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such cases till they are before him; and if he could, the whole world would not contain the statute books that should be written upon the subject.

There are also duties which a man owes to himself as well as to his neighbour; or, in other words, human happiness, as we have already seen, depends almost as largely upon his exercise of private as of public virtues. But the eye of civil law cannot follow him into the performance of these duties, for it cannot follow him into his privacy: it cannot take cognizance of his personal faults or offences, nor often apply its sanction if it could do so. And hence, in most countries, this important part of morality is purposely left out of the civil code, as a hopeless and intractable subject. Yet even in the breach of public duties, specifically stated and provided for, it cannot always follow up the offender, and apply the punishment: for he may secrete himself among his own colleagues, and elude, or he may abandon his country, and defy, the arm of justice.

There seems, then, to be a something still wanting. If the Deity have so benevolently willed the happiness of man, and made virtue the rule of that happiness, ought he not upon the same principle of benevolence, to have declared his will more openly than by the mere and, at times, doubtful inferences of reason? in characters, indeed, so plain, that he who runs may read? and ought he not also to have employed sanctions so universal as to cover every case, and so weighty as to command every attention?

As a being of infinite benevolence, undoubtedly he ought. And what, in this character, he ought to have done, he has actually accomplished. He has declared his will by an express revelation, and has thus confirmed the voice of reason by a voice from heaven: he has made this revelation a written law, and has enforced it by the strongest sanctions to which the mind of man can be open:-not only by his best chance of happiness here, but by all his hopes and expectations of happiness hereafter. And he has hence completed the code of human obligations, by adding to the duties which we owe to our neighbour and to ourselves, a clear rescript of those we owe to our Maker. Nor is such revelation of recent date; for a state of retributive justice beyond the grave constituted, as we have already seen, the belief of mankind in the earliest ages of time; and amid all the revolutions the world has witnessed, amid the most savage barbarism, and the foulest idolatries, there never perhaps has been a country in which all traces of it have been entirely lost, or have even entirely ceased to operate.

At different periods, and in different manners, the Deity has renewed this divine communication, according as his infinite wisdom has seen the world stand in need of it. New doctrines and discoveries-and doctrines and discoveries, too, of the highest importance, but which it is not my providence to touch upon in the present place-have in every instance accompanied such renewal, justificatory of the supernatural interposition. But the sanction has, in every instance, been the same; while, and I speak it with reverence, the proofs of divine benevolence have with every promulgation been growing fuller and fuller:-revealed religion thus co-operating with natural, co-operating with the great frame of the visible world, co-operating with every pulse and feeling of our own hearts in establishing the delightful truth, that GOD IS LOVE; and in calling upon us to love him, not from any cold and lifeless picture of the abstract beauty of holiness, beautiful as it unquestionably is in itself, but from the touching and all-subduing motive-BECAUSE HE FIRST

LOVED US.

LECTURE VIII.

ON THE GENERAL FACULTIES OF THE MIND, AND ITS FREEDOM IN WILLING.

IN the commencement of the successive series of lectures which I have had the honour of delivering before this respectable school of science, I stated, as it may be recollected by many of the audience before me, that the subject I proposed to discuss would be of considerable extent and variety;that it would embrace, though with a rapid survey, the whole circle of physics, in the most enlarged sense in which this term has been employed by Aris totle or Lord Bacon; and, consequently, would touch slightly, yet, as I hoped, with a correct outline, upon all the more interesting and important features of matter and of mind. It may be remembered, that I proposed to unfold to you the general principles, laws, and phenomena, as far as we are capable of tracing them, of the world without us, and the world within us; to follow the footsteps of nature, or rather of the God of nature, in the gradual evolu tion of that nice, and delicate, and ever-rising scale of wonders that surround us on every side, from the simplest elements to the most perfect and harmonious systems of visible or demonstrable existences; from shapeless matter to form, from form to feeling, from feeling to intellect; from the clod to the crystal, from the crystal to the plant, from the plant to the animal, from brutal life to man. All this I have endeavoured to accomplish; feebly and imper fectly, indeed, but I have still endeavoured it with whatever may be the powers that the breath of the Almighty has implanted within me.

