need not dissatisfy us, for though we are confined to what we thus have, the quantity to be attained is far more abundant within its limitations than any human beings have yet acquired, or are ever likely to possess. The supply surpasses the power of our allotted duration here to accumulate. This attainable knowledge has been limited to those sensations which we obtain from this external world by means of our five senses, to the perceptions and emotions thence arising, and to the action of our soul upon these materials in its exercises of memory, reasoning, and imagination. This is certainly a very special limitation; but to prevent its being detrimental to us, nature has been made so surprisingly multifarious, that we never shall exhaust it. The most numerous class of our sensations is that of sight, and this is confined to the agency of light upon the visual organizations of our eyes. All the knowledge which we derive from these, is but the knowledge of the effects of light from the outward object on our ocular nerves and on the soul in its association with them, from their affections or sensibilities. It has been fixed by our Creator, that the largest portion of our knowledge on earth should be of this lúminous and nervous origin and nature. This agency gives us a full notice of the existence of external things; and excites our soul, by the instrumentality of its visual mechanism, to become conscious of clear and exact images of exterior figures, and colours, and motions, and positions. It causes our mind, by some unknown process, to perceive these; to form distinct and appropriated images of each object; to remember them, and to think upon them, and to reason and fancy with them as we please. All this is obviously a very artificial result, and composes to us a very artificial species of knowledge, and yet it answers all our purposes of life, thought, and comfort. In some mysterious and inexplicable way, it occasions each of us to have in our minds an ideal world, exactly portraying, according to all appearance and probability, the external and substantial world, from which we have derived our intellectual copy. It is on this interior copy that we usually think and act. We refer to its original, and compare it with that, whenever we choose to direct our optical organs to a re-examination of what we have already perceived from it. By so doing, we correct and improve our mental images from it; but no one seems to have any knowledge of the external things among which he is living and acting, except so far as he has made from them his own personal, internal, ideal representations. The more correctly we form these within us, the more exact and certain is our knowledge. If our imagerical perception of any thing is imperfectly made, our knowledge of it will be as defective, and therefore untrue. In most things, we all appear to form correctly an interior conception of the same things; yet individual differences in this respect sometimes appear, so as to almost make us doubt if the same persons have been viewing the same thing but this diversity arises, not from an error in the sense, but from hasty, inaccurate, or insufficient observation.* The next greatest branch of our appointed knowledge during our human life, is that which arises to us from the sensations of sound; a most rich and valuable invention and provision for our delight and benefit; for to those we are indebted for our speech and music, both inestimable, and both given only to the human race, as no other animal can so produce and use them; though all seem to have the sense of hearing, and all quadrupeds and birds, and many insects and reptiles, and even some fish, can make sonorous utterances to express their passions and their feelings. The songster individuals of the feathered race form one exception as to the musical intonations, from the rest of their order of beings, and from the other brute animals; and sweet and delightsome are their natural melodies; but they are so uniform to each, so simple, so limited, and so unvaried, that although they have a musical effect, and may have suggested the invention and use of vocal music to mankind, yet they have no claim to the soul-moving art and science which we distinguish by this appellation. In those birds which sing, * It is the error of Condillac's system, and of that of his followers, to reduce man to his sensations alone, and to lead them to fancy that nothing is existing but the individual and his ideas. M. Royer Collard, in 1811, attacked this fallacy, according to which, "if an external world really exists, it is not visible to us. Man only feels his different sensations, odour, taste, colour, &c. There exists nothing but a sensibility differently affected. The individual only is existing. He sees and feels himself alone. Extension has no more reality than sounds or smells." -Damiron's Philos. en France. Condillac's mistake arose from not perceiving or believing that both things exist: both the external world, and also our sensorial and ideal one, mude gradually by our spirit from it, and faithfully representing it to us. the power and the notes are of the same instinctive character as their migrations and other habits; they neither invent, compare, arrange, nor diversify their strains. Each singing bird has one, oftenest but one succession of his pleasing notes, which he is always repeating, and which his descendants in like manner reiterate without any change or addition, and appear to have done so from their creation to the present day. The philomela of antiquity was the same, and but the same "Sweet bird, who shuns the noise of folly, with the same plaintive tones, and in the same evening portion of our natural day, as the bulbul of Persia, and the little nightingale of our lanes and groves; always interesting, but never improving. Nor have any feathered warblers ever been found to sing intentionally together, and to attempt a duet or a trio in unison, or in adapted harmonies. Both speech and music may, therefore, be considered as the donations of our Creator exclusively to his human population, and as specially intended and devised for their use and enjoyment, with a specific construction of the nerves and muscles of their larynx, in order that they may have the faculty of mutual conversation and of vocal music; for the gift seems to depend more upon this part of our body than on the mechanism of the ear, as several animals discover a gratified sensibility to human music, and many are perceptive of the tones and even of some of the meanings of our voice, though utterly incompetent to imitate either.