subject is required. He that thinks must think upon
something. But tell me, ye that pierce deepest into nature, ye that take
the widest surveys of life, inform me, kind shades of Malbranche and of
Locke, what that something can be, which excites and continues thought
in maiden aunts with small fortunes; in younger brothers that live upon
annuities; in traders retired from business; in soldiers absent from
their regiments; or in widows that have no children?

Life is commonly considered as either active or contemplative; but
surely this division, how long soever it has been received, is
inadequate and fallacious. There are mortals whose life is certainly not
active, for they do neither good nor evil; and whose life cannot be
properly called contemplative, for they never attend either to the
conduct of men, or the works of nature, but rise in the morning, look
round them till night in careless stupidity, go to bed and sleep, and
rise again in the morning.

It has been lately a celebrated question in the schools of philosophy,
_Whether the soul always thinks_! Some have defined the soul to be the
_power of thinking_; concluded that its essence consists in act; that,
if it should cease to act, it would cease to be; and that cessation of
thought is but another name for extinction of mind. This argument is
subtle, but not conclusive; because it supposes what cannot be proved,
that the nature of mind is properly defined. Others affect to disdain
subtilty, when subtilty will not serve their purpose, and appeal to
daily experience. We spend many hours, they say, in sleep, without the
least remembrance of any thoughts which then passed in our minds; and
since we can only by our own consciousness be sure that we think, why
should we imagine that we have had thought of which no consciousness
remains?

This argument, which appeals to experience, may from experience be
confuted. We every day do something which we forget when it is done, and
know to have been done only by consequence. The waking hours are not
denied to have been passed in thought; yet he that shall endeavour to
recollect on one day the ideas of the former, will only turn the eye of
reflection upon vacancy; he will find that the greater part is
irrevocably vanished, and wonder how the moments could come and go, and
leave so little behind them.

To discover only that the arguments on both sides are defective, and to
throw back the tenet into its former uncertainty,