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ROUSSEAU. 263 in itself at rest, and irom th: finality of the world — are only designed, as he declares by letter, to confute the materialists, and derive their impregnability entirely from the inner evidence of feeling, which amid the vacillation of the reason pro and con gives the final decision. If we limit our inquiry to that which is alone of impor- tance for us, and rely on the evidence of feeling, it cannot be doubted that I myself exist and feel ; that there exists an external world which affects me •, that thought, compari- son or judgment concerning relations is different from sensation or the perception of objects — for the latter is a passive, but the former an active process; that I myself produce the activity of attention or consideration ; that, consequently, I am not merely a sensitive or passive, but also an active or intelligent being. The freedom of my thought and action guarantees to me the immateriality of my soul, and is that which distinguishes me from the brute. The life of the soul after the decay of the body is assured to me by the fact that in this world the wicked triumphs, while the good are oppressed. The favored position which man occupies in the scale of beings — he is able to look over the universe and to reverence its author, to recognize order and beauty, to love the good and to do it ; and shall he, then, compare himself to the brute? — fills me with emotion and gratitude to the benevolent Creator, who existed before all things, and who will exist when they all shall have vanished away, to whom all truths are one single idea, all places a point, all times a moment. The Jiotv of freedom, of eternity, of creation, of the action of my will upon matter, etc., is, indeed, incomprehensible to me, but that these are so, my feeling makes me certain. The worthiest employment of my reason is to annihilate itself before God. "The more I strive to contemplate his infinite essence the less do I con- ceive it. But it is,'and that suffices me. The less I conceive it, the more I adore." In the depths of my heart I find the rules for my conduct engraved by nature in ineffaceable characters. Everything is good that I feel to be so. The conscience is the most enlightened of all philosophers, and as safe a guide for the soul as instinct for the body. The infallibility of its judg-