Wide, and more wide, th' o'erflowing of the mind
Takes every creature in of every kind.

Earth smiles around, in boundless beauty dress'd;
And heav'n reflects its image in his breast."

We stand in need, then, of no præcognita or innate ideas, of no fanciful instinct whatever;-arguing as intelligent beings, and fairly exercising the discursive faculty of reason, we come to the clear conclusion that virtue is the path to human happiness. The case, indeed, is so manifest, that while many of the instincts we actually possess are often tempting us against such a conduct and such a conclusion, whenever reason is appealed to, we never fail to return to the same established dictum.

The Stoics, with a sort of romantic refinement, pretended to have fallen into a love of virtue for her own sake; and to sustain and to abstain, to bear and forbear, to be patient and continent, comprised the summary of their moral system. But while they were thus enraptured with the means, like every other society of mankind, they had the full advantage of the end. They may, indeed, have practised virtue for the love of virtue, but they also practised virtue, and reaped the benefit of their own happiness.

The Epicureans, on the contrary, regarded all these sublime pretensions as mere cant and affectation. They also enjoined and practised, and, notwithstanding the false reproach that has attached to their name, enjoined and practised with more rigidity than even the Stoics, the laws and restraints of moral virtue; yet boldly and unequivocally avowed that it was chiefly as a mean towards an end: that it was not so much from a love of virtue, as from a love of pleasure or happiness: and hence pleasure and happiness were in this school used as synonymous terms, as were also vice and folly, and wisdom and virtue; or, rather, wisdom was regarded as the first of all virtues, as being that which teaches us that a life of real pleasure or happiness is to be obtained alone by the exercise of the general cluster of virtues. In one of his letters to Menæceus, that has yet survived the ravage of time, Epicurus has a passage upon this subject peculiarly striking, and that cannot be too strongly impressed on our memories. "Wisdom," says he, "is the chief blessing of philosophy; since she gives birth to all other virtues which unite in teaching us, that no man can live happily who does not live wisely, conscientiously, and justly; nor, on the other hand, can he live wisely, conscientiously, and justly, without living happily: for virtue is inseparable from a life of happiness, and a life of happiness is equally inseparable from virtue. Be these, then, and maxims like these, the subjects of thy meditation, by night and by day, both when alone and with the friend of thy bosom; and never, whether asleep or awake, shalt thou be oppressed with anxiety, but live as a god among mankind.'* To the same effect Cassius, in an expostulatory letter to his friend Cicero, who had shown some inclination to join in the general calumny against the Epicureans: "Those whom we call lovers of pleasure are real lovers of goodness and justice: they are men who practise and cultivate every virtue; for no true pleasure can exist without a good and virtuous life."

So Lucretius, when describing the different tribes of the sons of vice, or offenders against the public law, characterizes them by the common name of fools. 66 They are," says he, "perpetually smarting, even in secret, beneath a sense of their atrocious crimes, and that reward of their guilt, which, they well know, will sooner or later overtake them :

It was from the elegant and ornate moralists of the East, that the philosophers of this school derived this figurative synonyme; from Arabia, Egypt, and India; in all which quarters we find it still more frequent and familiar. Solomon, whose early studies were derived from an Arabic source, is peculiarly addicted to this use of these terms. The very commencement of his book of Proverbs, or system of ethics, as the schools would denominate it, affords us a striking instance:

"The fear of Jehovah is the beginning of knowledge:

For FOOLS despise wisdom and instruction."

