the earth; because such are the phenomena of matter and power, as communicated to my intelligence. If it should be asked, how a moist clod of earth can make a tree? or this block of wood produce fruit? I answer, I do not know it is the effect only, and not the cause, which is communicated to my intelligence; and the incomprehensible words, spirit, divinity, immateriality, &c. interposed between the apparent cause and the apparent effect, tend rather to obscure than to explain the simple and sufficient knowledge of phenomena. Intellect seems to possess rectitude of operation in those animals where it has least design. This is exemplified in the instinct of brutes, which make fewer errors without the aid of design, than the most exalted reason, perpetually misguided by that very design. The hog put into a sack, and taken several miles from his sty, will return home in a direct line, when the best designing geometrician would be lost.

Man, prone to analogize every thing with his own mode of being, supposes nothing can be done without human intellect; this is erroneous analogy, by comparing particulars with generals. True analogy, by comparing generals, that is, the organism of lesser modes with that of greater modes of being, teaches, that there must be more power in the body of the earth than in the body of man, and its quality as dif. ferent in genus as the two bodies are different in mode.

The popular standard of moral rectitude must yield to the change of the moral world. Murder would be a crime in a peaceful state of Nature; but when nations and individuals break into a state of hostility, and attempt to destroy each other, defensive murder then becomes a virtue.

Theft is no doubt a crime, while the imperfect laws of society protect the monopoly of avarice in a state of civic com. petition; but in improvable society, where sects make property common, the idea of theft would be criminal.

The law of slavery in the present imperfect state of socie ty enjoins obedience as a virtue; in a more improvable state of society, obedience would be a crime of the deepest dye, both in those who exact and those who pay it.

In the present state of society, chastity is thought to be the great hinge of moral harmony, and yet in an improvable state, persons and things being made common, the no. tion of conventional chastity would be changed.

The whole body of Nature has two modes of being, called by the ancients and moderns the good and evil spirits, and in my phenomenical knowledge, System and Contingency.

System is that operation of Nature where harmony prevails, that is, where ends are accomplished by a series of determinate means; Contingency is the remaining operations of Nature, where power acts out of the harmony of means and ends, and invades the province of its antagonist with disorder and dissolution.

In illustration: When a man or animal constructs a dwel ling, the various materials and laborers coöperate in harmo nious means, to produce a specific or systematic end. If a heavy wind, rain, or thunderbolt should destroy this structure, these elements, not being determinate to that event; it was an act of contingency.

Again in a lottery the putting a number of tickets into a wheel, the turning of the wheel, the taking out a ticket by the hand; these actions being all indeterminate towards any specific ticket, the prize falling to A or to B, is an act of contingency. But if the drawer marks or sticks a pin in a particular number or lot, and selects it from the rest, this changes the contingency of drawing into a system of fraud and deception.

In the same manner the mundane system will suffer an earthquake, or a partial deluge, without any control from its superior body the solar system, whose homogeneous power of gravity has no influence upon the various heterogeneous powers contained in the whole mundane system.

Finally the solar system, as a subordinate member of the vast machine of the visible universe, may be deranged by the irregular orbit of the comets, they coming in contact with the planets, and swallowing them up in their vortex; and this catastrophe cannot be impeded or prevented, because the various powers of organic matter, whether internal or external, combine a class of similar and of dissimilar qualities, which can have no cöordination or harmony with each other. While similar agents preponderate, system is preserved, and when dissimilar, system is dissolved; such are the phenomena of power producing good or evil.

Of the wonderful effects or the incognoscible causes, or laws of Nature, the most astonishing is the superstitious ex

travagance of the human understanding. Were the fish to leave the water, and mistake the forest for their element of residence, it could not equal the folly of man in his mistake of the element of intelligence, in abandoning the clear and all-sufficient light of phenomena, to plunge into the darkness of incognoscible causation.

Tyrants may threaten anarchy or despotism may deluge the earth with the evil of contingency, while the man of fortitude having previously exhausted his energy in opposition, and regarding the coffin as a cradle, will fly to death as the easy transition from irremediable pain to pleasure, and from incurable evil to accommodative good.

