sensations in time present as a just measure of their improvability in futurity. The measurement of sympathy, to place the whole human species in the best possible condition of well-being, must accommodate the coercion of law and government to the present powers of the human understanding; and should forms of society be established beyond the capacity of intellect, to execute such an incongruous attempt would diminish the good of time and futurity. All attempts to meliorate the condition of the brute species, so highly influential upon the well-being of the human species, must be conducted through the existing necessities and customs of social life. This important criterion, sympathy, Nature has placed like a staff in the hand of man, to guide his footsteps to the important goal of his being, the augmentation of good, and diminution of evil, in time and futurity in the mundane system. Its degrees of experience are marked with short gradations, that every opinion and every act may be brought to immediate trial, without attempting those bold and desultory innovations which endanger the order and peace of society, and retrograde the perfectibility of human nature. The laws of Nature have, however, provided for the zeal and ardour of sympathy, by permitting sects and individuals to enlarge the degrees of innovation upon the staff of experiment, by perfectionating customs and institutions of society, as a safe example to nations, resembling the pilot-boat that precedes the ship in shoal water. Thus the moral criterion is consummate, and moral opinion is never left without the clue of experiment to advance upon, in slow or rapid grada. tions. Without this indispensable criterion of experience, man would have been the laughing-stock and buffoon of the animal world; his organ of sight acting in an invisible medium, that of feeling in an intangible medium, and intellect in an unintelligible medium, he would have run his head against every post, and his fancy would have made him a drivelling idiot of superstition and credulity;-the destroyer, instead of the protector, of the sensitive system. In the early ages of the world and the infancy of human reason, physical power was made the test of truth; but it has long since been discovered, that brute power has no relation whatever to truth, and that if Euclid could have made the sun change its place with the moon, such an act of power could not have added to the evidence of a demonstration, and was as irrelative to the truth of doctrine as the color of man's coat to the arguments of his discourse. THE CLASSIFICATION OF thought. The phenomena of intellectual action or thinking may be classed into ideas, opinions, conjectures and phantasms. The word idea, means the mental copy of some original thing or real object of sense. It implies actual knowledge, and cannot be applied to an object of improvable knowledge, or doubtful, eventual, or impossible existence. Ideas are the elements of all actual knowledge, because science must have its foundation in the objects of sense, and in their positive relations copied by imagination, and restored by the impression of memory. Travellers and men of science, say there exists a city called Pekin, in China; those who have seen it can alone form an idea or copy, because they have received its impression or demonstration. Those who may adopt this idea on credence can be said only to have an opinion of the existence of such a city; but this opinion will be just as useful to intelligence as idea itself, because they can transport themselves to the place, and reduce the truth or falsehood of the fact to a positive idea; and in this manner of illustration, all the opinions of science are just as useful as the ideas themselves, where demonstration exists as the essential quality of ideas or knowledge. Opinions or notions, are modifications or phenomena of thought, in order to extend experience, to which they are amenable. An opinion, applied to moral subjects is called a sentiment, derived from the Latin word sentire, to feel. The legislator who plans an improvable state of human society, projects the ideas of existing laws and customs into sentiments of improvable relations; that is, the sentiment of an enlarged state of information in the mass of the people is accompanied with the sentiment of an increased proportion of civil liberty The moralist who plans the advancement of domestic hap. piness in the establishment of societies and fraternities, forms in his mind sentiments or relations of community, of property, liberty, of personal conduct, coadjutation of force, complete unity of interest, and coequality of power. These relations are all of them ideas in savage life, because they are practical customs; but in civilized life they are only sentiments, that is, sensations of objects that have existence in part, but no specific form or whole, till experience can reduce them to practical laws and customs. Conjecture imports a simple option or choice between the negative and affirmative of propositions, founded on mere analogy, and not amenable to experience. This may be exemplified in the conjecture that there are planetary inhabitants, which is an option of the affirmative proposition, founded upon the mere though very rational analogy with the similar phenomena of the earth and its attributes; but analogy offers