LETTER IX. FURTHER CONSIDERATION OF THE RESULTS WHICH HAVE IX. Ir was another part of the plan of our Creator LETTER when he settled his system of human nature, that we should be all, in every age and country, and of every condition, universally and without exception born into this world in total ignorance, and destitute of ideas. The prince, the beggar, the savage and the most civilized, come into existence in perfect equality and uniformity in this respect. The same rule of nature operates to this end now, as it did in the time of Noah, Theseus and Semiramis. It has been likewise as invariably ordained that we should acquire all our ideas from our own sensations and emotions, each for himself, as external things act upon us; and that we should thus derive all the knowlege we may possess, from the material substances and existences which are about us, which exist independently of us, and which have no necessary or indispensable connection with any indi vidual, Plato imagined, and has made Socrates intimate, from whom he may have had the notion, that we have all been living in pre-existent states, and come into being here with minds ready stocked with ideas, which events and things in this world IX. LETTER only re-call and re-awaken to our reminiscence;' and it is a rooted opinion among the Hindoo varieties of population, that we are born here out of a preceding life, and die but to transmigrate into another. But these are mere dreams, which no realities warrant, and deserve no consideration. We know not when our soul was first created, but we may be all sure, from our personal experience, and from studying our filial babes, that it comes into human life without form and void, unshaped and empty, with as little furniture in its mental capacity as it has apparel upon its soft and beautiful body. None of the subjects of our memory, none of our Kebes reminds Socrates of his doctrine: According to what you frequently mention, our learning is nothing else than reminiscence, and we have learnt in some former time, what we now remember; but this would be impossible, unless our soul had been somewhere else before it came into this human form.' Among other remarks on this, Socrates observes, 'If we have received any thing before we are born, and lose it when born, and afterwards, by using our senses concerning it, obtain again the cognition of it, should we not say, that this is a recovery of the knowlege which had been familiar to us? When did our souls receive this knowlege? Not since the time we were born here. Then it was anterior to that. Then, O Simmias, our souls existed before they came into this human form, without bodies, and had then intelligence.' Plato Phæd. s. 16-18. This is much insisted on as a favourite idea. 2 This was also a main doctrine of Pythagoras; and therefore Ovid makes him say, 'I myself was in the Trojan war, as Euphorbus.' Ov. Met. lib. xv. 160. Our ancient Druids had the same belief, which Lucan, in Rowe's pleasing translation, thus mentions of them: If dying mortals doom they sing aright, No ghosts descend to dwell in dreary night, No parting souls to grisly Pluto go; But forth they fly, immortal in their kind, And other bodies in new worlds they find.' Rowe's Lucan. In this spirit, Taliesin, the old British Bard, half a Druid in mind, frequently mentions his own pre-existences. IX. images or intellectual perceptions originate to us LETTER from our interior nature without the concurrence of something that is exterior to us; none, as far as I can judge, are intuitive within us, though some German psychologists have endeavored to except two or three abstract conceptions from the general blank.3 I think they are mistaken, and, from an anxiety to start new ideas, deviate largely into the fantastic; but if they were not wrong in their à priori theories, the small number of what the most reasonable of their speculatists contend for as connate with human nature, makes very little difference in the vast totality of our unquestionable ignorance.* We have a wonderful capacity and sensibility for receiving all impressions from without, and for instantaneously forming perceptions from them. Our minds act in this respect with a celerity which 3 Kant led himself to believe, that the ideas, or universal forms of time and space, were connate with him. Professor Hegel, of Berlin, mentioning this, adds 'Kant once pronounced the strong opinion, that the understanding of man is the law-giver of nature; but others have gone beyond him, and have exulted to possess the forms, categories and ideas of all existence in their laws of thinking, and to develope them out of human thought. 'I will not remain behind in this sublime art. I soon drop experience. I raise myself above it, and soar into the open region of thinking à priori. Here commences its original, perfect, self-sufficient operation. Here I sit, shaping forms of thought; developing categories and ideas. It is wonderful and glorious that I possess this original, self-active power of forming ideas out of conceptions à priori.' When will the German mind, always so valuable, and once so sound, descend or subside into the realms of correct reason, sober thought, and steady, good, common-sense judgment? How wild these German metaphysicians can be, we see from Fichte, one of the most celebrated. About 1786 he declared, from his Professor's chair at Jena, that in five years from that time Christianity would cease to exist, and that reason would become the religion of mankind!' Theol. Rep. Dec. 1830. LETTER IX. we cannot follow, even in thought. But they are vacant, until the exterior cause acts upon them, and our sensorial organizations are the channels which have been provided for this surprising agency, and its marvellous, tho quite inexplicable effects accruing to us. The appointed system is, and has ever been, that all our intellectual treasures shall be derivative to us, and shall occur to us after we have begun our human existence, and from all that we experience while it continues. We see that the body grows into its assigned shape and maturity from the exterior matter which accrues to it, and of which the stomach and circulating vessels are made the recipients. Our mind, in like manner, increases as progressively in its sensations and perceptions, and derives these from the impressions of other things, which are not a part of its original self, but which are subsisting externally on our surface, and excite our consciousness of them. These also we did not form, nor so place, as to be the instruments of our knowlege or within our observations. They have been made and stationed there by the same power who created us, and by their position and contiguity, we see that they are where they are, expressly, among other results, that we may have this knowlege and these impressions from them. On this system of our nature, it is obvious that the soul would have been nothing but its own naked vitality and capabilities, if it had been left to itself; and if some external world or other had not been devised and created on purpose to furnish it with all that really makes it an intelligent being. There is nothing in ourselves to cause this out IX. ward world. Our mind or body no more makes a LETTER tree or an animal than they make a man. Their existence is therefore as independent of us as ours is of them. We can plant, breed and rear in various places, and change the localisation of what we nurture by our activity, but we cannot originate any; hence, as it was necessary that there should be an external world of some kind or other, in order to give us knowlege and that intellectual personality which arises from it, so it was equally indispensable that this should be provided for us by some power capable both of devising and providing it. This has been accomplished. There is such an external world daily before us, which we have had no share in producing, and it is thus an evidence sensorially to us, that there is, without us, an intelligent, contriving and most mighty Power, who has visibly been exerting His omnipotence in this respect for our use; for as we did not form the earth we live in, nor that, the human race, there must be a common Framer of both, who has benignly created each, and most skilfully and beautifully adapted the one to the other.5 It is interesting to find impressions of this kind among the great men among our forefathers. One of these, Sir Thomas Browne, thus expresses his feelings : There are two books, from which I collect my divinity. The one, written of God; the other, of His servant Nature, that universal manuscript, which He has expanded to the eyes of all. But I never so forget God, as to adore the name of Nature. The effects of Nature are the works of God, whose hand and instrument only she is ; and therefore, to ascribe His actions unto her, is to devolve the honor of the principal agent upon the instrument. If we may do this with reason, then let our hammers rise up, and boast that they have built our houses; and let our pens receive the honour of our writing.' Browne's Religio Medici. |