frame. On my idea, conscience is the frame of
the mind, fitted for its probation in mortality. And this is in exact
accordance with the foundations of our religion, the Divine origin of
which is marked no less by its history than its harmony with the
principles of our nature. Obedience to its precepts not only prepares
for a better state of existence in another world, but is likewise
calculated to make us happy here. We are constantly taught to renounce
sensual pleasure and selfish gratifications, to forget our body and
sensible organs, to associate our pleasures with mind, to fix our
affections upon the great ideal generalisation of intelligence in the one
Supreme Being. And that we are capable of forming to ourselves an
imperfect idea even of the infinite mind is, I think, a strong
presumption of our own immortality, and of the distinct relation which
our finite knowledge bears to eternal wisdom.

_Phil_.--I am pleased with your views; they coincide with those I had
formed at the time my imagination was employed upon the vision of the
Colosaeum, which I repeated to you, and are not in opposition with the
opinions that the cool judgment and sound and humble faith of Ambrosio
have led me since to embrace. The doctrine of the materialists was
always, even in my youth, a cold, heavy, dull, and insupportable doctrine
to me, and necessarily tending to Atheism. When I had heard, with
disgust, in the dissecting-rooms the plan of the physiologist of the
gradual accretion of matter, and its becoming endowed with irritability,
ripening into sensibility and acquiring such organs as were necessary, by
its own inherent forces, and at last rising into intellectual existence,
a walk into the green fields or woods by the banks of rivers brought back
my feelings from nature to God; I saw in all the powers of matter the
instruments of the Deity; the sunbeams, the breath of the zephyr,
awakened animation in forms prepared by Divine intelligence to receive
it; the insensate seed, the slumbering egg, which were to be vivified,
appeared like the new-born animal, works of a Divine mind; I saw love as
the creative principle in the material world, and this love only as a
Divine attribute. Then, my own mind, I felt connected with new
sensations and indefinite hopes, a thirst for immortality; the great
names of other ages and of distant nations appeared to me to be still
living around me; and, even in the funeral monuments of the heroic a