and wills, and reasons, and remembers, and worships. Here are qualities in the one case; operations in the other. Here are two definitions as totally distinct as any two can be; and he that sees not in them a difference of substance, sees it nowhere: to him all natures are one; and that one, an absurd supposition.
15. In favour of what is urged by the phrenologists, it may perhaps be admitted, as a natural law, that, "If a picture of a visible object be formed upon the retina, and the impression be communicated, by the nerves, to the brain, the result will be an act of perception."--Wayland's Moral Science, p. 4. But it does not follow, nor did the writer of this sentence believe, that perception is a mere act or attribute of the organized matter of the brain. A material object can only occasion in our sensible organs a corporeal motion, which has not in it the nature of thought or perception; and upon what principle of causation, shall a man believe, in respect to vision, that the thing which he sees, is more properly the cause of the idea conceived of it, than is the light by which he beholds it, or the mind in which that idea is formed? Lord Kames avers, that, "Colour, which appears to the eye as spread upon a substance, has no existence but in the mind of the spectator."--Elements of Criticism, i, 178. And Cicero placed the perception, not only of colour, but of taste, of sound, of smell, and of touch, in the mind, rather than in the senses. "Illud est album, hoc dulce, canorum illud, hoc bene olens, hoc asperum: animo jam hæc tenemus comprehensa, non sensibus."--Ciceronis Acad. Lib. ii, 7. Dr. Beattie, however, says: "Colours inhere not in the coloured body, but in the light that falls upon it; * * * and the word colour denotes, an external thing, and never a sensation of the mind."--Moral Science, i, 54. Here is some difference of opinion; but however the thing may be, it does not affect my argument; which is, that to perceive or think is an act or attribute of our immaterial substance or nature, and not to be supposed the effect either of the objects perceived or of our own corporeal organization.
16. Divine wisdom has established the senses as the avenues through which our minds shall receive notices of the forms and qualities of external things; but the sublime conception of the ancients, that these forms and qualities had an abstract preëxistence in the divine mind, is a common doctrine of many English authors, as Milton, Cowper, Akenside, and others. For example: "Now if Ens primum be the cause of entia a primo, then he hath the idea of them in him: for he made them by counsel, and not by necessity; for then he should have needed them, and they have a parhelion of that wisdom that is in his Idea."--Richardson's Logic, p. 16: Lond. 1657.
"Then the Great Spirit, whom his works adore,
Within his own deep essence view'd the forms,
The forms eternal of created things."--AKENSIDE.
Pleasures of the Imagination, Book i.
"And in the school of sacred wisdom taught,
To read his wonders, in whose thought the world,
Fair as it is, existed ere it was."--COWPER.
Task: Winter Morning Walk, p. 150.
"Thence to behold this new-created world,
The addition of his empire, how it show'd
In prospect from his throne, how good, how fair,
Answering his great idea."--MILTON.
Paradise Lost, Book vii, line 554.
"Thought shines from God as shines the morn;
Language from kindling thought is born."
ANON.: a Poem in imitation of Coleri
