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foundation of happiness. The mind, to avoid stagnation creates various factitious desires and wants, pursuing them with an energy, that agitates, and not undulates the current of life. Castles are occupied by themselves and families, where forms of etiquette and proud ceremony turn their pompous habitations into gloomy prisons, and where the elastic balmy air of the atmosphere is forbid entrance to purify the morbid air of the drawingroom, exhausted with the heat of candles and fire, infected with the respiration of unhealthy and numerous companies, and which turns their inhabitants into spectres in appearance, and invalids in reality. The mind participates of the debility of the body; and memory to avoid the tedium of inactive life, fills itself with all the rubbish of ancient and modern history, courts, domestic anecdotes, which overwhelm the faculties of judgment, and reduce the mind to the same state of unconsciousness with excessive labor, and is evinced by that easy behavior, and thoughtless loquacity of the rich and great, which seem to indicate no vacuum in life, but is, at the same time, a sure proof of want of judgment, sensibility, and consciousness, without which rational existence can have no excellence over animal, and the mind can possess no powers to expand into intellectual existence.

Industry, therefore, according to the present system, seems a necessary evil or a relative good, as it gives power and riches to nations; but the morality of Nature regards all excessive occupation, as an enemy to human happiness, and demands a medium of repose and labor to enable the mind to expand into consciousness, by contemplation of itself, and to invigorate the corporeal faculties, to procure the periection of essence,-A sound

MIND IN A SOUND BODY.

THE ARTS.

THE first art, and the most useful, which quality alone, in an enlightened state of Nature gives pre-eminence, is AGRICULTURE, as on this depends the existence of animate matter; and though a greater proportion of the human race subsist by devouring sentient fellow parts of this matter, yet this evil must cease in an enlightened state of Nature; and man, the great instrument by which Nature operates her own perfection, the moment he is called to intellectual existence, must change his aliment from animal to vegetable, in order to procure both health of body and health of mind. For as animal food tends to pamper the body with gross humors, and inflame the blood which gives strength to the passions, and in the same proportion debilitates the reason, so it must engender disease and vice; but vegetable diet has the contrary effect, which may be proved at any time by experience: though it requires a delicacy of attention, and accuracy of judgment to discover such results.

A man in an enlightened state of Nature will be averse to the violence necessary to procure subsistence by animal food, and the only violence he will permit, and that with extreme regret, will be the destruction of destructive creatures, whom he cannot change by education or prevent by restriction: both of which means he will first attempt, in order that the sacred passion of sympathy may receive no callosity or diminution by hasty or voluntary violence.

THE MECHANIC ARTS.

THESE useful arts serve to assist the art of agriculture by fabricating its implements, and to combat the inclemencies of the climate, by building houses and making clothes; also to construct arms to oppose destructive animals; to invent also various machines of sport, plays, and enjoyments of every kind.

THE POLITE ARTS.

THE FINE ARTS-Music, Painting, Sculpture, Engraving, Poetry, Eloquence, &c. are to be studied as contributing much to the comforts and pleasures of life; and Eloquence is highly beneficial, as tending to give form to thought, and to facilitate its communication, by which alone intellectual existence can be promoted or preserved, in the present corrupted state of man, or erroneous civi lization. Eloquence is used to communicate thought, biassed and corrupted by the will, and is therefore the the greatest enemy to intellectual existence; for if eloquence had not arrayed error in such seducing ornaments of language, mankind would long ago have been emancipated from the charms of this syren. It is, however, consolatory to human nature, to reflect that the more strength eloquence acquires, the more useful it will become when subdued by wisdom, when as an auxiliary and tributary power, it will amply atone for all the injury it has yet done to mankind in destroying truth; and by extending over the whole world the empire of wisdom, and by surrounding its throne, render it invincible and eternal.

The mechanic and the fine arts are real friends to human nature, and if contemplation of self, or the study of man is not sacrificed thereto, happiness will be greatly indebted to them for much comfort, pleasure and utility. Poetry, eloquence, music, &c. constitute the relaxation of wisdom, who acquires energy from the temporary repose in their tender and voluptuous embraces; but these valuable exercises of the mind are at present basely prostituted to the service of adulation, falsehood, vice, and superstition. But when wisdom shall have gloriously triumphed over the errors of civil institution and the prejudices of credulity and superstition, the fine arts will amply at one for their apostacy and prostitution, by becoming the ministers of truth, virtue and happiness, to support the throne of wisdom.

THE RELIGION OF NATURE.

TENET I. NATURE is the great integer of being, or natter and motion, without beginning as without end.

II. Mankind are the instruments of Nature in its moral motion, formed to procure well-being or happiness to all animated matter.

III. All animated matter, however organized, changed, or dissolved, is related as parts inseparable from the great integer Nature.

IV. Bodies intellectualized and possessing identifications of I, you, and they, are created to possess consciousness of existence by sensations of pleasure and pain; and though these [individual identities] are annihilated upon the dissolution of the bodies, they still, as parts of Nature, are concerned in the future pain and pleasure of their common integer, from which they are inseparable, though subject to endless change and revo

lution.

V. Moral and physical motion are subject to fixed laws, which produce volition-the cause of action in animate matter.

VI. The judgment or result of the operation of the mental faculties can have cognizance only of secondary causes which it apparently controls and directs to produce well-being or happiness to its essence, which it will ever suppose to be the end [object] of primary

causes.

VII. The human intellect has no power beyond these secondary causes of volition, and their end, which is happiness, all beyond being incoinprehensibility; and the reasoning of analogy can influence only from its probability, and that must be considered relative to the happiness of all animated Nature.

VIII. Man, in forming a volition to procure happiness, begins with self as the centre, and extends to the circle

formed by all animate matter. He is to will for himself alone, and do no violence to any part of animate matter; and in the orbit of social attraction he must imitate the revolution of the celestial bodies, whose reciprocal repulsion and attraction operate without concussion or violence to the centre, or the point, self. Man cedes not, but reforms his volition when it is in collision with that of another, to acquire more happiness, considering himself a component part in this eternal relation to the great integer of Nature; and by this means he produces and eternizes a system of moral harmony, or pain and pleasure, of which he must ever be a centre, and participate as an eternal part of an eternal integer; which connection is indissoluble, though its mode is incomprehensible, and passes through every form of matter in an infiuite revolution.

WHEN the mind takes into contemplation a subject of such importance, novelty and magnitude, as the Religion of Nature, it is apprehensive and alarmed, and descends with caution and terror into its vast profundity. In subjects and researches of infinitely less utility and consequence, how many minds have been debilitated and distracted! The mathematics have sacrificed many victims, astronomy more, the longitude and chemistry have absorbed and deranged many of the most strongly organized faculties, but the subject of religion has so universally deranged and destroyed the human faculties, that reason seems to have lost its powers of pre-eminence, and instinet would be preferred, but that the former contains innate elastic matter, which, when heated by the sun of wisdom, must expand, and reason then assume its pre-eminence and dignity.

Agitated, though not confounded by these discouraging reflections, I shall proceed to give the course of exposition to my thoughts without any regard to ceremonious rules of literature on one hand, or the menaces of prejudice on the other.

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