t," a
mighty and independent system, a city fitted up and upheld by the
everlasting God. Who told us that we were placed in a world composed of
matter, which gives rise to our subsequent internal perceptions of it,
and not that we were let down at once into a universe composed of
external perceptions of matter, that were there beforehand and from all
eternity--and in which we, the creatures of a day, are merely allowed to
participate by the gracious Power to whom they really appertain? We,
perversely philosophising, told ourselves the former of these
alternatives; but our better nature, the convictions that we have
received from God himself, assure us that the latter of them is the
truth. The latter is by far the simpler, as well as by far the sublimer
doctrine. But it is not on the authority either of its simplicity or its
sublimity, that we venture to propound it--it is on account of its
perfect consonance, both with the primitive convictions of our
unsophisticated common sense, and with the more delicate and complex
evidence of our speculative reason.

When a man consults his own nature, in an impartial spirit, he
inevitably finds that his genuine belief in the existence of matter is
not a belief in the independent existence of matter _per se_--but is a
belief in the independent existence of the perception of matter which he
is for the time participating in. The very last thing which he naturally
believes in, is, that the perception is a state of his own mind, and
that the matter is something different from it, and exists apart _in
natura rerum_. He they _say_ that he believes this, but he never does
really believe it. At any rate, he believes in the _first_ place that
they exist _together_, wherever they exist. The perception which a man
has of a sheet of paper, does not come before him as something distinct
from the sheet of paper itself. The two are identical: they are
indivisible: they are not two, but one. The only question then is,
whether the perception of a sheet of paper (taken as it must be in its
indissoluble totality) is a state of the man's own mind--or is no such
state. And, in settlement of this question, there cannot be a doubt that
he believes in the _second_ place, that the perception of a sheet of
paper is not a modification of his own mind, but is an objective thing
which exists altogether independent of him, and one which would still
exist, although he, and all other created beings were annihilat