FACULTIES OF TtiE MIND. 



455 



dation must be permanent, and its nature unalloyed. He yields himself 

 to this train of contemplation ; and the mind, now fully reinstated in its 

 government, indulges a sober and rational grief, and arrives at a sober and 

 rational conclusion. It determines that earth has no such happiness to 

 offer him ; it may perhaps lead him further, and prompt him to seek it in 

 a sublimer source. 



This description I have drawn from the naturaf passions of the human 

 heart — passions that, in a greater or less degree, are common to all coun- 

 tries and ages ; but there are passions of which uncultivated nature knows 

 nothing, which are the baneful offspring of a morbid civilization and im- 

 moral habits, and which possess, if possible, a still more tyrannical con- 

 trol over the judgment than any that nature herself has implanted within 

 it. Such is the passion for gambliing, which has often, even in the so- 

 briety of our own cUmate, maddened the brain of men who, but for this, 

 had been worthy members of society, and plunged them into the foulest 

 vices, and at length, into the deadly gulf of suicide. One of the best pic- 

 tures of the heart-rending despair of such a wretch, just before the per- 

 petration of this horrible crime, is to be found in the description of Be- 

 verley in The Gamester who is thus painted to the life, in the inevitable 

 ruin into which he was thrown afler having staked the last resource and 

 final hope of his wife and family on one unfortunate and fatal hazard :— » 



" When all was lost, he fixed his eyes upon the ground, and stood some 

 time with folded arms, stupid and motionless ; then, snatching his sword 

 that hung against the wainscot, he sat him down, and with a look of fixed 

 attention drew figures on the floor. At last, he started up ; looked wild, 

 and trembled ; and, like a woman, seized with her sex's fits, laughed out 

 aloud, while the tears trickled down his face. So he left the room.'* 



Yet, even here, under the fell sway of this accursed incantation, we 

 are not without examples of its being occasionally broken through, and 

 its deadly fetters shaken off by the virtuous resolution of a mind deter- 

 mined to prove its independence, and to act according to the dictates of 

 its better judgment. As an exsmple of which, among many others, I 

 may refer to the conduct of one of the first statesmen of our own coun- 

 try, and our own age ; — a statesman, whose name will ever be dear to 

 Britain, on various accounts, but chiefly, perhaps, since under his admi- 

 nistration, she set the glorious example to the world of abolishing the 

 slave trade. In early life it is well known that Mr. Fox was irresistibly 

 addicted to this intoxicating passion and it is also equally known, that 

 in his maturer life, he tore himself from the further prosecution of it, by 

 a courageous determination from which he never departed. 

 — It appears obvious, then, that the mind both can and ought to maintain 

 a general mastery over all its faculties ; and is able, at all times, except 

 in extreme cases, to furnish itself with motives. And hence, though it is 

 perfectly true that it cannot will, or, in other words, cannot choose or re- 

 fuse without a motive, and to this extent is under a necessity, yet the ori- 

 gination or change of motives being vested in itself, it is equally true that 

 it is so far free to will, as well as to act or perform what it wills. 



If the distinction here offered had been properly attended to, we should, 

 as I am inclined to think, have had fewer opponents in all ages, to the 

 doctrine of the freedom of the mind, or of the will as it is commonly de- 

 nominated. Among the chief of these opponents we may rank the Fa- 

 talists of ancient, and the Necessarians of modern times. 



The general train of argument by which they have been letl, and tht? 



