brain. The sensorium, notwithstanding the magnitude of its mental substance, has no power over the stomach, and can no more will hunger than it can will the circulation of the blood; and this proves, that the agency of the body, and its attribute mind, needs not the mystic power of what is called spirit to unite them into one inseparable identity. Much stress has been laid on the capacity of separation of the mind and body, as two distinct beings, by the Stoic philosophers, in pompous narratives of heroic martyrdom, where the mind appears to separate its action from that of the body this, however, proves only the exercise of fortitude, which may be generated by enthusiasm and folly, and gives hopes to reason, that a much higher degree of rational fortitude may be acquired by its more powerful energy.

The Stoic of enthusiasm, or even the philosopher of true wisdom, whose mind might triumph over the pain of fire; yet, in this moment of apparent separation of the body from its attribute, if a bottle of brandy was to be forced down the patient's throat, the mind would immediately succumb together with the body under the force of this new material agency. It is a most indignant and loathsome task to the man of reason and nature, to be obliged to clear away so much rubbish of prejudice, and dirt of credulity, before he can lay down the foundation of a system of fact, intelligence, and experience. There exists such a universal propensity in the undisciplined mind of man to take sound for sense, and words for things, that credulity is become an invincible instinct, and an almost insurmountable barrier to the progress of reason. Men of letters, as well as priests, have taken advantage of this common propensity, and by substituting words to things, have introduced a false knowledge, that has as much deprived man of the use of his understanding as a bandage over his eyes would deprive him of the sense of sight. The celebrated metaphysician, Berkeley, with the use of the unmeaning word spirit, has taught, that men and things have no bodies or substance, and that they exist only as powers whose action is made knowu to the mind. To demonstrate this he lays down a great principle, that all bodies which have a real existence must all be, or exist, in the localities of their action: that is, the tree which I think I see, being an object of too great magnitude to enter the locality of the eye, can have no existence but in power or spirit, that is in the mind itself.

I shall answer this silly sophism with a few simple observations, that will overthrow all the systems of word-makers, and, at the same time, explain the fundamental principles of my new mental philosophy.

The use and purpose of intellectual power is, to conform the actions of thought to the intelligible relations of things, without any regard to the unintelligible relations, which avail nothing to human energy. I will illustrate this truth with the action of a

chamber-fire. I know that the fire exists because I feel it and see it; and I have just the same evidence of the existence of the object fire in all its modes without, as I have of the existence of its simple sensation heat within the mind. The simple action of any one sense comprehends and identifies all its external modes of action as one and the same thing, and supported by one and the same evidence of consciousness. I cannot discover the modifications of the reciprocal actions of the mind, and its external object fire, to produce the agency of the one and the passiveness of the other but I can assume, through the experience of my sensation, such relations of distance as cause warmth to comfort me, and such relations of culinary powers as will prepare and dress my food-and such a conformity of the actions of thought to the intelligible relations of fire amenable to experience, I call knowledge. Metaphysicians, in pursuit of fame, profit, or power, pretend to explore the unintelligible relations of things, and when lost in the maze of their own sophistry, they coin the word spirit; and every secret and unintelligible action is accounted for by that unmeaning sound, offered to unsuspecting and uninquiring credulity.

It is one of the first laws of intelligence, that no power can exist without substance to support it, or, in other words, that all essence or being must have extension as its element; and this primary law of intelligence abrogates all the jargon of metaphysics, as immaterial substance or spirit having its essence in nothing to give it action or existence.

There seems to be but one simple reply required to overturn the airy fabric of metaphysical sophistry. When these spiritual sages observe, that when you see an object you only imagine you see it, I reply, you only imagine your imagination, and absurdly oppose it to the only evidence of existence, consciousness or sensation, which is the proper definition of existence.

I shall dismiss this contemptible controversy of proving circles not to be squares, and, vice versa, squares not to be circles, and proceed to make my purposed investigation of the nature of the human mind, with the criterion of common sense and the standard of universal experience, which the action of things, independent of their causes, sufficiently exhibits throughout all the cognoscible systems of the universe. I must here seriously and impressively admonish my auditors not to confound the province of reason with that of religious faith, by suffering their prejudices to take offence at this explosion of the word spirit as a sound of unmeaning emptiness. I do not expunge it from the vocabulary of faith, with which these Lectures have no concern, but only from that of reason, where, if admitted, it would make a chaos of the laws and discipline of the human understanding. Locke, Priestley, and many learned and pious men, the defenders of Christian faith, have treated the word spirit with both indifference and re

pugnance. My peculiar promise is the sphere of intellectual power, or the boundary of knowledge, marked by experience; and that of thought, marked by conceivability: that is, to ascertain what we can know and what we can conjecture or imagine within those precincts. The operation of imagination, which extends the powers of intellect by projecting objects of knowledge upon the base of observation beyond experience, in the regular analogy of influential sentiment, I shall treat of in my Lecture appropriated to that faculty. It will be sufficient in this place to shew only what are the different characters of knowledge and thought, advancing its energies beyond it in the conjectures of analogy. Knowledge, governed by observation and experience, must have some palpable object, as the part or whole of a thing for the element or medium of its action. For example, the existing state of man, law, happiness, form partial objects of those systems of perfectibility which knowledge may arrive at, through the experience of social reform or improveable science, to direct and limit human action.

