjoyment of actual good, and the perfectibility of that good in the mun. dane system in time and futurity.

The means to effect that end appear to be the economy of sensation through the improvement of intellectual power.

Sentiments of the true subjects of man, his end, and the means, are formed by projecting the ideas of man in his unity with Nature, into associations of the species, to mul tiply their energy, amenable to a graduated and temperate scale of experience, conformable to practice or existing cir cumstances, and advancing towards the distant goal of theo. retic truth in safe and gradual reform.

The end of human existence is conceived in its relations to the good of the mundane system in time present and fu turity, and not in the adoration of inconceivable personified power in analogy without object.

In the science of natural philosophy, memory records the simple phenomenon of gravitation, to prove the union of all matter in the solar system; next it records, in the science of chemistry, the circulation of all bodies into one another, both in a state of organism and of dissolution. These phenomena, added to those records of sympathy as the scale of

experience, constitute ample matter of evidence to determine the end and nature of man.

The subject, the means to conduct the nature of man to its end, will require more ample records in the retentive func. tion, memory; a certain proportion of historic facts recorded as a table of political experience, and not as insulated anecdotes of chronology; some necessary records of the actual state of human society among the various nations of the world; some records of the laws, customs, and temper of the inhabitants of our own country: these records, abbre viated in number and matter, will be sufficient for the reten. tive function of memory.

Reflection, energized by exercise, holds in view and per vades the whole circle of human relations, till it discovers man to be a fractional and constituent part of the whole visi. ble system, an important link in the vast chain of the Uni verse, whose percussion of good and evil on the neighboring links recoils with increased impetus on self, both in life and death, as an individual part of an indestructible whole in es sence, though not in form.

Reflection rising superior to the narrow confines of reli. gious creeds and mythological dogmas, and comprehending the vast circle of Nature's laws relative to man, discovers the end of his being to be the improvement of the mundane system in time and futurity. It reasons on the means to ac complish this end, by contemplating human existence in the vast sphere of possible perfectibility, calculating the increase of liberty, peace, health, wisdom, and happiness; and then reducing these vast speculations to the short and straight line radii of existing laws, customs, and human capacity, the precise union of theory and practice is ascertained to place man in his true condition of being, the worship of self and Nature, the enjoyment of actual good as far as compatible with the improvement of future good in the mundane system.