power, or at least a power not at work in the present processes of nature. The world as a whole bears marks of being an effect, and there must have been a time when it was produced by a power above itself. In the inspired writings we have evidence of works being done by Moses and the Prophets, by Jesus and the Apostles, surpassing the power of man or of physical nature. All this is inconsistent with a belief in the absolute uniformity of the course of nature, but it is quite in harmony with the intuitive conviction. If the world be an effect, we seek for a cause above the world; if the new species of animated beings cannot have been produced by natural agencies, we call in a supernatural cause; if the miracles of Scripture cannot be accounted for by human power, we call in Divine Power; and we feel, meanwhile, that so far from our native convictions being violated, they are gratified to the full when they learn of the events, otherwise inexplicable, being referred to causes adequate to produce them. It thus appears that those difficulties which have been propounded so pompously about the impossibility of proving that there can have been a cause above nature producing the effects in nature, or of establishing a miraculous interposition in the course of things, all proceed on defective and erroneous views of causation, and at once disappear when the nature of our conviction is inductively investigated and correctly expressed.1

1 It is not to my present purpose to enter on the subject of miracles, but it does fall in with the topics discussed in the text to remark, that there is nothing in a miracle opposed to any intuition of the mind,-certainly nothing opposed to our intuition as to cause. Hume, the sceptic, takes all sorts of objections to miracles, and the evidence by which they are supported, but he does not maintain that a miracle is impossible. It is "experience," according to him, “which assures us of the laws of nature" (Essay on Miracles); and I hold that the same experience shows us effects in nature which constrain us, according to the intuitive law of causation, to argue a Power above nature, which Power is an adequate cause of any miracle which may be attested by proper evidence. Brown has shown very satisfactorily that a miracle, with the Divine Power as its cause, is not inconsistent with our intuitive belief in causation (Cause and Effect, note E). Ever since Fichte published his Versuch einer Kritik aller Offenbarung, there have been persons in Germany who represent it as impossible for God to perform a miracle. This may be a necessary consequence of those false assumptions regarding our knowing only self, which landed Fichte in an incongruous pantheism, in which he at one time represents the Ego as the All-including God, as the "moral order ;" and at another time represents God as the All, and absorbing the Ego. But it can plead in its behalf no principle either natural or necessary. The result at which we have arrived is, that the question of the occurrence of miracles is to be determined by the ordinary laws of evidence.

BOOK IV.

MORAL CONVICTIONS.

CHAPTER I.

GENERAL VIEW OF THE MOTIVE AND MORAL POWERS.

SECT. I.-THE APPETENCIES, THE WILL, AND THE CONSCIENCE.

THE relation between the innate principles, or the fundamental laws of the mind; on the one hand, and the faculties of the mind, on the other, has seldom been properly understood. The former seem to me to be the rules of the operation of the latter. I have in the first three Books endeavoured to unfold the main primary principles regulating those faculties which have been called the Understanding, or the Intellectual or Gnostic or Cognitive Powers; or, better still, the Cognitive and Contemplative, so as to embrace the Imagination, which can scarcely be called a Cognitive, but is certainly a Contemplative Power. But in all classifications of the powers of the mind which have the least pretensions to completeness, there has been a recognition of another class, under the name of the Will, or the Feelings, or the Orective or Motive Powers; they may perhaps be best designated as the Motive and Moral Powers, so as to embrace unequivocally the functions of the conscience. I am in this Chapter to take a glance at this class of powers, and afterwards seek to ascertain the fundamental principles involved in them. They are at least three in number: the Appetencies,— including the Emotions; the Will; and the Conscience.

1. There are the native APPETENCIES OF THE MIND LEADING TO EMOTIONS. Man is so constituted that he is capable of being

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swayed in will, and so in action, by certain motives, that is, by the contemplation of certain objects or ends, while others do not influence him. It would serve many important ends to have a classification of these, that is, of the springs of human will and action. To endeavour to give a complete and exhaustive list of them, that is, of the categories of man's moral nature, would, I am aware, be quite as bold an effort as that so often made to determine the categories of the understanding. Such a classification would at the best be very imperfect in the first instance. But, even though only provisionally correct, it might accomplish some useful purposes. In the absence of any arrangement sanctioned by metaphysicians generally, it must suffice to mention here some of the principal motives which very obviously sway the will and impel to

action.

