tous an unreality? Here are
professors gravely lecturing on medicine, or history, or political
economy, who, so far from being bound to acknowledge, are free to scoff at
the action of mind upon matter, or of mind upon mind, or the claims of
mutual justice and charity. Common sense indeed and public opinion set
bounds at first to so intolerable a licence; yet, as time goes on, an
omission which was originally but a matter of expedience, commends itself
to the reason; and at length a professor is found, more hardy than his
brethren, still however, as he himself maintains, with sincere respect for
domestic feelings and good manners, who takes on him to deny psychology
_in toto_, to pronounce the influence of mind in the visible world a
superstition, and to account for every effect which is found in the world
by the operation of physical causes. Hitherto intelligence and volition
were accounted real powers; the muscles act, and their action cannot be
represented by any scientific expression; a stone flies out of the hand
and the propulsive force of the muscle resides in the will; but there has
been a revolution, or at least a new theory in philosophy, and our
Professor, I say, after speaking with the highest admiration of the human
intellect, limits its independent action to the region of speculation, and
denies that it can be a motive principle, or can exercise a special
interference, in the material world. He ascribes every work, every
external act of man, to the innate force or soul of the physical universe.
He observes that spiritual agents are so mysterious and unintelligible, so
uncertain in their laws, so vague in their operation, so sheltered from
experience, that a wise man will have nothing to say to them. They belong
to a different order of causes, which he leaves to those whose profession
it is to investigate them, and he confines himself to the tangible and
sure. Human exploits, human devices, human deeds, human productions, all
that comes under the scholastic terms of "genius" and "art," and the
metaphysical ideas of "duty," "right," and "heroism," it is his office to
contemplate all these merely in their place in the eternal system of
physical cause and effect. At length he undertakes to show how the whole
fabric of material civilization has arisen from the constructive powers of
physical elements and physical laws. He descants upon palaces, castles,
temples, exchanges, bridges, causeways, and shows that they ne