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The single question of the election of a President of the United States definitely or indefinitely calls the faculties of the mind into a higher degree of exercise than all the scientific questions of academies published in court gazettes, to dignify these diaries of royal follies, and amuse a thoughtless people with the shadow of free inquiry into questions of trifling literature, or the natural philosophy of cockle shells. I will rest all my defence of national prejudice upon the political state of the American people. This country, with fewer universities, libraries, observatories, and institutes; poets, painters, and sculptors-arts, or sciences, has carried the moral science to its acmé in the discovery of the great desideratum of human policy-a confederacy of nations. This sublime system, regarded as a chimera by the lettered sages and star-gazers of Europe, was reserved by Nature, for the farmers of America to establish, as an indelible and irrefutable evidence of the superiority of sagacity over science.

The posthumous relation of man to the sensitive system exhibits the simple object of transmutation, of dissolving into renovating bodies, without any experience of the quantity or duration of interest in that transmutation; but this fact or idea is amenable to the scale of sensation in life, and makes the accommodative good of time the com mensurate and progressive good of futurity.

On the scale of sensation, experience teaches us that the peace, liberty, and happiness of self is multiplied in the exact ratio of its extension to all surrounding being; and the scale of human perfectibility is graduated by the cessation of violence and reciprocation of aid to the whole sensitive system. The medium of intelligence has two distinct departments-the one called knowledge, founded on observation and limited by experience the other called conjecture, founded on some palpable objects of sense and limited by conceivability. The department of knowledge directs and limits all human action in the formation of social institutions, conforming to the laws of human sensa tion, which makes sympathy the primary law of the moral, as gravitation is that of the physical world. The laws of sympathy extend individual interest in the ratio of the

steei-yard, scale or lever-the momentum of weight or interest increases in the remoteness of relation from the fulcrum of self to the whole circumference of the sensitive system. The comprehensive circle of sensitive life being the extremity of the lever of sympathy, the vio lence inflicted or kindness extended by man to the brute species becomes the highest momentum of moral evil or moral good. Children, as soon as their perception commences, are perpetual witnesses of violence to the brute species, which forms the greatest momentum of the coun teracting power of sympathy, and follows the ratio of spe cies, nation, country, neighborhood, friend, parent, self, as explained in the allegory of Pope, comparing self-love to a lake, agitated by the impetus of a pebble, which shews the greatest force to follow the remoteness of the circles of undulation. That is, the greatest interest of self-love advances or is multiplied by the remoteness of its relation; the first remove from self into the circle of friendship procures a higher degree of sympathy and interest than can be acquired by a selfish love contracted into the point of individual existence. The next circle of neighborhood, or acquaintanceship, offers in their pros perity a multiplied sympathy and interest reacting upon the well-being of self. The circle or country advances the power of interest to a greater diameter of public good, and multiplies the means of happiness to its citizens, like a great commercial capital, which increases the sum of interest to every stockholder. Thus in every advancing circle, from friendship to sensitive life, the interest of selflove moves in the exact ratio of the diameter of its sympathy. The character of intelligence, called actual know. ledge, is nothing more than the observation of the har mony of powers, as rain following clouds, fertilization following rain, the powers of man coöperating with these in the harmony of cultivation followed by harvest. In the moral world, ignorance followed by vice, wisdom followed by happiness, education followed by perfectibility. The observation of the order of the foregoing phenomena enables man to predict the future state of things, and to har monize the powers of his mind and body with the laws of course of Nature, without taking any concern in the me

taphysical logomachy in suppositious causes of matter and power in verbal phantasms of spirit, immaterial essence, or abstract ideas.