But we have not stopped here; having reached in man the summit of the visible pyramid of creation, we have tremblingly ventured to take a glance at the interior of his mysterious structure; we have followed him, with no unhallowed eye, into the temple of the soul; we have amused ourselves, for, after all, it has been little or nothing more, with conjectures about its essence, and have commenced an analysis of those faculties so fearfully and wonder fully planned, which place him at an almost infinite distance from the brute creation, and approximate him to the sphere of celestial intelligences: to that order of pure and happy spirits with whom it is his high prerogative, if not forfeited by his own misconduct on earth, that he shall associate hereafter, and press forward in the pursuit of an infinite and self-rewarding knowledge, and in the fruition of an endless and unclouded felicity.

This last topic, however, we have entered upon, and nothing more: we have noticed, indeed, the general furniture of the mind, and the diversified faculties with which it is endowed; but we have only extended our investigation beyond such notice to the principles of perception, thought, and REASON, or the discursive power; and to those communications, or ideas of objects or subjects, derived externally or from within, upon which the discursive power is ever exercising itself; and which, as they are obtained from the one or the other of these two sources, are denominated ideas of sensation or of reflection. Now, besides an ability to perceive, think, or reason, we find the mind pos sessed of an almost infinite variety of other attributes or faculties, implanted in it for the wisest and most beneficent purposes. We behold it endowed with consciousness, judgment, memory, imagination; with a power choosing or refusing; with admiration and desire; hope and fear, love and hatred; grief and joy, transport and terror; with anger, jealousy, and despair. And we behold each of these faculties, as called into action, producing a correspondent effect upon the organs of the body; giving rise to what the painters call EXPRESSION, or the language of the features; and to articulate sounds, or the language of the lips; lighting up the eye, and animating the countenance; invigorating the speech, and harmonizing its periods; or, on the contrary, filling the eye and the countenance with gloom or indignation, and the voice with sighs and bitter rebukes.

of

The external signs thus produced, and representative of the inward emotion,

operate in their turn with a reflex influence, and rekindle in the mind the feelings that have given birth to them. And hence the origin and soulsubduing power of tender or impassioned poetry, or of manly and forcible eloquence; as also the cause why we feel equally hurried away by the classical debates of the senate, and the fictitious distresses of the drama.

We behold, moreover, in different persons, these energetic principles differently modified or associated in every variety of combination: sometimes one of them, and sometimes another, and sometimes several leagued together, peculiarly active, and obtaining a mastery over the rest. And we behold these effects in different instances, from different causes; as peculiarity of temperament, peculiarity of climate, custom, habit, or education. And hence the origin of moral and intellectual character; the particular dispositions and propensities of individuals or of whole nations. Hence one man is naturally violent, and another gentle; one a prey to perpetual gloom, and another full of hope and confidence; one irascible and revengeful, and another all benevolence and philanthropy; one shrewd and witty, and another heavy and inert. Hence the refinement and patriotism of ancient Greece; the rough hardihood of the Romans; and the commercial spirit of Carthage; and hence, in modern times, the silent and plodding industry of the Dutch; the chivalrous honour of the Spaniards of the last century, unpoisoned by the deadly fever of Corsican morality; the restless loquacity and intriguing ambition of the French; and, may I be permitted to add, the high heroic courage, and love of freedom, the generosity and promptitude to forgive injuries, the unswerving honesty and lofty spirit of adventure, that peculiarly signalize the inhabitants of the British isles: all which are subjects that yet remain to be treated of and elucidated, and which seem to promise us an ample harvest of entertainment and instruction.

Let us begin with the mental faculties themselves. These, as we have already seen, are numerous and complicated; so much so indeed, that it is difficult to arrange and analyze them; and hence I do not, at the present moment, recollect a single treatise upon the subject, which gives us a clear and methodical classification of them. I shall take leave, therefore, to offer a new distribution; and shall divide them into the three general heads, of powers or faculties of the UNDERSTANDING; powers or faculties of ELECTION; and powers or faculties of EMOTION. To the first belong the principles of perception, thought, reason, judgment, memory, and imagination; to the second, those of choosing and refusing, or of WILLING and NILLING, to adopt an old and very expressive metaphysical term, that ought never to have grown obsolete; to the third belong those of hope, fear, grief, and joy, love, hatred, anger, and revenge, or whatever else is capable of moving the mind from a state of tranquillity and rest.

