12 OBSERVATION IS NATURAL. 



making their revelations to us, if the circumstances 

 under which we are placed will at all admit of 

 their acting. We cannot mark their beginnings ; 

 and, as we have no positive knowledge but where 

 we have had experience, we cannot even imagine 

 what our knowledge or our enjoyment may be 

 when we are " out of the body ;" but what we re- 

 ceive through them, and the arrangement of it 

 after it has been received, are all our occupation 

 and all our enjoyment in this world, and the im- 

 mediate purpose of these remarks extends no fur- 

 ther. 



To observe is, indeed, the very constitution of 

 our nature ; and though our own memories do not 

 reach back to that period, and those who are very 

 near it cannot inform us, yet we have every reason 

 to believe that life and observation begin at the 

 same instant, and hold on their course, and close 

 together ; and that there is nothing that we can 

 know, or believe, or deny, for which we are not 

 immediately indebted to observation, or of which 

 the foundation may not be traced to something 

 that we have observed, however removed it may 

 seem to be from the ordinary exercise of the 

 senses. When we call a man of intelligent mind, 

 " a man of sense," we do not therefore speak 

 falsely, or even figuratively. We speak the literal 

 truth, for we mean a man who has used his senses 

 to good purpose a man of observation. 



From want of knowing what led us to make the 

 first observation, and how that observation was 

 made, we are unable directly to school or instruct 

 each other in the process of observing. But after 

 we have observed and profited by it, we can re- 

 trace the process backwards, which is teaching by 