* But universal as speech and music are, and though in some form or other mankind have been using them, ever since they began to inhabit this terrestrial globe, nothing in "Theophrastus remarks of the hearing sense, that it is more than all the others connected with the passions of the soul, for nothing that is seen, or touched, or tasted, brings on us such excitements, disturbances, or sudden frights, as those which occur when some noises, and sounds, and shrill echoes fall on the ear. But it is still more applicable to the reason than it is to the passions."-Plut. de Audit. v. i. p. 65. From the possible effect of selected vocal tones on the mind, Plutarch tells us, that "the sophists, in order to allure and interest their hearers, took great pains to soften and modulate their voices by the sweetest musical accents, and soothing tones, and harmonized modifications which they could practise." By this artful management, they won the attention of the young to their captivating elocution.-Ib. 67. nature is more mysterious and surprising than their production and effect. We call them modifications of sound, and we have traced a connexion between them and vibratory impulses, and have ascertained many important laws to which they are subservient; but all that we have discovered on this subject furnishes us with no real elucidation of the origin and cause of the phenomena. We know not what sound is; it is as ,yet but a name, to which we apply the observations and reasonings which we have made upon the effects we experience upon it; but of which we have in truth discerned no more, than that our auditory organs feel such sensations, and that our soul makes such perceptions, from them; but the hidden cause remains just as concealed from us as it has always been. We designate it by the name of sound. We have traced one most curious relation which it has with light, and we can as yet get no farther. It may be the luminous fluid itself, for what we know, which is now found to have undulations with some analogies to those of sound, or it may be the electric fluid, or it may be something else; we cannot tell what it is; we can only call it by the name sound, and speak of it as such. Its invisibility precludes at present all farther knowledge of it, and we must leave it to our posterity to find out, if they can, what it really and specifically is, and whether it is, as we suppose, a distinct and sui generis something, or only a modification or quality of some of those ethereal subjects that we are a little more acquainted with. These two senses supply us with by far the largest quantity of our knowledge of all descriptions. Our taste and smell add also that which arises from the impressions made upon their peculiar organs; and the sense of feeling, which by an admirable distribution of our nervous fibres is diffused over all the surface of our body, and which is made particularly minute and delicate in our fingers, contributes likewise, from their sensitivity to heat and cold and contact, to increase the number and variety of our intellectual perceptions. It is a kind peculiarity attached to all our sensorial organs, that their action and the acquisition of the knowledge thence derived, have been made pleasurable to us. Continual comfort is the result of the natural action of all our bodily powers and functions; and thus the formation of our knowledge is Vol. II-M but a succession of placid enjoyment accruing to us as it occurs. But all the materials and causes of whatever knowledge we may acquire, are those which have been, without any concert with us, chosen and appointed to be that knowledge which human beings should possess. We may attain as little or as much of this as we may please, or have opportunities of gaining; but we cannot have any other. All its constituent elements, all the sources and means of it, have been specially chosen for us and made to occur to us, or to be always accessible to us, in order that it may form us to be that particular kind of being which makes a human nature. Our pains and pleasures have been also the subjects of the divine consideration, choice, and appointing will. None of these are native in the soul; they all accrue to it from its body and from its present external world; and they only occur to it so far as they have been provided for, and as special organizations have been made in our body, in order that they may take place. Thus the most frequent and repeated gratification which we experience during our human life, is that derived from our daily food. This occurs to us every day whenever we eat, and never ceases till we die. But nothing has been more specially, carefully, and exuberantly provided for us; and this pleasure arises entirely from a most artificial fabrication of functions and organs within us, for the express purpose of occasioning this effect. The pleasure was not necessary to the benefit. The sustenance which our bodies required might have been made to pass into us like the air into our lungs, without any sensation or gratifying effect. Even what we take might have been received by our month and stomach without any attendant pleasure. But it has been the choice and kind determination of our Creator, that continual gratification should attend the means of our nutrition, and that our food should be pleasurable as well as useful to us and to all animal classes, and that this should be the main supply of our sensorial enjoyments. But to accomplish his own wishes in this respect, and to cause this satisfaction to arise continually to us, very great tions of contriving thought, curious mechanism, and exve adaptations were required. He had so to arrange |