All these are, properly speaking, acts or actions of the mind; yet, as, during the operation of the last set, the mind becomes at times irregularly and involuntarily agitated and affected, though, by the force of its own attributes, as the voluntary muscles of the body are often thrown into trepidation and spasms by the contraction of their own fibres, metaphysicians, and especially those of Germany, have seemed inclined to restrict the name of mental actions to the operations of the understanding and the will, and to give the name of affections or passions to those productive of mental emotion: to those transitions of feeling into which the mind is involuntarily hurried by the stimulus of this class of its own powers, and under the stress of which it may thus far be said to be passive; and hence, if I mistake not, the application of the term passions (which has so much puzzled the metaphysicians) to certain conditions or powers of the mind, which import activity and exertion. It is upon the same ground, that where the mind is completely subdued, and suffers extreme violence, we employ the term with peculiar emphasis; thus, when a man is raging either with anger or love, he is said pre-eminently to be in a passion, or to entertain a passion; and thus again, but in a far more serious and solemn sense, the Christian world applies the same term in its highest force of signification to the agony of our blessed Saviour.

Now, it is the peculiar feature of physiology, and especially as studied upon the principles of induction, that, as far as it has proceeded, it has discovered a general adaptation of means to a proposed end; and has hence placed the doctrine of final causes, as it has been incorrectly, and not without some degree of confusion, denominated, of causes, however, operating to a final intention,-upon a basis too strong to be shaken by the ridicule of many modern philosophers, sheltering themselves under an erroneous construction of Lord Bacon's views upon the subject. What, then, are the uses or proposed ends of this extensive and complicated machinery of the mind of man? What are the respective parts which its various faculties, in the order in which we have now arranged them, are intended to fulfil, and the means by which they are to operate?

Their object is threefold, and in every respect most important, and admirably calculated to prove the wisdom and benevolence of the almighty Architect: they are the grand sources by which man becomes endowed with knowledge, moral freedom, and happiness; and is hence fitted to run the elevated race of a rational and accountable being. From the powers of the understanding he derives the first; from those of volition or election the second; and from the passions or motive powers the third. Yet never let it be forgotten, that he can in no respect, or at least to no considerable extent or good purpose, possess either the one or the other, unless the mind, as an individual agent, maintain its self-dominion, and exercise a due degree of government over its own forces. This, I think, must be obvious to every one; and it is in this harmonious balance, this equable guidance and control, that the perfection of the human character can alone consist and exhibit itself. Unless the faculties of the understanding be called forth, there can be no knowledge; and unless they be properly directed, though there may indeed be knowledge, it will be of a worse nature than utter ignorance; we shall pluck, not of the mixed tree of the knowledge of good and evil, as it stood before the fall, but from the tree of the knowledge of evil alone, without any union or participation of good. In like manner, unless the will and the passions be under an equal degree of guidance, the mind can be neither independent nor happy; a mental chaos must usurp the place of order, and the whole be misrule and confusion.

We are too much in the habit, both in common life and in philosophy, of regarding the faculties of the mind as distinct agents from the mind itself, as though the latter were nothing more than a house or repository for their reception. This is particularly true in respect to the faculty of the WILL; for we are perpetually told that the will operates upon the understanding or the mind; and that unless the WILL be free, the man himself can have no freedom. Now, the will, like the memory or the judgment, is a mere power or ability, and freedom is another power or ability; but powers or abilities of one kind cannot belong to or be the property of powers or abilities of another kind: they can only belong to or be the property of some agent, and in this case the mind is the only agent. The question, therefore, whether the will be free, can only mean, if it mean any thing, whether the mind be free, of which the will is a power or attribute; and to the question thus modified, I have no hesitation in stating, that the mind is perfectly free to do whatever it wills. I do not say whatever it desires; for the DESIRE is a different faculty from the WILL; and though too generally confounded with each other, for the want of clear ideas upon the subject, the two are frequently in a state of direct opposition. Thus, a man may desire to fly, but he never wills it; and for this plain reason, that though the action may be a matter of desire, it can never be a matter of volition; for to suppose the will or power of choosing to be exerted upon a subject in which there is no power of choosing, is to suppose an ab

