habitual agents. Thus feelings and then reasonings are the combined
result of a multitude of entangled thoughts, and of a series of what
are called impressions, planted by reiteration.

The view of life presented by the most refined deductions of the
intellectual philosophy, is that of unity. Nothing exists but as it is
perceived. The difference is merely nominal between those two classes
of thought, which are vulgarly distinguished by the names of ideas and
of external objects. Pursuing the same thread of reasoning, the
existence of distinct individual minds, similar to that which is
employed in now questioning its own nature, is likewise found to be a
delusion. The words _I_, _you_, _they_, are not signs of any actual
difference subsisting between the assemblage of thoughts thus
indicated, but are merely marks employed to denote the different
modifications of the one mind.

Let it not be supposed that this doctrine conducts to the monstrous
presumption that I, the person who now write and think, am that one
mind. I am but a portion of it. The words _I_, and _you_, and _they_
are grammatical devices invented simply for arrangement, and totally
devoid of the intense and exclusive sense usually attached to them. It
is difficult to find terms adequate to express so subtle a conception
as that to which the Intellectual Philosophy has conducted us. We are
on that verge where words abandon us, and what wonder if we grow dizzy
to look down the dark abyss of how little we know.

The relations of _things_ remain unchanged, by whatever system. By the
word _things_ is to be understood any object of thought, that is any
thought upon which any other thought is employed, with an apprehension
of distinction. The relations of these remain unchanged; and such is
the material of our knowledge.

What is the cause of life? that is, how was it produced, or what
agencies distinct from life have acted or act upon life? All recorded
generations of mankind have wearily busied themselves in inventing
answers to this question; and the result has been,--Religion. Yet,
that the basis of all things cannot be, as the popular philosophy
alleges, mind, is sufficiently evident. Mind, as far as we have any
experience of its properties, and beyond that experience how vain is
argument! cannot create, it can only perceive. It is said also to be
the cause. But cause is only a word expressing a certain state of the
human mind with regard to the manner in