So Vishnusarman in his Hitopadesa, to the same precise effect: "Many who read the Scriptures are grossly ignorant; but he who acts well is a truly LEARNED man."*

Whatever view, therefore, we take of this subject, in whatever way we exercise our reason upon it, we cannot fail to approve of virtue in preference to vice; for we cannot fail to regard virtue as the only sure road to happiness, and, consequently, as the path of wisdom, or the will of God. The case, indeed, is so clear, that it is seldom mankind in any part of the world are now-a-days at the trouble of debating the subject. There is no controversy -the result is taken for granted. And hence wherever education exists, or, in other words, wherever civilized life extends, we are chiefly taught it, not as a science, but as a rule of action; we imbibe it as a habit; and our first and finest feelings co-operate with our best reason in its favour. We form an abstract picture of it in our minds, and delineate it, under the correct and pleasing image of the fair, the needful, the sovereign good. We have already seen that, in proportion as society is ignorant, men are wicked; in proportion as it becomes wise, they grow virtuous. They acquire clearer ideas of right and wrong, which are obviously nothing more than virtue and vice, under an additional set of names, or in a state of activity. And were the rules and laws of right, virtue, or wisdom to be constantly adhered to, or, in other words, the will of the Deity to be fully complied with, there can be no question that mankind, even in the present state, would enjoy all the happiness their nature would allow of; and that a kind of paradise would once more visit the earth.

And why, then, is not the will of the Deity fully complied with? Why, since the consequence is so undoubted, and so beneficial, are not the rules of virtue constantly and universally adhered to?

This is a most important question, as well in itself as in its results.

The will of the Deity, or the entire rules of virtue, are not always adhered to, first, because, as collected from reason or the light of nature alone, they are not, through the whole range of this complicated subject, in all instances equally clear and perspicuous; and, secondly, because, in a thousand instances in which there is no want of clearness or perspicuity, there is a want of sanction of a compulsory and adequate force. The rules of virtue are general, and must necessarily be general; but the cases to which they apply are particular. The case is present and often impulsive, but the operation of the rule is remote, and it may not operate at all; and hence the pleasure of immediate gratification is perpetually unhinging this harmonious system, and plunging mankind into vice with their eyes open.

But civil laws, moreover, or the authority of the social compact in favour of virtue, are not only often inadequate in their force, but they must necessarily, in a thousand instances, be inadequate in their extent. It is impossible for man, of himself, to provide against every case of vice or criminality that may offend the public; for the keenest casuist can form no idea of many of

such cases till they are before him; and if he could, the whole world would not contain the statute books that should be written upon the subject.

There are also duties which a man owes to himself as well as to his neighbour; or, in other words, human happiness, as we have already seen, depends almost as largely upon his exercise of private as of public virtues. But the eye of civil law cannot follow him into the performance of these duties, for it cannot follow him into his privacy: it cannot take cognizance of his personal faults or offences, nor often apply its sanction if it could do so. And hence, in most countries, this important part of morality is purposely left out of the civil code, as a hopeless and intractable subject. Yet even in the breach of public duties, specifically stated and provided for, it cannot always follow up the offender, and apply the punishment: for he may secrete himself among his own colleagues, and elude, or he may abandon his country, and defy, the arm of justice.

There seems, then, to be a something still wanting. If the Deity have so benevolently willed the happiness of man, and made virtue the rule of that happiness, ought he not upon the same principle of benevolence, to have declared his will more openly than by the mere and, at times, doubtful inferences of reason? in characters, indeed, so plain, that he who runs may read? and ought he not also to have employed sanctions so universal as to cover every case, and so weighty as to command every attention?

As a being of infinite benevolence, undoubtedly he ought. And what, in this character, he ought to have done, he has actually accomplished. He has declared his will by an express revelation, and has thus confirmed the voice of reason by a voice from heaven: he has made this revelation a written law, and has enforced it by the strongest sanctions to which the mind of man can be open:-not only by his best chance of happiness here, but by all his hopes and expectations of happiness hereafter. And he has hence completed the code of human obligations, by adding to the duties which we owe to our neighbour and to ourselves, a clear rescript of those we owe to our Maker. Nor is such revelation of recent date; for a state of retributive justice beyond the grave constituted, as we have already seen, the belief of mankind in the earliest ages of time; and amid all the revolutions the world has witnessed, amid the most savage barbarism, and the foulest idolatries, there never perhaps has been a country in which all traces of it have been entirely lost, or have even entirely ceased to operate.