⚫Causarum finalium inquisitio sterilis est, et, tanquam Virgo Deo consecrata, nihil parit. Such is his celebrated aphorism: but the term inquisitio does not relate to the subject or doctrine itself, but merely to its being made a branch of physical instead of metaphysical philosophy. The discoveries of modern times have sufficiently shown that Bacon was deceived upon this last point. But it is perfectly clear from other passages in his writings that he did not mean to controvert the doctrine itself. See Stewart's Elements, vol. ii. p. 454.

surdity. In like manner, on the contrary, the schoolboy may will to get his task, though sorely against his desire or inclination, and the timid female, for the benefit of her health, may will to be plunged into the cold bath, though with as great a reluctance. So, when a kind and indulgent father chastises his son for disobedience, the mind, urged by proper motives, consents, and consequently wills it; it prefers inflicting the chastisement to abstaining from it but while it wills or prefers the punishment, it is so far from desiring it, that it probably hates it more than the child itself does.

It has been said that, in this case, the feeling of desire is still exercised; that the father, though he does not desire the punishment, desires the ultimate good of his child; that the same power of the mind is therefore still in activity, though directed to a different object; and, consequently, that willing is nothing more than desire in a higher range of the scale, or a state of predominant exertion. But this is to confound rather than to simplify the feelings of the mind. Desire is always accompanied with pleasure, and can never be altogether separated from it; for no man can desire that which is wholly and essentially painful. Now, though the father takes a pleasure in the good of his child, he takes no pleasure, but, on the contrary, great and unmixed pain, in his chastisement; and unless pleasure and pain be one and the same feeling, we cannot apply the simple idea of desire to both, though that of the will is equally applicable. And hence the will and the desire must necessarily be regarded as different faculties of the mind. In like manner, a person labouring under a severe fit of toothache may say that he desires to have the tooth taken out; but in saying this he does not desire the pain of its extraction, but only the ease which he hopes will follow upon its removal: for he hates the pain, and would avoid it, and have the tooth removed without it, if possible; but he consents to, or wills it, for the sake of that prospective advantage which alone is the object of his desire, as it is also of his will. So that here again, while the desire is limited to the one state of body, the will applies to both, and affords another proof that they are two distinct mental powers. In like manner, Revelation tells us repeatedly, and as strictly as it does emphatically, that God "hath no pleasure or desire in the death of the wicked;" but it tells us also, that God is, nevertheless, effecting, and, consequently, willing, their death or punishment every day.

Freedom of mind, then, or an exercise of the will, is a distinct power or attribute from that of desire, and can only respect actions in which there is a condition of choice. A man standing on a cliff, has a power of leaping twenty yards downward into the sea, or of continuing where he is; and, having this option, he is free, and exercises his will accordingly. But he has no power of leaping twenty yards upwards into the air, and it can never become a question with him-a subject of deliberation or option-whether he shall leap upwards or not; and, consequently, as this can never become a question with him, the mind can never will it, and its freedom remains undisturbed.

Here, then, we rest: the mind is free to do whatever it wills. But the in genuity of man has not been content with letting the subject remain at this point: it has pushed it still farther, and inquired whether the mind is free to will as well as to act after it has willed? and this, after all, is the real drift of the inquiry with which the world has been so long harassed, whether the will itself be free?

This question is a complex one; and its complexity has not always been sufficiently traced out and explained. The mind of every intelligent being can only will, or, in other words, be determined to do or forbear an act by a motive or moving power, and in this respect it is subject to a necessity issuing from the nature of things; but if, as I shall endeavour to show, the mind, by a voluntary operation of some one or more of its other faculties, of itself constitutes the motive, annuls it, or changes it for another, it must necessarily follow, that it has all the freedom of willing, as well as of acting, that an intelligent being is capable of possessing.

Now, the grand aim of every living, and especially of every intelligent

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