itself in its conscience, or secret principle of action. The highest exertion of intellectual energy is to invert the mind upon itself; according to the poet, Young:

To turn thought inwards; force back the mind to

Settle on itself:-the point, supreme of manhood. To effect this, we should always have an object of sense in the action of perception, and comprehend all its relations. If the question is civil liberty, we must collect into the same view of perception, all the relations of power and subjection, modified by population, their information, temperament, and sociality. If the question is peace or war, we must relate them in all their reciprocal influences of means and ends, to time, place, and circumstances, in one continuous view; and should we forget a single important relation, and take it afterwards in succession, it might be too late.

The faculty of perception will be increased in its powers by its exercise in travels, moral lectures and discussions, polemic writings, conversation with free-thinkers; and I trust that the perusal of this work may aid in producing the constant examination of the most secret and recondite operations of our own thoughts.

Memory is a capacity of mind to retain or restore the actions of thought in the order and force of impression or attention, with which they were originated. Upon the use or abuse of this faculty depends the weakness or strength of the judgment. When the memory is stuffed with a great mass of useless matter, as dead languages, the attention is confined to these copies and figures of other men's thoughts and invention, and the great instrument of sagacity is impeded. Simple memory or recollection is the mere copy or record of existing things and their relations, called Science. But memory also furnishes the material for Invention, which by a new combination of causes, predicts a new result of events to guide thought and conduct through improvable knowledge, to the acquisition of moral truth and happiness.

Make, then, memory a record resembling the merchant's leger, which gives an epitomized view of accounts with a reference to the journal for their detail. Thus, the conten. tions of the senate and the people in Rome may be impressed on the memory, as causes of the establishment of emperors and tyrants; and all the useless details of their lives, battles,

and administrations referred to history, as the waste book of matter unentered in the leger of memory.

This discipline may be illustrated by the conduct of many scientific men, whose memory being, as it were, saturated or replete with the peculiar objects of their studies, have been rendered incompetent for the social and individual functions of life, which constitute happiness.

It is reported of the celebrated mathematician Ferguson, that he was so totally absorbed in the study of mechanical powers, that he was literally obliged to be nursed by his wife; and of Sir Isaac Newton, that his friend one day persuaded him that he had eaten his dinner, by placing empty dishes with their covers on the table.

All the sciences should be studied and impressed upon the memory by attention, in such proportion of ideas as may be conducive to the knowledge of self and Nature; beyond this, the whole supplementary detail should be left to the reference of the library, without exhausting the memory. [The memory of strange names and things may be aided by their association with similar familiar ones.]

The word CONCEPTION is derived from the Latin "concipere," to conceive, or take together; that is, to connect together thoughts in the mind, as they may represent things in

existence.

Fancy frequently interrupts this order of conception by putting things together in the relations of ideas, which have no possible relation in things themselves: Thus, the raven croaking upon the house-top, [or dog howling in the neighborhood,] is put into the relation of thought with the sick man in the chamber, and presages his death: the conjunction of the planets, or the return of a comet, was put together with the councils of nations, to betoken war and desolation to the human species!

The works of an author are associated with his actions. The physician may have written the most irrefutable theories of health and happiness, yet if he has not fortitude to prac tise them, a fanciful conception makes his error of practice or action, the test of truth for his writings or theories.

The oral recantation of an infidel upon his death-bed, is conceived, by a simple negative of the fancy, a refutation of all the profound arguments of his voluminous works.

The most dangerous and outrageous misconception of fancy is to correlate physical power with truth, as was the practice of many false prophets, who established the most abominable and cruel systems of superstition, by false and supposed miracles of raising the dead, coming on a white horse from heaven, or arresting the course of Nature. If such miracles could be performed, they would no more corroborate or relate to the truth of science, than the length of the pen to the arguments of the writer.

Suppose Euclid had maintained two to be more or less than the half of four, and that his pupils objecting to the falsehood of his proposition, he made the moon change place with the sun; such a miracle could not affect the relation of numerical quantities. Two and four are relations of science, which stands upon its own evidence, irrelative and independent of all other action and power.

It is the same in the moral science. Murder, theft, liberty, tyranny, are all relations of social life, to be tried by the evidence of human policy; and the power of the doctor of ethics, if he could call down the sun to his footstool, could not affect, or in any manner relate itself to moral evidence.

