ciple, because they come not from the natural man, but from the temporary and artificial circumstances of his political position.*

Another natural uniformity has been produced in our mental actions and reasoning, inferring and judging. We do not always come to the same conclusions, because our knowledge and acquired ideas on which our thinking faculty operates, vary in amount and applicability. But we always reason, infer, and judge in the same manner, and on resembling principles. When self-interest, falsehood, passions, habits, and prepossessions, or such like disturbing causes, do not alter the primitive tendency and operations of our nature, we think very much alike. If we take up the Proverbs of Solomon, written above 2,700 years ago, if we read the sententious aphorisms of the Arabian Poets before Mohammed appeared among them, or the Rose Garden of the Persian Saadi, the Runic Havamaal, the moral Orations of Isocrates, the verses of Phocyllides, the Ethics of Aristotle, the Offices of Cicero, or the works of Timour the Great, or of the Emperor Akbar,-if we look into the Sanscrit moral writers, or even turn over the voiceless literature of the insulated and uncommunicating Chinese,-if we note the conversations and remarks of the negro in his torrid plains, or the Esquimaux in his snow-built hut, or the war-loving New Zealander in his pleasant, but uncultivated island-we meet with a surprising identity of thought and judgment, on the ordinary actions and circumstances of man and nature.

* An instance of this appears in the lower orders of the Irish, in the present excitements under which they have been acting. Sir Hussey Vivian thus described them in 1832, before the Committee on the State of Ireland :

"There is one thing I should wish to notice, and that is the extraordinary carelessness of human life among the lower classes. I have endeavoured to find out whence it arises, that the men who appear so kind in their dispositions, so grateful for any little kindness bestowed upon them, as the lower class of Irish generally are, should exhibit such little apparent reluctance to destroy their fellow-creatures.

"It is a very striking circumstance in Ireland, that a disturbance scarcely ever arises but you hear of the loss of life; yet, during the whole of the disturbances in England, there was but one instance in which a hand was raised against an individual. In Ireland, if you go into their houses, and you are kind to them, they appear grateful beyond measure, and I believe really are so; and yet those very persons would have no sort of hesitation in taking up a stone, and committing murder. The cause of this readiness to sacrifice life should be inquired into.”— Dub. Evening Mail, Aug. 1832.

VOL. II.-L

They seem often like one man moving from region to region, and from one century to another, and penning down in each the same deductions, the same opinions, the same moral reasonings and results.* How this has been accomplished, I cannot explain satisfactorily to myself; for the smallest exertion rouses individual will to debate and opposition. Yet amid all the discord and battle of individual self-will, we have been so formed, and our life so arranged, and such effective means have been put in action, that no one naturally contends that two and two make five, that vice is becoming, or that virtue is a disgrace; that to be a fool is a creditable, or that a knave is an honourable character; though artificial habits and ideas may be adopted, which ingraft variations that make some wrong actions laudable, while such impressions influence.t

By producing so effectually these designed uniformities, our Creator has made abundant provision for our being all human beings of the same general kind; and by subjecting every one

* A beautiful dissuasive against envy by the Persian poet Jami has just met my eye, which I will add as one of the instances of our similarities of thought and moral judgment :

"Fate once gave me this disinterested advice. Indeed, there is not a single dispensation of Providence which, if properly viewed, will not afford an excellent lesson: Never (said she) repine at the good fortune of others; for many are they who wish to be raised to your situation." The Persian original of Jami is very elegant and forcible.-Gladw. Asiat. Misc. p. 30.

