REVELATION AND REASON. 3 



has no grasp : its existence alone is known to him, and the laws by 

 which it is regulated : and thus it may be said the Great First 

 Cause, which alone can call both matter and mind into existence, 

 has alone the power of modulating intellectual nature. But when 

 the subject is well considered, this difference between the two 

 branches of science disappears with all the rest. It is admitted of 

 course, that we can no more create matter than we can mind ; and 

 we can influence mind in a way altogether analogous to our power 

 of modulating matter. By means of the properties of matter, we can 

 form instruments, machines, and figures ; so, by availing ourselves 

 of the properties of mind, we can affect the intellectual faculties, 

 exercising them, training them, improving them, producing, as it 

 were, new forms of the understanding. Nor is there a greater dif- 

 ference between the mass of rude iron from which we make steel, 

 and the thousands of watch-springs into which that steel is cut, or 

 the chronometer which we form of this and other masses equally 

 inert, than there is between the untutored, indocile faculties of a 

 rustic, who has grown up to manhood without education, and the 

 skill of the artist who invented that chronometer, and of the ma- 

 thematician who uses it, to trace the motions of the heavenly bodies." 



In thus comparing the plasticity of mind and matter, we question 

 how far his Lordship has aided his specific argument ; we have 

 quoted it here, because it would have been more logical in the noble 

 author to have adduced it in the earlier part of his work. Reverting 

 to page 56, it is said : 



" The evidence for the existence of mind is to the full as com- 

 plete as that upon which we infer the existence of matter : indeed, it 

 is more certain and irrefragable. The consciousness of existence, 

 the perpetual sense that we are thinking, and that we are per- 

 forming the operation quite independently of all material objects, 

 proves to us the existence of a being different from our bodies, with 

 a degree of evidence higher than any we can have for the existence 

 of those bodies themselves, or of any other part of the material 

 world. It is certain proved, indeed, to demonstration, that many 

 of the perceptions of matter which we derive through the senses are 

 deceitful, and seem to indicate that which has no reality at all. 

 Some inferences which we draw respecting it, are confounded with 

 direct sensation or perception for example, the idea of motion ; 

 other ideas, such as hardness and solidity, are equally the result of 

 reasoning, and often mislead. Thus we never doubt, on the tes- 



