LETTER in a candid and impartial state while we are pursuing I. it; and let us draw our principles of it from those venerated writings, which were composed and have been preserved to convey this knowlege to the human race, wherever the introduction of Christianity should carry these in its train, and present them to the contemplation of the inquiring and grateful intellect. For grateful it must be, if it does but perceive what a Cimmerian darkness of mind we should have been in on these momentous subjects, and on all the others which they have improved, if they had never been written or circulated. We should have been what the Gothic and Sarmatian Pagans would have made us, if these conquering invaders had not been christianized. Can I then but be grateful for having been preserved, by what I am recommending, from being what I otherwise should have been, a savage worshipper and imitator of Thor and Odin, or of some other bloody and barbarous monstrosities of the same character and operation? we conclude that the Great Spirit pervades all space, and is a sole and single spirit? I reply, We derive this knowlege from the conviction of our reason, and from an innate consciousness arising out of sympathy.' Trans. Roy. As. Soc. v. ii. p. 96. No Greek or Roman philosopher has surpassed and few equalled these ideas. Yet he was unable to act consistently with them, for he was a zealous worshipper of Vishnu and Chrishna. His mind felt that there was something better than these, but had not, like ours, been associated with what is so. LETTER II. NATURE DISTINGUISHED INTO THE VISIBLE AND THE INVISIBLE MY DEAR SYDNEY, II. Or the Divine Philosophy, which I have been LETTER recommending to you, the Sacred History of the World will be the most important subject; and of this, the principal compartment, or at least that which cannot but be paramount to us, is the Sacred History of Man. For, altho this earth has not been devised or made for him alone, yet it has been manifestly formed with great and continual reference to him; and he is, beyond dispute, the pre-eminent being upon it, at least, of all that wears a visible shape, and by that, has become cognizable by us. Our eyesight, indeed, cannot be taken at any time as an absolute criterion of the existing. The apparent rising, semicircular journey and evening departure of the sun, are a daily testimony to our judgment, that our vision alone is not the certain teacher of the true. Nature is always indicating this circumstance to us, that we may not be led to call her invisibilities into question. LETTER II. We never see the warmth that delights us so often in a vernal day, when the cloud conceals from us Day's garish eye;' nor the cold which freezes us, altho he is shining as gaily on his winter throne. Thus the perception of the visible never authorizes us to confine every thing to it, nor to deny the existence of what is otherwise. Some have from singularity chosen to limit the knowable by the visible; but this would be only wilfully consigning ourselves to ignorance of some of the grandest realities of existing things; and whenever this feeling operates, it is the weakness, not the strength of the individual mind that leads any one to indulge it. Nature consists of both these descriptions of beings; of the unseen as well as of the seen; of that which is perceptible by our senses, and of that by which they are not affected. Nothing exists because we are conscious of it, nor depends upon our acquaintance with it, nor ceases to be or never has been, because it has not become a subject of our sensorial excitations. Invisibility is as much a character and state of creation as visibility and tangibility likewise are. Many things exist which we cannot touch, as well as others which we cannot see. Matter is in some of its forms as invisible to us as spirit, and even often imperceptible in its tenuity by any of our senses. But to be attenuated is no more nonexistence than to be unseen. It therefore resembles a childish error to disbelieve what we cannot see, or to suppose that nothing exists but what our eyes can behold. This seems so obvious, that it is almost chimerical to allude to it; and yet I have known that II. it has been recommended, and very earnestly in LETTER France, to educate from infancy on this principle; a strange condemnation of the young ingenuous mind, which naturally loves truth, and all truth, and would willingly cherish it in all its shapes, to be narrow and contracted, and imperfect both in its knowlege and its judgment. The visibility of which we are conscious is no natural quality of any thing, for all things naturally are invisible to each other. It is an artificial effect produced on our frame, and in that of all the animated classes, by the wonderful laws assigned to the luminous fluid, and by the as wonderful construction and adaptation of the optical organ. Nothing is visible where no light thus acts, nor to what has no nervous matter in its frame. Nothing is visible to the living principle in plants, any more than to the limestone, to the diamond or to the dew-drop, altho in the two latter a marvellous agency of the matter of light so brilliantly operates. But it is a part of our Creator's plan of His animal kingdom, that we and our fellow brutes should have that knowlege of external things, which arises from the impressions which constitute sight; and He has therefore contrived and placed within us a most delicate and complicated organization, by which outward substances should be caused to become objects of our consciousness. Visibility is therefore merely that artificial result of these admirable and benevolent provisions as to light and our material eyes, and the association of our mental principle with them, which makes this to have such a sensation from external things, and to form the perceptions from them, which become our II. LETTER sight and the knowlege we derive from it. No visibility can therefore extend beyond the extent of these special provisions. Our Creator has extended them to every thing which He designs us to be thus acquainted with in our present age and world; but He has not carried our power of seeing farther. It is our deficiency, and not our merit, that we cannot see what is smaller or finer, or more distant than that which so affects us, or which, from being immaterial, never can so act upon us. But Nature is always warning us not to commit the mistake of disbelieving, because we cannot see. Her largest expansion of material substance, tho every where enveloping us; the air, which ascends so loftily above us, and presses so densely upon us, yet is always invisible to us.' The wind which tosses up like a football the ponderous masses of the ocean, and breaks down the mightiest trees, cannot be seen, however dreadfully its moving force is felt. All the component elements and primary combinations of the most solid substances are in the same predicament. Thus, the invisibilities of Nature are an essential and universal portion of it; and it will be always unphilosophical to make our sight the sole judge or standard for our belief as to external things. At the head of all the invisible existences that we know of is the gracious Deity Himself, from whom they proceed, and whom they in this respect resemble. 'Its pressure or weight on all parts of the earth is fifteen pounds to one square inch. The greater portion of the atmosphere is always within fifteen or twenty miles of the earth's surface, tho it has been inferred to extend to forty or forty-five miles in height.' Dr. Prout's Bridg. Treatise, p. 188, 9. |