At different periods, and in different manners, the Deity has renewed this divine communication, according as his infinite wisdom has seen the world stand in need of it. New doctrines and discoveries-and doctrines and discoveries, too, of the highest importance, but which it is not my providence to touch upon in the present place—have in every instance accompanied such renewal, justificatory of the supernatural interposition. But the sanction has, in every instance, been the same; while, and I speak it with reverence, the proofs of divine benevolence have with every promulgation been growing fuller and fuller:-revealed religion thus co-operating with natural, co-operating with the great frame of the visible world, co-operating with every pulse and feeling of our own hearts in establishing the delightful truth, that GOD IS LOVE; and in calling upon us to love him, not from any cold and lifeless picture of the abstract beauty of holiness, beautiful as it unquestionably is in itself, but from the touching and all-subduing motive-BECAUSE HE FIKST

LOVED US.

LECTURE VIII.

ON THE GENERAL FACULTIES OF THE MIND, AND ITS FREEDOM IN WILLING.

IN the commencement of the successive series of lectures which I have had the honour of delivering before this respectable school of science, I stated, as it may be recollected by many of the audience before me, that the subject I proposed to discuss would be of considerable extent and variety;that it would embrace, though with a rapid survey, the whole circle of physics, in the most enlarged sense in which this term has been employed by Aristotle or Lord Bacon; and, consequently, would touch slightly, yet, as I hoped, with a correct outline, upon all the more interesting and important features of matter and of mind. It may be remembered, that I proposed to unfold to you the general principles, laws, and phenomena, as far as we are capable of tracing them, of the world without us, and the world within us; to follow the footsteps of nature, or rather of the God of nature, in the gradual evolution of that nice, and delicate, and ever-rising scale of wonders that surround us on every side, from the simplest elements to the most perfect and harmonious systems of visible or demonstrable existences; from shapeless matter to form, from form to feeling, from feeling to intellect; from the clod to the crystal, from the crystal to the plant, from the plant to the animal, from brutal life to man. All this I have endeavoured to accomplish; feebly and imperfectly, indeed, but I have still endeavoured it with whatever may be the powers that the breath of the Almighty has implanted within me.

But we have not stopped here; having reached in man the summit of the visible pyramid of creation, we have tremblingly ventured to take a glance at the interior of his mysterious structure; we have followed him, with no unhallowed eye, into the temple of the soul; we have amused ourselves, for, after all, it has been little or nothing more, with conjectures about its essence, and have commenced an analysis of those faculties so fearfully and wonderfully planned, which place him at an almost infinite distance from the brute creation, and approximate him to the sphere of celestial intelligences: to that order of pure and happy spirits with whom it is his high prerogative, if not forfeited by his own misconduct on earth, that he shall associate hereafter, and press forward in the pursuit of an infinite and self-rewarding knowledge, and in the fruition of an endless and unclouded felicity.

This last topic, however, we have entered upon, and nothing more: we have noticed, indeed, the general furniture of the mind, and the diversified faculties with which it is endowed; but we have only extended our investigation beyond such notice to the principles of perception, thought, and REASON, or the discursive power; and to those communications, or ideas of objects or subjects, derived externally or from within, upon which the discursive power is ever exercising itself; and which, as they are obtained from the one or the other of these two sources, are denominated ideas of sensation or of reflection. Now, besides an ability to perceive, think, or reason, we find the mind possessed of an almost infinite variety of other attributes or faculties, implanted in it for the wisest and most beneficent purposes. We behold it endowed with consciousness, judgment, memory, imagination; with a power of choosing or refusing; with admiration and desire; hope and fear, love and hatred; grief and joy, transport and terror; with anger, jealousy, and despair. And we behold each of these faculties, as called into action, producing a correspondent effect upon the organs of the body; giving rise to what the painters call EXPRESSION, or the language of the features; and to articulate sounds, or the language of the lips; lighting up the eye, and animating the countenance; invigorating the speech, and harmonizing its periods; or, on the contrary, filling the eye and the countenance with gloom or indignation, and the voice with sighs and bitter rebukes.

