all.

What is life? Thoughts and feelings arise, with or without our will,
and we employ words to express them. We are born, and our birth is
unremembered, and our infancy remembered but in fragments; we live on,
and in living we lose the apprehension of life. How vain is it to
think that words can penetrate the mystery of our being! Rightly used
they may make evident our ignorance to ourselves, and this is much.
For what are we? Whence do we come? and whither do we go? Is birth the
commencement, is death the conclusion of our being? What is birth and
death?

The most refined abstractions of logic conduct to a view of life,
which, though startling to the apprehension, is, in fact, that which
the habitual sense of its repeated combinations has extinguished in
us. It strips, as it were, the painted curtain from this scene of
things. I confess that I am one of those who am unable to refuse my
assent to the conclusions of those philosophers who assert that
nothing exists but as it is perceived.

It is a decision against which all our persuasions struggle, and we
must be long convicted before we can be convinced that the solid
universe of external things is "such stuff as dreams are made of." The
shocking absurdities of the popular philosophy of mind and matter, its
fatal consequences in morals, and their violent dogmatism concerning
the source of all things, had early conducted me to materialism. This
materialism is a seducing system to young and superficial minds. It
allows its disciples to talk, and dispenses them from thinking. But I
was discontented with such a view of things as it afforded; man is a
being of high aspirations, "looking both before and after," whose
"thoughts wander through eternity," disclaiming alliance with
transience and decay; incapable of imagining to himself annihilation;
existing but in the future and the past; being, not what he is, but
what he has been and shall be. Whatever may be his true and final
destination, there is a spirit within him at enmity with nothingness
and dissolution. This is the character of all life and being. Each is
at once the centre and the circumference; the point to which all
things are referred, and the line in which all things are contained.
Such contemplations as these, materialism and the popular philosophy
of mind and matter alike forbid; they are only consistent with the
intellectual system.

It is absurd to enter into a long recapitulation of arguments
suf