p or cluster of sensations; and,
in looking back to the memory of our own being, we find one principle,
which may be called the _monad_, or _self_, constantly present,
intimately associated with a particular class of sensations, which we
call our own body or organs. These organs are connected with other
sensations, and move, as it were, with them in circles of existence,
quitting for a time some trains of sensation to return to others; but the
monad is always present. We can fix no beginning to its operations; we
can place no limit to them. We sometimes, in sleep, lose the beginning
and end of a dream, and recollect the middle of it, and one dream has no
connection with another; and yet we are conscious of an infinite variety
of dreams, and there is a strong analogy for believing in an infinity of
past existences, which must have had connection; and human life may be
regarded as a type of infinite and immortal life, and its succession of
sleep and dreams as a type of the changes of death and birth to which
from its nature it is liable. That the ideas belonging to the mind were
originally gained from those classes of sensations called organs it is
impossible to deny, as it is impossible to deny that mathematical truths
depend upon the signs which express them; but these signs are not
themselves the truths, nor are the organs the mind. The whole history of
intellect is a history of change according to a certain law; and we
retain the memory only of those changes which may be useful to us--the
child forgets what happened to it in the womb; the recollections of the
infant likewise before two years are soon lost, yet many of the habits
acquired in that age are retained through life. The sentient principle
gains thoughts by material instruments, and its sensations change as
those instruments change; and, in old age, the mind, as it were, falls
asleep to awake to a new existence. With its present organisation, the
intellect of man is naturally limited and imperfect, but this depends
upon its material machinery; and in a higher organised form, it may be
imagined to possess infinitely higher powers. Were man to be immortal
with his present corporeal frame, this immortality would only belong to
the machinery; and with respect to acquisitions of mind, he would
virtually die every two or three hundred years--that is to say, a certain
quantity of ideas only could be remembered, and the supposed immortal
being would be, with re