of development, actually give birth to thoughts and feelings. These
faculties and susceptibilities are, no doubt, congenital with the mind,
--or, rather, are the mind itself. But its actually manifested phenomena
wait the of the external; and they will be modified accordingly. It is
absolutely dependent on experience in this sense, that it is only as
it is operated upon by the outward world that the dormant faculties,
whatever they are, and whatever their nature, be they few or many,--
intellectual, moral, or spiritual,--are first awakened. If a mind were
created (it is, at least, a conceivable case) with all the avenues to
the external world closed,--in fact, we sometimes see approximations
to such a condition in certain unhappy individuals,--we do not doubt
such a mind, by the present laws of the human constitution, could not
possess any thoughts, feelings, emotions; in fact, could exhibit none
of the phenomena, spiritual, intellectual, moral, or sensational,
which diversify it. In proportion as we see human beings approach this
condition,--in fact, we sometimes see them approach it very nearly,--we
see the "potentialities" of the soul (I do not like the word, but it
expresses my meaning better than any other I know) held in abeyance,
and such an imperfectly awakened man does not, in some cases, manifest
the degree of sensibility or intelligence manifested in many animals.
If the seclusion from sense and experience be quite complete, the life
of such a soul would be wrapped up in the germ, and possess no more
consciousness than a vegetable.

It appears, then, that universally, however true it may be, and
doubtless is, that the laws of thought and feeling enable us to derive
from external influence what it alone would never give, yet that
influences an indispensable condition, as we are at present constituted,
of the development of any and of all our faculties.

As this seems the law of development universally, it is so of the
spiritual and religious part of our nature as well as the rest; and
in this very fact we have abundant scope for the possibility and
utility of a revelation,--if God be pleased to give one,--even of
elementary moral and spiritual truth; since, though conceding the
perfect congruity between that truth and the structure of the soul,
it is only as it is in some way actually presented to it from without,
that it arrives at the conscious possession of it. And what, after
all, but such an external sou