Thought, whose element is conceivability, and not experience, must however be directed by observation to the assumption of some object, as in the analogy of planetary inhabitants, the object assumed is not human, vegetable, or animal bodies, but only that the planets support some modes of existence as a conceivable analogy with the earth; and such is the influential sentiment generated by imagination, following the rules of analogy in genus and species, which no effort of reason can prevent. Religious faith is a subject beyond my inquiry, because it is allowed by its teachers to be placed beyond the powers of observation and experience, and to depend on revelation, inspiration, and mystery. But while I treat religious faith with silent respect, I will suffer no mystery to become a check to the progress or energy of the sovereign light of reason. I will follow the example of Galileo, the astronomer, who having discovered that the sun never moved, (though Scripture history asserted the contrary) and having been punished by the Inquisition, instead of being rewarded, exclaimed upon his enlargement, "The earth moves, and not the sun;" a fact no authority, however sacred, can refute. In the same manner, should I be censured by bigots for discovering the word spirit to be a nonentity in the system of intelligence, I will repeat my assertion in the face of every inquisitor, and recommend to all pious sectarians the following advice:-If Scripture mystery should any where have asserted that two was the half of six, or any other proposition equally contradictory, it would be most prudent and pious for a religionist, upon the detection of such error, to assent to truth, and attribute the fault to his own misunderstanding, rather than expose Scripture to support contradiction and falsehood, and thereby make it an impediment to the progress of intellectual energy, the sovereign power of the moral world, to direct and

control the operations of the human species in the worship of nature, the augmentation of good and diminution of evil in the mundane system.

The present undisciplined and defective state of intellectual power, which seems to follow the parallel of learned activity, is owing to the preposterous error of moralists, who confound the two distinct premises of religious mystery and experimental reason. What furious struggles between reason and faith were carried on in the beginning of the last century, when enlightened legislators forbad the trials of witchcraft Bigoted judges appealed to Scripture for the sentence of death pronounced therein-while reason opposed the laws of nature to prove that no such mode of being could exist. Reason however triumphed, and attached a brand of infamy to the human understanding, which had suffered millions of innocent victims to be sacrificed through the lapse of ages to the most drivelling and barbarous superstition, which still survives in some countries as a deplorable instance that the grossest detections of absurdity cannot eradicate that natural root of superstition in the human temperament.

Bigots opposed the Scripture to Locke when he conceded to Materialists the unnecessary existence of spirit which the progress of reason and experience had discovered to his mind. Bigots opposed the Bible to Pope when he declared universal power to be the aggregate of all partial powers, and no personification, consummate and coequal in man, tree, insect, and all other parts of the universe. Bigots opposed Scripture to Sir Isaac Newton's discoveries of the laws of light, in which he shews that the light of the fixed stars could not arrive at the earth in as many years as the history of the creation gave days to its advent. These instances of stupid zeal, which bring the tales of mystery to contend with and stop the progress of reason, will insure the ultimate downfal of superstition, and the eternal triumph of reason and truth.

I now proceed to the subject of this Lecture-the development of the substance and attribute of the human mind. The great genus of being called matter may be divided into four grand species, viz. animal, vegetable, organic, and concrete substances. Animal life, or substance, contains the four classes within itself; animality exists in the substance of the nerves; vegetality in the circulation of the blood; organism in the membral parts of the body; and concrete power in the coherence of the fleshy substance. The animal man has no other distinction from his animal species than a characteristic quality called perfectibility; the powers of intelligence, though very superior in man, have no distinct character, but follow the common process of intelligence, to remember, to reflect, to compare, to judge, and to think, throughout all the animal species, differing only in quantity, but not in quality of intellect.

The human characteristic, perfectibility, which so specifically and pre-eminently distinguishes man from his fellow-beings in the sensitive system, I here offer to the attention of naturalists as the great desideratum of classification in natural history. Naturalists have attempted to classify men with the various epithets, the erect, the unfledged, the laughing animal; but these have all been encroached upon by the brute species.

In the character of perfectibility man stands insulated and unconfounded, as demonstrable in the change and progress of civil society within the period of authentic history. In the same pe riod we discover no change or progress whatsoever, either individual or social, among the sensitive tribes. The bees, the ants, the beavers, live now in the same unchangeable condition in which they lived in the time of the Grecian and Roman republics, from which we may conclude the total absence of the quality of perfectibility, the sole characteristic of human nature.

I shall now confine my researches to the anatomy of the human mind, in order to develope its nature in those clear and experimental phenomena which are observed in the substance and powers of the nervous system, the seat of intelligence.

The nervous system is formed of fibres, which pervade all parts of the human body, having their greatest mass of assemblage in the head, or what is called the brain. This mass, or brain, exhibits to every man's experience various actions or modifications called thought, which is denominated the sensorium, and which I shall prove to be a sixth sense, as the necessary foundation of all my mental discipline.

The five senses of seeing, hearing, feeling, smelling, and tasting, are contained in the ramifications of the nerves, which extend themselves from the brain, as the organ of thought, to all the other organs of sense, as the eyes, the ears, the nose, the palate, and the valves of feeling in the fingers and every other part of the body.

Hence we may observe, that the body has six instead of five senses, which important discovery I shall first proceed to demonstrate. In all the works of nature, whether in spheres, systems, planets, plants, or animals, we discover a competency of every part to perform their specific functions in the common laws of cause and effect, without any supernatural interference of miraculous power, or, in other words, without any deviation from the universal course of Nature's law. The sun keeps his centre without a Photon to arrest him; the earth supports itself in its own orbit without an Atlas. Plants and trees vegetate without the aid of Hamadryads, or spirits of the woods; and man performs all the functions of his nature without the aid of Hercules in the fable. This competency of human power, commensurate with its functions, is placed in the mechanism of the human mind, through the different organs of sensation, as thus:-Intelligence, or