ot, neither
let the sun go down upon our wrath." We shall make of our fellow-men
neither idols to worship, nor demons to be regarded with horror and
execration. We shall think of them, as of players, "that strut and fret
their hour upon the stage, and then are heard no more." We shall "weep,
as though we wept not, and rejoice, as though we rejoiced not, seeing
that the fashion of this world passeth away." And, most of all, we shall
view with pity, even with sympathy, the men whose frailties we behold,
or by whom crimes are perpetrated, satisfied that they are parts of one
great machine, and, like ourselves, are driven forward by impulses over
which they have no real control.

ESSAY XIII. OF BELIEF.

One of the prerogatives by which man is eminently distinguished from all
other living beings inhabiting this globe of earth, consists in the gift
of reason.

Beasts reason. They are instructed by experience; and, guided by what
they have already known of the series of events, they infer from the
sense of what has gone before, an assured expectation of what is to
follow. Hence, "beast walks with man, joint tenant of the shade;" and
their sagacity is in many instances more unerring than ours, because
they have no affectation to mislead them; they follow no false lights,
no glimmering intimation of something half-anticipating a result,
but trust to the plain, blunt and obvious dictates of their simple
apprehension. This however is but the first step in the scale of reason,
and is in strictness scarcely entitled to the name.

We set off from the same point from which they commence their career.
But the faculty of articulate speech comes in, enabling us to form
the crude elements of reason and inference into a code. We digest
explanations of things, assigning the particulars in which they resemble
other classes, and the particulars by which they are distinguished
from whatever other classes have fallen under our notice. We frame
propositions, and, detaching ourselves from the immediate impressions of
sense, proceed to generalities, which exist only, in a way confused, and
not distinctly adverted to, in the conceptions of the animal creation.

It is thus that we arrive at science, and go forward to those
subtleties, and that perspicuity of explanation, which place man in a
distinct order of being, leaving all the other inhabitants of earth at
an immeasurable distance below him. It is thus that we communicate our
discov