en accustomed to contemplate and discriminate
objects extensive and complicated in their nature. The faculties of
the mind itself have never yet been distinguished and defined, with
satisfactory precision, by all the efforts of the most acute and
metaphysical philosophers. Sense, perception, judgment, desire,
volition, memory, imagination, are found to be separated by such
delicate shades and minute gradations that their boundaries have
eluded the most subtle investigations, and remain a pregnant source of
ingenious disquisition and controversy. The boundaries between the great
kingdom of nature, and, still more, between the various provinces,
and lesser portions, into which they are subdivided, afford another
illustration of the same important truth. The most sagacious and
laborious naturalists have never yet succeeded in tracing with certainty
the line which separates the district of vegetable life from the
neighboring region of unorganized matter, or which marks the termination
of the former and the commencement of the animal empire. A still greater
obscurity lies in the distinctive characters by which the objects
in each of these great departments of nature have been arranged and
assorted.

When we pass from the works of nature, in which all the delineations
are perfectly accurate, and appear to be otherwise only from the
imperfection of the eye which surveys them, to the institutions of man,
in which the obscurity arises as well from the object itself as from
the organ by which it is contemplated, we must perceive the necessity of
moderating still further our expectations and hopes from the efforts
of human sagacity. Experience has instructed us that no skill in the
science of government has yet been able to discriminate and define,
with sufficient certainty, its three great provinces the legislative,
executive, and judiciary; or even the privileges and powers of the
different legislative branches. Questions daily occur in the course of
practice, which prove the obscurity which reins in these subjects, and
which puzzle the greatest adepts in political science.

The experience of ages, with the continued and combined labors of the
most enlightened legislatures and jurists, has been equally unsuccessful
in delineating the several objects and limits of different codes of laws
and different tribunals of justice. The precise extent of the common
law, and the statute law, the maritime law, the ecclesiastical law, the
l