no object, sensation, or relation of any part of planetary inhabitant, to form positive knowledge or ideas. Conjectures when they pass beyond experimental relations in pursuit of analogy, should have no influence on human action, but only on the pleasures of imagination in specula. tion. Phantasm imports an action or motion of mind, without form, substance, entity, or original, and is designated by the word apparition, witch, spirit, magician, &c. &c. In the vocabulary of metaphysics, the immaterial essences, abstract ideas, powers without substance, that is, something existing in nothing, and all such contradictions, are involv ed in the class of phantasms. The criterion of the modification of thought, called phantasm, is to bring all sounds to the test of sense, that is, to seek after the real object which the word represents; and if we find it mere analogy, it belongs to the class of simple conjecture; but if we observe a total absence of all possibility of entity in object or relation, either in part or whole, as an act of sensation, we may determine such sound to rep. resent nothing but a phantasm; and thus we liberate the mind from the extravagance and imbecility of fancy, superstition, credulity, and metaphysics. THE MENTAL FACULTIES. Let us now consider the actions or phenomena of mind, called faculties, as distinguished from thoughts; perception, memory, conception, reflection, judgment, imagination, belief and reasoning. These serve to evolve and put in operation the several classes of thought. PERCEPTION or sensation is the inceptive action of intelligence upon which the energy of mind depends. Thus, when the object, man, is impressed upon the external senses of a child, it perceives only the single relation of nurse or friend, and it requires the progress of age and experience to multiply its perception into those of citizen, magistrate, wise, virtuous, philosopher, cosmopolite, and co-essential part of the great whole of existence; which objects comprehend all the relations of man viewed in his connection with all surrounding Nature. The conduct of human life resembles the game of chess; every action is measured by its relations to surrounding circumstances, and he makes the best move on the chess-board of life who views simultaneously the most extensive and numerous relations of man with all surrounding Nature, as illustrated by Pope, in his beautiful allegory of self-love, consummated by my addition in its climax : Friend, parent, neighbor, first it does embrace, And self and Nature's endless union shows. The existing system of human life, in moral, civil, and political relations, is a difficult compromise of good and evil to produce the condition of well-being by means often apparently contrasted with their ends. To effect these difficult calculations of means and ends in theory and practice, we must elevate and extend sensation to the highest degree, in order to discover at one view all the relations of a subject. The faculty of perception constitutes the scale of intellectual power. The savage, at the base of this scale, has but few perceptions in the objects of sense, while the philoso. pher at the vertex, has all the multiplied perceptions which constitute science. It is the faculty of moral perception, which, by making a man wise, renders him necessarily virtuous. This tears the veil from conscience, and exhibits the naked heart to the inspection of reason. The tyrant of nations, who prefers silly pomp and splendor, and the anxious care of personal power, to the peace and happiness of man and Nature, had he a strong faculty of moral perception to discover the secret motives of his conduct, must despise and loathe himself, till he had cured the disorder of ambition, and become a patriot prince. In the same manner the domestic tyrant, whose avarice or ignorant selfishness, tortures his relations, his tenants, his servants, or his cattle, had he the powers of moral perception to detect the secret motives of his own heart, would loathe his own being till he had changed its temperament. The demagogue, who prefers the power and fleeting ap. plause of the mob, to the peace and prosperity of his country; had he the faculty of perception to discern the inward motives of his heart, would fly from himself as from a monster, and could have no happiness till he had reformed his moral temperament. In my very extensive intercourse with mankind, in travels, I was astonished to observe the great incapacity of man for self-examination: this, I soon discovered, was caused by the defect of the faculty of perception, having no power to interrogate his principles of habitude, of custom and preju dice, to distinguish them from principles of rectitude. The bigot is disposed to examine every operation of his mind, rather than the leading propensity, credulity; and if he has had a vision, commanding him to destroy his own children, he will discuss the justice of putting them to death, but not interrogate the vision itself as doubtful, or the effect of a delirious imagination, because he regards it as sacred, and all examination as blasphemous. In the same manner, the tyrant cannot interrogate his ambition, the demagogue his factiousness, or the cruel master his ignorant selfishness. The mind is used, like a dark lan. tern, to throw light on all external objects, and to conceal |