The man who allows systematic misery is passively, as great a criminal, if he can prevent it, as he actively is, who inflicts it. I wish it was in my power to procure for the whole sensitive system this beneficent volition of death, and to teach the noble horse and the innocent steer, who with their heels or horns sometimes destroy their cruel tyrants, also to dissolve the identity of self, which lives and feels only in a point or mode at a time, but is interested throughout the whole circle of existence in the endless transmutation of its indestructible matter.

THE CONQUEST OF THE MORAL WORLD.

ADDRESSED TO THE CONQUEROR OF THE PHYSICAL WORLD, NAPOLEON, EMPEROR OF THE FRENCH.

BY JOHN STEWART.

The true philosopher approaches the prince as the sun approaches him in the morning's dawn, not to sooth or flatter, but to awaken, to illuminate, and to energize his powers.

The indestructible atoms of matter are incessantly circulating from body to body, throughout all modes of sensitive life, and in the transition they pass from a single point, or centre of agency, in the personal identity, into a vast circle of multiplied patiency, the material identity; which causes the retribution of the agency of good or evil to be increased in an incalculable ratio, to all atoms of matter that exist or circulate in the patiency or sphere of sensitive life.

When, Sire, you form a decree, issue an order, or perform an action, to execute some particular desire, or gratify some urgent inclination, you enjoy the pleasure of that action in your single and personal identity of Emperor; but this decree, order or action, may diffuse pain or pleasure to millions and millions of subjects, allies and surrounding nations ; and as your personal atoms are every moment leaving your body, and dispersing themselves far beyond the extent of your own empire, they must in their vast sphere of cir. culation, successively become constituent parts of millions and millions of sensitive beings, affected in their actual condition of enjoyment or sufferance, by their own previous agency in their collective or personal identity in the body of Empe ror, and, consequently, must multiply their interest of pain and pleasure, in an incalculable ratio, in the vast circle of patiency, in their new material identities, which cannot be affected by the loss of memory, in the change of consciousness, by the transmutation of their substance, from mode to mode.

It has been objected to this clear and demonstrable chemi⚫ cal process of Nature in its laws of circulation of matter, throughout all bodies within the vast sphere of influence or affinity, that as the personal identity must lose all remem brance of its connection with the material identity, that is, that the atoms of the prince, when separated, and circulat

ing into the bodies of subjects, that they lose all proper interest, in the loss of memory, or change of consciousness.

To this objection I reply, that, if the atoms of the ruler, in their previous agency, or collective consciousness of a personal identity, have communicated, or been the cause of good or evil to their successive material patiency, in new consciousness of new identities, though these atoms must lose all memory of their previous associations in past identity, and assume or change it into the consciousness of a new identity, such oblivion or change of personal identity, cannot alter or affect the nature of the really existent sensations, suffered or enjoyed by the same identical atoms.

I will suppose a traveller on horseback, during the day to have interchanged many millions of atoms with the body of his horse-Now I demand, whether those human atoms that have transmuted into the new identity of horse, will feel less pain from the spur, the bit, the whip, the galling, the mutilating, jading and the hunger, inflicted by the agency of their previous identity, man, because they have lost all consciousness of their former association in such identity, and acquired the new one of horse?

Another alledged objection is, that when a limb or mem. ber is amputated from any part of the body, all personal interest in that detached member must cease.

We must take notice, that the human body forms two clear and discriminate identities, the one merely nominal, called personal identity, and the other real, called material identity; which have no proper, or common, but only an influential interest with each other, which may be explained in the following manner.

The nominal, or personal identity called self, is nothing but a succession of thoughts or sensations, bound together by the tether of memory; and when this ends, the identity ceases. The agency of this personal identity tends only to procure

continuation of good, to what is called self, or person, and to perpetuate and expand that good, in the widest circle of the sensitive system; to anticipate the interests or procure the well-being of the real or material identity, in the transmutation and circulation of its indestructible atoms into that sphere in which all connection with the identity of self or person is totally lost.