186 PURPOSE AND GENERAL COND.fTION 



which is gratification, and of faculties, the exercise o£' 

 which is pleasurable. When we consult our own sensa- 

 tions, we find that, even in a sense of a healthy perform- 

 ance of all the functions of the animal economy, God has 

 furnished us with an innocent and very high enjoyment. 

 The mere quiet consciousness of a healthy play of the 

 mental functions, a mind at ease with itself and all around 

 it — is in like manner extremely agreeable. This nega- 

 tive class of enjoyments, it may be remarked, is likely to 

 be even more extensively experienced by the lower ani- 

 mals than by man, at least in the proportion of their ab- 

 solute endowments, as their mental and bodily functions 

 are much less liable to derangement than ours. To find 

 the world constituted on this principle is only what in 

 reason we would expect. We cannot conceive that so 

 vast a system could have been created for a contrary pur- 

 pose. No averagely constituted human being would, in 

 his own limited sphere of action, think of producing a sim- 

 ilar system upon an opposite principle. But to form so 

 vast a range of being, and to make being everywhere a 

 source of gratification, is conformable to our ideas of a 

 Creator in whom we are constantly discovering traits of a 

 nature of which our own is but a faint and far-cast shad- 

 ow at the best. 



It appears at first difficult to reconcile with this idea 

 the many miseries which we see all sentient beings, our- 

 selves included, occasionally enduring. How, the sage 

 has asked in every age, should a Being so transcendently 

 kind have allowed of so large an admixture of evil in the 

 condition of his creatures ? Do we not at length find an 

 answer to a certain extent satisfactory, in the view which 

 has now been given of the constitution of nature ? We 

 there see the Deity operating in the most august of his 

 works by fixed laws, an arrangement which, it is clear, 

 only admits of the main and primary results being good, 

 but disregards exceptions. Now the mechanical laws are 

 so definite in their purposes, that no exceptions ever take 

 place in that department ; if there is a certain quantity of 

 nebulous matter to be agglomerated, and divided, and set in 

 motion as a planetary system, it will be so with hair's- 

 breadth accuracy, and cannot be otherwise. But the laws 

 presiding over meteorology, life, and mind, are necessarily 

 less definite, as they have to produce a great variety of 

 mutually related results. Left to act independently of 