1. Mankind are evidently inclined, involuntarily and voluntarily, to exercise every native power, the senses, the memory, the imagination, the power of language, the various rational powers— such as abstraction, comparison, causality-the emotional, voluntary, and moral capacities. A vast portion of human activity proceeds from no higher and from no lower source than this. As the lambs frisk, and the colt gambols, and as the child is in perpetual rotation, so man's internal powers are for ever impelling him to exertion, independent altogether of any external object, or even of any further internal ends to be gained.

2. Whatever is contemplated as capable of securing pleasure is felt to be desirable, and whatever is apprehended as likely to inflict pain is avoided. This is so very obvious a swaying power with human beings, that it has been noticed, and commonly greatly exaggerated, in every account which has been given of man's active and moral nature. The mistake of the vulgar, and especially of the sensational systems, is that they have represented pleasure and pain as the sole contemplated ends by which man is or can be swayed. It is our object in these paragraphs to show that man can be influenced by other motives, better and worse.

3. There are certain appetencies in man, bodily and mental, which crave for gratification, and this independent of the pleasure to be secured by their indulgence. Of this description are the

appetites of hunger, thirst, and sex, and the mental tendencies to seek for knowledge, esteem, society, power, property. These appetencies may connect themselves with the other two classes already specified, but still they are different. They will tend to act as natural inclinations, but still they look towards particular external objects. We may come to gratify them for the sake of the pleasure, but in the first instance we seek the objects for their own sakes, and it is in seeking the objects we obtain gratification. They operate to some extent in the breasts of all, and they come to exercise a fearfully controlling and grasping power over the minds of multitudes.

4. Man is impelled by an inward principle, more or less powerful in the case of different individuals, and varying widely in the objects desired, to seek for the beautiful in inanimate or in animate objects, in grand or lovely scenes in nature, in statues, paintings, buildings, fine composition in prose or poetry, and in the countenances or forms of man or woman.

5. It is not to be omitted that the moral power in man is not only (as I hope to show) a knowing and judging faculty; it has a prompting energy, and leads us, when a corrupt will does not interfere, to such acts as the worship of God and beneficence to man, done because they are right.

6. Whatever is felt to be appetible for ourselves we may wish that others should enjoy, while we may desire that they should be preserved from all that is inappetible, such as restraint and pain and sin. Man is so constituted as to be stirred to desire and prompted to action by the contemplation of other beings to whom he is related, such as God, when he knows Him, and his fellowmen, more especially certain of his fellow-men, such as his countrymen and kindred, and those who have bestowed favours upon him I must ever set myself against the miserably degrading doctrine of those who represent man as utterly selfish in his constitution, and capable of being swayed by no other considerations than those which promise pleasurable gratifications to be realized by himself. He may, by a hardening process of sin, make himself thus selfish, but in his original nature he is capable of being swayed by a great number and variety of other motives, and among others by attach

ments to man as man, or to particular men or women, and by sympathy for persons in trouble.

In whatever way we may classify them, these, or such as these, are the motives by which man is naturally swayed. Upon these native and primary principles of action, others, acquired and secondary, come to be grafted. Thus money, not originally desired for its own sake, may come to be coveted as fitted to gratify the love of property, the love of power, or the love of pleasure. Or, a particular fellow-man, at first indifferent, comes to be avoided, because he seems inclined to thwart us in some of our favourite ends, such as the acquisition of wealth or of fame. It is a peculiarity of our nature that these secondary principles may become primary ones, and prompt us to seek, for their own sakes, objects which were at first coveted solely because they tended to promote further ends.

The appetencies, native and acquired, stir up Emotion, which is called forth by an apprehension of objects as fitted to gratify or to disappoint these appetencies. Let us call whatever accords with them the Appetible, and whatever runs counter to them the Inappetible; then the law is that the appetible, when in prospect, calls forth hope, and when realized, joy; whereas the inappetible, when in prospect, excites fear, and when realized, sorrow. It is always to be taken into account that the emotive susceptibility is naturally stronger in some minds than in others, is stronger at one period of life, or even one day or hour, than another; but making due allowance for this variable element, the intensity of feeling is determined by the strength of the motive principle, its native strength or its acquired strength, and by the extent of the appetible on inappetible embraced within the mental apprehension of the object or end fitted to gratify or disappoint the appetency. There are thus three elements determining the emotion, and these varying in the case of different individuals, and of the same individual at different times. There is the emotional susceptibility, depending largely on the state of the brain or particular organs of it. There is the mental appetency, natural or acquired. There is the mental apprehension of an object or event as tending to content or gratify the appetence. By these elements we can explain all the feelings, and much of