The poet of Bokhara, Rodoki, presents to us an identity of thought and feeling with Solomon, in the following fine distich on a contemporary friend and poet :

"Muradi, alas, is dead! But no! he certainly cannot be dead. It is not so easy for death to triumph over such an illustrious man. He has only restored his noble soul to our universal Father. He has only resigned his sordid body to our universal mother."-Ib. p. 32

† Piracy and robbery of strangers are instances of this sort. When these have been artificially made the sources of subsistence, the mind trained to them from childhood loses its natural feelings against them, and yet often shows the rudiments of what has been suppressed by the bad habits. Thus Lieut. Conolly found a strange medley of hospitality and natural good feeling combined with this exotic rapacity in the Toorkmuns of Asia. "Your person is sacred, and your life dearer to him than his own, while you are under the shadow of his tent; but the very man who gives you bread in his tent, will not scruple to fall upon you when you are beyond its precincts. Perhaps at the very moment you are eating his salt, your host is thinking how, on a future occasion, he may transfer a part of your wealth to himself."-Conolly's Journey in the North of India. But a Mooselmaun who had been rabbed by some Bedouins, said, "afterward, having nothing, at whatever tent I stayed I got food and a welcome."-Ib.

of us to the same wants, and causing us all to have the same natural appetites and desires, the general similarity is carefully preserved. So much identity is specially produced by his selected means, acting with constant efficiency to their ap pointed ends; and so completely do these cause all our race to be human beings of some kind or other, that the most destitute and lowest savage never becomes in his mind, or habits, or occupations, an orang-outang, a simia, or a walrus. One or two wild men of the woods have been found: these are the nearest degradations of man to the animal. Yet this was no voluntary transformation. The lost or abandoned babe had grown up in a forest apart from all human society. None became so under the usual laws of human life. The man that is born and bred among his fellows, of whatever sort, can no more become a monkey or a wild beast, than a horse or a parrot can identify itself with a man.

By an individual process which we cannot detect, every animal is assimilated to its species, and kept from uniformity with any other. This system is peculiarly pursued towards man, with undeviating success. Every division of his population has all the main features and qualities of a human being, and not of the brute animals about them. Each meets the other with this impression and certainty, and acts towards the other as such. So the cultivated European approaches the naked Australian and the poorest negro; and such they mutually find each other to be; though doubt of each other's purposes, and fear of each other's hostility, from their reciprocal ignorance and strangeness, and the excitement of each other's passions, may soon put them into a state of deadly hostility and vindictive battle.*

* We can hardly select a stronger instance of the efficacy and uniformity of the moral constitution of man, and of the adaptation of the appointed course of nature to it, than in that connexion which all ages and climes have found to subsist between wickedness and misery. Our celebrated Junius exclaims, in one of his private letters to Mr. Woodfall, No. 44," after long experience of the world, I affirm before God, I never knew a rogue who was not unhappy."-Woodfall's Junius, v. i. p. 237.

Juvenal found the same fact to be as true 1,600 years before; for he also says, "Nemo malus felix" (no bad man is a happy one).--Satire iv. In Job's earlier days, and in very different countries, it was the same. "The wicked man travaileth with pain all his days," xv. 10.

"Knowest thou not that of old, since man was placed upon earth, the triumphing of the wicked is short, and the joy of the hypocrite for a moment," xx. 4, 5.

LETTER IX.

Farther Consideration of the Results which have been accomplished in the Execution of the Divine Plan, as to our knowledge, sensations, feelings, and intellectual operations.

It was another part of the plan of our Creator, 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 operated 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 knowledge 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 connexion with any individual. 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 only recall and reawaken to our reminiscence; and it is a rooted opinion among the Hindoo varieties of population, that we are born here out of

*

In his royal station, David remarked the same: "I have seen the wicked in great power, and spreading himself like a green bay-tree. Yet he passed away. Lo! he was not. I sought him, but he could not be found."-Psalm xxxvii. 35, 36. Everywhere else the same experience occurs, whatever the external aspect or present condition may be.

Kebes reminds Socrates of his doctrine: "According to what you frequently mention, our learning is nothing else than reminiscence, and we have learned 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 afterward,

à 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 images or intellectual perceptions, originate to us 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 endeavoured to except two or three abstract conceptions from the general blank. I think they are deceived, and from an anxiety to

by using our senses concerning it, obtain again the cognition of it, should we not say that this is a recovery of the knowledge which had been familiar to us?

"When did our souls receive this knowledge? 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.

* 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.

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 lawgiver 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 develop 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 a priori. Here commences its original, perfect, self-sufficient operation. Here I sit, shaping forms of thought; developing categories and ideas.