ficiently familiar to those inquiring minds, whom alone a writer on
abstruse subjects can be conceived to address. Perhaps the most clear
and vigorous statement of the intellectual system is to be found in
Sir William Drummond's Academical Questions. After such an exposition,
it would be idle to translate into other words what could only lose
its energy and fitness by the change. Examined point by point, and
word by word, the most discriminating intellects have been able to
discern no train of thoughts in the process of reasoning, which does
not conduct inevitably to the conclusion which has been stated.

What follows from the admission? It establishes no new truth, it gives
us no additional insight into our hidden nature, neither its action
nor itself. Philosophy, impatient as it may be to build, has much work
yet remaining, as pioneer for the overgrowth of ages. It makes one
step towards this object; it destroys error, and the roots of error.
It leaves, what it is too often the duty of the reformer in political
and ethical questions to leave, a vacancy. It reduces the mind to that
freedom in which it would have acted, but for the misuse of words and
signs, the instruments of its own creation. By signs, I would be
understood in a wide sense, including what is properly meant by that
term, and what I peculiarly mean. In this latter sense, almost all
familiar objects are signs, standing, not for themselves, but for
others in their capacity of suggesting one thought which shall lead to
a train of thoughts. Our whole life is thus an education of error.

Let us recollect our sensations as children. What a distinct and
intense apprehension had we of the world and of ourselves! Many of the
circumstances of social life were then important to us which are now
no longer so. But that is not the point of comparison on which I mean
to insist. We less habitually distinguished all that we saw and felt,
from ourselves. They seemed as it were to constitute one mass. There
are some persons who, in this respect, are always children. Those who
are subject to the state called reverie, feel as if their nature were
dissolved into the surrounding universe, or as if the surrounding
universe were absorbed into their being. They are conscious of no
distinction. And these are states which precede, or accompany, or
follow an unusually intense and vivid apprehension of life. As men
grow up this power commonly decays, and they become mechanical and