The external signs thús produced, and representative of the inward emotion,

operate in their turn with a reflex influence, and rekindle in the mind the feelings that have given birth to them. And hence the origin and soulsubduing power of tender or impassioned poetry, or of manly and forcible eloquence; as also the cause why we feel equally hurried away by the classical debates of the senate, and the fictitious distresses of the drama.

We behold, moreover, in different persons, these energetic principles differently modified or associated in every variety of combination: sometimes one of them, and sometimes another, and sometimes several leagued together, peculiarly active, and obtaining a mastery over the rest. And we behold these effects in different instances, from different causes; as peculiarity of temperament, peculiarity of climate, custom, habit, or education. And hence the origin of moral and intellectual character; the particular dispositions and propensities of individuals or of whole nations. Hence one man is naturally violent, and another gentle; one a prey to perpetual gloom, and another full of hope and confidence; one irascible and revengeful, and another all benevolence and philanthropy; one shrewd and witty, and another heavy and inert. Hence the refinement and patriotism of ancient Greece; the rough hardihood of the Romans; and the commercial spirit of Carthage; and hence, in modern times, the silent and plodding industry of the Dutch; the chivalrous honour of the Spaniards of the last century, unpoisoned by the deadly fever of Corsican morality; the restless loquacity and intriguing ambition of the French; and, may I be permitted to add, the high heroic courage, and love of freedom, the generosity and promptitude to forgive injuries, the unswerving honesty and lofty spirit of adventure, that peculiarly signalize the inhabitants of the British isles: all which are subjects that yet remain to be treated of and elucidated, and which seem to promise us an ample harvest of entertainment and instruction.

Let us begin with the mental faculties themselves. These, as we have already seen, are numerous and complicated; so much so indeed, that it is difficult to arrange and analyze them; and hence I do not, at the present moment, recollect a single treatise upon the subject, which gives us a clear and methodical classification of them. I shall take leave, therefore, to offer a new distribution; and shall divide them into the three general heads, of powers or faculties of the UNDERSTANDING; powers or faculties of ELECTION; and powers or faculties of EMOTION. To the first belong the principles of perception, thought, reason, judgment, memory, and imagination; to the second, those of choosing and refusing, or of WILLING and NILLING, to adopt an old and very expressive metaphysical term, that ought never to have grown obsolete; to the third belong those of hope, fear, grief, and joy, love, hatred, anger, and revenge, or whatever else is capable of moving the mind from a state of tranquillity and rest.

All these are, properly speaking, acts or actions of the mind; yet, as, during the operation of the last set, the mind becomes at times irregularly and involuntarily agitated and affected, though, by the force of its own attributes, as the voluntary muscles of the body are often thrown into trepidation and spasms by the contraction of their own fibres, metaphysicians, and especially those of Germany, have seemed inclined to restrict the name of mental actions to the operations of the understanding and the will, and to give the name of affections or passions to those productive of mental emotion: to those transitions of feeling into which the mind is involuntarily hurried by the stimulus of this class of its own powers, and under 'the stress of which it may thus far be said to be passive; and hence, if I mistake not, the application of the term passions (which has so much puzzled the metaphysicians) to certain conditions or powers of the mind, which import activity and exertion. It is upon the same ground, that where the mind is completely subdued, and suffers extreme violence, we employ the term with peculiar emphasis; thus, when a man is raging either with anger or love, he is said pre-eminently to be in a passion, or to entertain a passion; and thus again, but in a far more serious and solemn sense, the Christian world applies the same term in its highest force of signification to the agony of our blessed Saviour.