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O THOUGHT! Great first cause waere comprehension meets incomprehensibility; Author of all moral good and ill; Intelligent cause of motion, develope thyself in the effulgent benevolence of thy essence; guide man to the acme of existence, through thy culture in the religion of Nature; endue him with that strength of wisdom, to adjust the liberty of volition, to the augmentation of judgment; spread thy benignant grace over all the world, to regenerate man to intellectual existence, and establish the moral system of self and sensitive Nature in place of the chaos of ignorance, and the civilization of animal existence. Take under thy peculiar protection the liberty of the press, and inspire jurymen with so holy a respect for thy divinity, that though the ardor of thy glorious rays, collected by error, may burn, the benignity of thy nature cannot be impeached; and action, the result of malicious error, may alone be condemned and punished.

I must admonish my readers not to confound the doctrine of the eternity of existence under different modes of inter-revolution, with the Pythagorean doctrine of transmigration of spirit, or specific change of mode into mode, thereby confounding true principles, and leading the mind into ignorance and error, by pretending to develope and explain the process and connection of cause and effect. The doctrine of the former, teaches the indestructibility of the whole or any part of Nature. That matter which upon dissolution ceases to be man, does not cease to exist, but flows into the ocean of matter, to form new entities, and without disclosing the mode of the process or manifesting any specific identity, is like the river which flows into the ocean and may become portions of rivers again; this idea ought to be consolatory, and encouraging to men to abstain from violence, the author of all evil in the Ocean of Nature, whose waters calmed or troubled by man's wisdom or ignorance in a state of intellectuality, conveys with the undulations of pain and pleasure his changeable existence to all eternity.

END OF THE REVELATION OF NATURE.

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Non rhetor, non grammaticus, non magna scientia doctor, Sapientia sola, hoc aperit fide, hæc hominum dux atque magister.

NEW-YORK.

OPUS MAXIMUM,

AN ESSAY ON MATERIALISM.

PSYCONOMY, OR THE LAWS OF SENSATION.

Knowledge means the conformation of the mental actions or thoughts, to the phenomena or appearances of things, without regard to their unknown causes.

The Nature of any thing signifies the appearances under which that thing exists, as its attributes of figure, action, color, size, locality, &c.

The human mind exists in the substance of the brain and nervous system, exhibited in the senses or phenomena of action, called seeing, hearing, feeling, smelling, tasting, and thinking. The true action of these senses is ascertained by the criterion of experience, to prevent any imposition from the irregularity of their appearances, and to render human knowledge competent and efficient to all the purposes of hu

man existence.

the reverse.

Irregularities may be corrected by our own experience, aided by that of others. Thus, the sense of taste may be deranged by a fever, and what is bitter appear sweet, and We must appeal to the impression or record of memory, in the sixth sense, to prove the falsehood of the phenomena; and we must appeal to the sense of taste in others, by the faculty of belief, to determine the specific quality of bitter or sweet in the particular subject.

Some irregularities of the senses may be corrected by an immediate appeal to the other senses, as when a straight stick appears crooked in the water, we can appeal from the false phenomenon of sight to the sense of touch, and the truth of one sense is ascertained by the criterion of another. Again, when the fingers are crossed and passed over a ball, the sin gle object appears double to the touch, but the criterion of sight proves the error of the sense of feeling. In the same manner we correct the false phenomenon of the sun's motion, by appealing to the impressions of the sixth sense in the de

monstrations of astronomical science.

I shall now examine the false phenomena of the mind or internal sense. In the action called vision or apparition, a

dead man is supposed and said to be seen by his friends after his decease. This phenemenon, when appealed to the crite rion of the sixth sense in ratiocination, is found to be nothing but a motion or action of thought, without prototype, or any resemblance to the phenomena of real existence. This disease of the mind is often cured by rubbing the eye, or diverting the thoughts to another object, or by the appearance of company.

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Another very dangerous and common error of the internal or sixth sense is, to suppose the existence of a thing because it has a word or sound to represent it, as ghost," "witch," "spirit," &c. &c.; these names, when brought to the criterion of sense or reason, are all contradictions. Ghost means a living dead body, or death performing the actions of life; witch means an old woman possessing supernatural power, that is, a power beyond her powers-another contradiction; spirit means a something with nothing to exist in, that is, immaterial power, or force without body—a pal. pable contradiction.

These sounds, though they can give no form, yet they generate motion and influence in thought. This may be exem. plified in the mind of a child, which suffers more agitation from the word "bugaboo," pronounced by the nurse, than the adult mind of a sensible man would suffer by "slavery," a rational word that represents all the real ills of life.

The laws of Nature, intelligible in their phenomena alone, have established a clear and impassable boundary to human knowledge, experience, beyond which all is unintelligible, and within which all is comprehensive and consummate, to render man a competent and efficient instrument in the great machine of Nature, by developing his energy as a constituent member in the mundane system.

The various phenomena of Nature relative to human existence exhibit an absolute identity of the human body with the great whole of existence, through the perpetual transmutation of matter, both in life and death; but these phenomena being amenable to no experience, to ascertain the interest of the parts and their whole in time and futurity, the laws of Nature have substituted a criterion in the moral sense of sympathy, which guides man to the formation of such laws and opinions as may acquire the highest degree of pleasurable

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