or,
acting by general laws, and awakening his sluggish existence, by the
animating touches of the Divinity, into a capacity of superior
enjoyment. The original sin of man is the torpor and corruption of the
chaotic matter in which he may be said to be born.

It could answer no good purpose to enter into the question whether mind
be a distinct substance from matter, or only a finer form of it. The
question is, perhaps, after all, a question merely of words. Mind is as
essentially mind, whether formed from matter or any other substance. We
know from experience that soul and body are most intimately united, and
every appearance seems to indicate that they grow from infancy
together. It would be a supposition attended with very little
probability to believe that a complete and full formed spirit existed
in every infant, but that it was clogged and impeded in its operations
during the first twenty years of life by the weakness, or hebetude, of
the organs in which it was enclosed. As we shall all be disposed to
agree that God is the creator of mind as well as of body, and as they
both seem to be forming and unfolding themselves at the same time, it
cannot appear inconsistent either with reason or revelation, if it
appear to be consistent with phenomena of nature, to suppose that God
is constantly occupied in forming mind out of matter and that the
various impressions that man receives through life is the process for
that purpose. The employment is surely worthy of the highest attributes
of the Deity.

This view of the state of man on earth will not seem to be unattended
with probability, if, judging from the little experience we have of the
nature of mind, it shall appear upon investigation that the phenomena
around us, and the various events of human life, seem peculiarly
calculated to promote this great end, and especially if, upon this
supposition, we can account, even to our own narrow understandings, for
many of those roughnesses and inequalities in life which querulous man
too frequently makes the subject of his complaint against the God of
nature.

The first great awakeners of the mind seem to be the wants of the body.
(It was my intention to have entered at some length into this subject
as a kind of second part to the Essay. A long interruption, from
particular business, has obliged me to lay aside this intention, at
least for the present. I shall now, therefore, only give a sketch of a
few of the leading circumst