There is another very common error which imposes itself on the faculty of conception, in relating propensities of the heart with theories of the understanding. This error was exemplified in the case of John Wilkes, who wrote against the tyranny of general warrants, and was answered by ministers with an accusation of robbing his regiment: this might have been true or false, but it could have no possible relation to general warrants. This ministerial artifice influenced, however, the minds of the vulgar, but had no effect in perplexing the conception of the enlightened courts of justice which condemned general warrants.

JUDGMENT.-The relations of moral truth, fluctuate like the waves of the ocean, in the conditionality of circumstances. Murder, or man-killing, under one particular co-existence of relations, is an atrocious crime; under another set of rela tions, (accidents,) it is an act of indifference; and under a third set, (warfare,) it is called meritorious.

The human intellect to decide on the moral proposition, murder; must first be removed from the influence of preju dice; its index of language must have a flexible correspon.

dence with the conditional nature of moral relations; and judgment, which corresponds to the needle of the compass, must have a free oscillation in doubt, to mark the approximation or adjustment of theory and practice. The mind must be open to doubt and examination, and receive nothing on mere authority. Nor need it therefore be unfit for action; but be like the mariner, who, in a perpetual state of incertitude or calculation of longitude, continues in the perpetual action of sailing forward. For thus it is with human conduct. The wise man who uses his understanding after the rules of discipline, never ceases to deliberate upon improvable life while he acts in practical life; and, like the bold and cheerful mariner, he sails forward in the perfectibility of his nature, with serene, complacent, and confident energy, unperplexed and unrestrained by inflexible dogma, which drives a nail into the compass of intellect, checks all progress of invention, and annihilates intellectual power.

REFLECTION.

Reflection is the mirror of the mind, which it inverts on itself, and generates intellectual energy.

In all human conduct the will is comparatively innocent, because good is its object in every action, whether of vice or virtue. When a man does good or evil to a fellow-being, the primary and ultimate purpose is to make himself happy, which renders the will similar and innocent in all actions. The criminality of action is placed in the understanding, whose function it is to examine the will in all its motives.

When the bigot persecutes to death the infidel as a supposed enemy of the demon he worships, he refuses to reflect upon the arguments of the victim, or the motives and purposes of his own mind, which would discover to him the baseness of his conduct, and the cruelty of his vengeance.

When the demagogue seeks to revolutionize his country, he avoids those persons whose conversation in opposite sentiments, and those books which in opposite arguments, would excite his mind to reflection: he herds with the factious, he reads seditious discourses, and pursues reckless habits of ac tion and decision, which exclude the liability of doubt and reflection.

The man who should will the destruction of the world by

imprecating the access of a comet within the orbit of the earth's attraction, would be perfectly innocent, and most honorably justified, if he first reflected candidly and sincerely upon the action of his reason; his will seeking controversy, challenging every where discussion and inquiry, ultimately by the discipline of reflection, holding perpetual converse and examination of the most secret operations of conscience; but the man who shall avoid controversy, fly from inquiry and discussion, and dread the examination of his own conscience, he is the great culprit of Nature.

It may be objected here, that the error of will may be accompanied with an incapacity to reflect and examine, and that this ignorace would offer an excuse for crime. To this I reply, that if this ignorant man has never refused to seek after or to hear evidence, he is certainly innocent; but if he has turned his back on inquiry, and been averse to instruction, reflection, and self-examination, he is then most atrociously criminal.

IMAGINATION.

Imagination is derived from the Latin word imago, an image, which signifies the resemblance of some original thing. There can be no proper action of this faculty but as an ade quate or inadequate resemblance of some palpable object; as there can be no image or resemblance where there is no original, but its qualities may be varied by new combinations.

Pythagoras, who discovered the property of the hypothenuse, did not create it; Faustus, who discovered printing, did not create the properties of the press; and Lycurgus, who established the constitution of Sparta, created no new faculty in man or Nature.

The inhabitant of the world, in the development of his energy to augment good and diminish evil in the mundane system, can receive no aid from the people of Saturn, or the number of the stars; and it would be better for man, admonished by this lesson, to study himself on the ample experience of sensation, as the all-sufficient science of self and Nature.

All qualities or powers must have substance or extension to exist in; and thought or mind is the substance of the brain in action, though the understanding of man may be incapa