is thus that we die. The man that
guides the operations of his own mind, is either to a certain degree
in bodily health, or in that health of mind which shall for a longer or
shorter time stand forward as the substitute of the health of the body.
When we die, we give up the game, and are not disposed to contend any
further. It is a very usual thing to talk of the struggles of a man in
articulo mortis. But this is probably, like so many other things that
occur to us in this sublunary stage, a delusion. The bystander mistakes
for a spontaneous contention and unwillingness to die, what is in
reality nothing more than an involuntary contraction and convulsion of
the nerves, to which the mind is no party, and is even very probably
unconscious.--But enough of this, the final and most humiliating state
through which mortal men may be called on to pass.

I find then in the history of almost every human creature four different
states or modes of existence. First, there is sleep. In the strongest
degree of contrast to this there is the frame in which we find
ourselves, when we write! or invent and steadily pursue a consecutive
train of thinking unattended with the implements of writing, or read
in some book of science or otherwise which calls upon us for a fixed
attention, or address ourselves to a smaller or greater audience, or are
engaged in animated conversation. In each of these occupations the mind
may emphatically be said to be on the alert.

But there are further two distinct states or kinds of mental indolence.
The first is that which we frequently experience during a walk or any
other species of bodily exercise, where, when the whole is at an end,
we scarcely recollect any thing in which the mind has been employed, but
have been in what I may call a healthful torpor, where our limbs have
been sufficiently in action to continue our exercise, we have felt the
fresh breeze playing on our cheeks, and have been in other respects in
a frame of no unpleasing neutrality. This may be supposed greatly to
contribute to our bodily health. It is the holiday of the faculties:
and, as the bow, when it has been for a considerable time unbent, is
said to recover its elasticity, so the mind, after a holiday of this
sort, comes fresh, and with an increased alacrity, to those occupations
which advance man most highly in the scale of being.

But there is a second state of mental indolence, not so complete as
this, but which is still indol