This exhibition of the laws of Nature makes dissolution, instead of a bugbear, a beneficent fact, that prepares for the dispersed atoms of the human body an unlimited range of existence throughout all the modes, systems, and spheres of Nature, teaching this important lesson of sympathy during life, that the body of man, which inflicts good or evil on surrounding sensitive life, retributes that good or evil a million million fold, as may be thus exemplified. As the human body is supposed to renew all its particles or atoms in the course of a few years, it is highly probable that the body of a cruel tyrant inflicting evil on the sensitive system, its atoms may be dispersed and recombined in millions of subjects, slaves, or brutes, and those very atoms which enjoyed the pleasure of only one identity of the mode of tyrant, may retribute that joy in the pain of others in a million of sensitive beings; thus the agency of good or evil is retributed a thousand fold in its patiency, and holds out a stronger admonition of virtue or benevolent self-love in the influential sentiments of imagi nation than in the doctrines of science, or penal codes of superstition. It will consummate the illustration of the laws of intellectual power in their highest action of imagi nation, to compare the irregular and absurd analogies of mental discipline. Superstition in all ages has established an intellectual and material idolatry upon the abuse of analogy, as thus, man being an artist of mechanism, they analogize the mechanism of universal Nature, and conclude some mode of intellectual existence must be its cause. If we examine the two orders of mechanism, we shall find that they have nothing of similitude in genus or species, the works of man, as watch, house, &c. have no power of reproduction, which distinguish those of Nature in anımals, vegetables, and fossils, which have all a reproductive power of identical modes, which proves that the difference of effect in all the operations of Nature must have a proportionate difference of cause.

The vulgar superstition still retains the unmeaning words witch, omen, magic, and miracle, but these, like

the rest, will be expunged from language in the progress of knowledge; and the old women who keeps cats will be suffered to live in peace, though sacred history denounces its curses against witches, which never did, be cause they never could exist. Ravens will croak upon the house-top where all the inhabitants live to a good old age, and omens will be laughed at. Magicians in Lapland will no longer sell an easterly wind to sailors when the damp vapours of the air foretell the event, and the sailors become acquainted with the prognostic of the climate. Priests will no longer perform miracles with the jaw-bone of a saint in restoring votaries to health, when animal magnetism shall have taught the mass of the people the great effect of fancy or imagination over the functions of the body.

An error in the rearing of infancy, is the excess of dalliance of nurses and mothers by tossing them suddenly about, surprising them by sudden jerks and shocks, which do violence to baby nature both in mind and body. The idle practice of alarming curiosity by sudden excitements of the attention to surrounding objects, confuses the mind, and disposes it to slight or trivial observation, besides imposing upon it efforts beyond the capacity of its strength, and consequently injurious to its growth.

I know that this dalliance is the only resource of domestic comfort for females when neglected by sottish husbands, who spend their evenings at clubs and taverns. I would not for the world diminish the pleasures of sympathetic, benevolent woman, too cruelly treated both by man and Nature; I recommend only the substitution of mental to corporeal dalliance, because I think the pleasing hopes of educating a man would give more joy than the instinc tive and noxious dalliance of suckling fools.

Chemistry might be explained with a few simple experiments, to give the manufacturer and farmer all the useful competency of its knowledge to improve the arts, and manure the soil. History might be explained, not as an empty table of chronology and fable, but as a volume. of moral experience to teach the study of man where such events alone should be noticed as formed links in the great chain of cause and effect of human policy. Lectures on

politics might limit themselves to the ample page of American or British history, without going back to the remote ages of antiquity, when the circumstances and characters of nations bear little relation or similitude to the modern state of man.

Respect the public rights. I have seen boys at New-York, with their hoops, and wheel-barrowers and wood-sawyers drive every one from the pavement, and a few individuals at the playhouse standing upon the front seat, with hats on, deprive the whole audience of a sight of the scene. The public in the old country would not suffer such wrongs and insults.

The integer Nature, and its component modes, or parts, are circulating into each other either in chaos or organism to all eternity, which proves the identity of all being: and till man is conscious of this fact, or knowledge, Spinosa declares he can have no use whatever of his understand. ing.

The moderns have far surpassed the ancients in science, but they have not digested it into sense; that is, they have not applied it to moral knowledge or the system of wellbeing of all feeling life procured by the agency of intellec tual power in the application of chemistry to the knowledge of self and Nature, which Pope says, is the whole of knowledge, "all our knowledge is ourselves to know," in comparison with which all learning and science is intellectual trifling.

The science of chemistry applied to moral as identified with physical science, teaches us through mathematical demonstration, that man, or self, is identified with all surrounding being in interest, essence, and power, from and to all eternity, through the incessant circulation of all matter, or bodies, from one to all, and all to one; which fact equalizes all pain and pleasure to the great whole of Nature and its component parts or modes, in time and futu rity.

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