of things, either agreeable or otherwise, but because the willing being, or agent, is correspondingly affected. But there is a higher form of will pertaining to rational existence, by which we choose, not merely according to sensation, but also according to moral conviction. We do not always obey our desires, but sometimes deny ourselves a pleasure in consideration of results that may affect our future well-being; hence it evidently appears that we possess the power, if willing, to exert our faculties either to oppose or to encourage any of our natural desires for the purpose of accomplishing some end, in pursuing which all our endowments are modified, both as regards the dispositions and pleasures connected with them.

Desire, power, and pleasure, imply the existence of a selfhood that desires, acts, and is pleased. The existence of these faculties implies the love of life, and this conducts us to the consideration of immortality. The selfhood has relation to an outward consciousness, through the senses, by which images of objects are impressed on the mind. Desire, action, and pleasure, must of course relate to objects either perceived or inferred. We can not see God, but we can believe in his existence, and love him too, if we feel his benevolence through the many proofs which he presents to our senses. The groundwork of all thought is objective. Our Maker teaches us by what he has actually done for us both in body and in spirit: he does not demand our allegiance but on palpable evidence and conviction.

We can in no case see the cause either of action or reaction, motion or rest, either mentally or materially. We witness only the media and vehicles of power," either dynamic or resistant; and whether we study physical forces or moral influences, we find that objects are alike but signs of spiritual existence; so that all we can know of truth is but inference con

cerning the relation of things ostensible to things beyond the sphere of our senses, or else but the direct communication to our minds of intelligence from some being better informed concerning the secrets of creation in their union and totality. Reason must either infer from effects to causes, or be instructed by revelation. Belief in God is the end in both cases. By inference man forms a notion of Deity according to the extent of his own knowledge of nature, but by revelation he is taught the moral attributes of God, as a being causing himself to be known to man in righteousness and love forever.

It will therefore be but consistent and reasonable to treat our subject with reference both to natural and revealed truths, while still confining our attention, for the most part, to man's inherent love of pleasure, and the means provided for its gratification. Keeping the capacity either for enjoyment or misery always in view, we may distribute our thoughts without regard to any artificial system; still, however, preserving, as far as possible, throughout our disquisitions, the distinction felt by us all between the intellectual, moral, and emotional conditions of our nature.

This plan is a deviation from that indicated by metaphysicians, but we may, notwithstanding, be able to show that it is not the less congruous with what we know of ourselves, and with what the Maker of mind has condescended to teach us. We would not, however, depreciate the labors of those capacious and masculine intellects that have investigated and expounded the science of mind, but would rather freely and thankfully acknowledge our obligation to many of them, who, like men of faith and reason, have met infidelity on its own ground, and there defeated it, by casting in its eyes a new light, and causing it to see the hideousness of its own features, as if reflected in the bright shield of truth.

CHAPTER II.

SELFHOOD-SOUL, MIND, SPIRIT

WHAT is a soul? It is yourself. Some notorious physiologists tell us they can not discover the soul, and, according to the best of their judgment, that which is moved by the rational will is the same thing as that which wills to move. Bones, muscles, nerves, blood vessels, and brain, constitute a thinking and feel. ing machine, say they, working on chemical aud mechanical principles-and that this machine is a man when arranged in the form of a wingless biped, and a brute when contrived for walking on four feet. Moses was not enlightened, like a modern philosopher, by feeling his way in the dark. He saw a little further into the mysteries of man's existence than these physiologists, and certainly concluded, by the divinity within him, rather than by inference, that mere machinery is not disposed to think of the personal character of the Deity; but that a being that reflects upon the past, and pries into the future, with a desire to know God, and to resemble him, is really his representative on earth. If man may be in any respect a similitude of his Maker, it can only be in his mental and moral nature, unless, indeed, the Almighty-preposterous thought!-be himself a bodily being, and nothing more. Of course, no one will deny that matter would feel, and think, and worship, if Omnipotence ordained that it should; but then that must be a matter of which we can not conceive the existence, for it must be a matter with a personal will.

Without turning to the Bible, we can discern that understanding and will, in a moral and religious sense,

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can proceed only from God's own direct impression of truth on the mind of man. We can know nothing but by Divine teaching, the thinking faculty and the object of thought being both created. The apprehension of God as a personal Being, demanding our obedience and adoration, is surely not a property of matter-adoration is mental conformity to God's will. This power, proceeding from the Creator to the creature, and enabling it to think and will with a recognition of himself, can not be organic. Matter exists, indeed, as a medium for manifesting to us the thoughts even of God himself, but this must be to a mind, to a being, that thus perceives the purpose and will of the Creator, and this being, when conformed to that will and purpose by a corresponding will and purpose in his own person or individuality, is the image of God in as far as any creature can resemble Deity, or reflect his character.

It is the man himself that perceives, thinks, and determines; but the power to perceive, think, and determine can not be predicated of the body, or any part of it, therefore the man himself can not be the body, but something occupying and influencing the body so as through it to become acquainted with the objects of sense. Desire, emotion, intellect, result from the operation of the discerning and reasoning power in consequence of sensation, which is itself a mental perception of bodily impression, and which induces the percipient principle to act according to its own nature. That which perceives is the subject of sensation, and therefore can not have been caused by sensation. Without the anterior existence of an agent to receive impressions through the senses, sense could not be. Reason thus seems indubitably to demand our assent to the fact asserted in the common language of mankind as to the existence of a distinct agent as the actuating principle in a living human body.

But a new kind of rationalism has arisen of late, which, while acknowledging the reality of revelation, nevertheless refuses to receive as truth any thing which can not be demonstrated to the senses. Those who addict themselves to the dogmatism of such a sensible faith not being able to see, hear, touch, or taste the soul, nor to test it by any chemical agents, very consistently deny its existence altogether. And yet, yielding somewhat to the fashion of belief in favor of the Bible as an authoritative document, because its historic, internal, and collateral evidences amount to a demonstration of its rightful claims to our credence, these rational believers have succeeded at last in convincing themselves, that in that marvelous Book there is no such thing spoken of as a soul or spirit irrespective of the body, and therefore they conclude that bodily existence, such as we witness, is all we are taught by the words spirit and soul as applied to man, either in this life or the next.

It is my anxious desire to found all my metaphysical opinions upon the Bible, because I think this book contains an explicit statement of God's mind as regards all that is essential for us to believe, in order to our everlasting prosperity, both as intellectual and moral beings. The sacred volume, indeed, is not constructed on philosophical principles, because it is God's word, and therefore there is no speculation in its announcements; for God does not propose to theorize on his own work, but yet whatever can be proved true in philosophy and science must be found in keeping with scriptural statements if these are true, since one truth can not contradict another. I believe in the truth of revelation because I have not been able to discover any thing of a demonstrable kind, either in the science of matter or of mind, at variance with it, and therefore if I now hear of a doctrine like that which asserts the non-existence of any thing but what may bo seen, heard, or