BOOK I. PRELIMINARY CONSIDERATIONS. CHAPTER I. On the Cognizance which the Understanding takes of its own Processes. 1. It has often been said of man that he is the greatest of all mysteries to himself. What hath led to this saying is his profound ignorance of that which is so immediately about him as his own sentient and moral and intellectual economy. It is strange that to him the most deep and difficult secrets are those which lie nearest to him. Yet so it is and however inscrutable he may find Nature to be in all her departments, yet never does he find her more so than among the recesses of his own internal system, and amid the hidden workings of his own nature. 2. But it is of the utmost practical importance to remark that though man knows not the processes of that complex economy by which it is that he moves and feels and thinks, it is not necessary that he should, in order either to move aright, or to feel aright, or even to think aright. In as far as the merely animal constitution is concerned, this is quite palpable. That the processes of this constitution should go rightly forward it is not necessary that he should understand them. He does not need to study anatomy that he might find his way to the appropriate muscles by which to move and turn himself. It is not by any intelligent guidance of his that the processes of digestion and secretion and circulation are regulated. The creature may be upheld in living play and in the healthful enjoyment of life, although he should never have taken lessons on Physiology, or speculated till he had lost his way among the arcana of vitality and the vital principle. That the machinery of his own internal system may be kept prosperously a-going it is no more required that he should look inwardly, than that he should look outwardly or upwardly to the Heavens lest the mechanism of the Planetary system should go into unhingement. The systems both of Astronomy and Anatomy are independent of him and though both lay hid in unrevealed mystery for ages, yet did the one proceed as invariably and the other almost so, as now that they have been somewhat opened to the gaze of his curiosity. A thing may operate rightly though he knows nothing of the modus operandi. To have the full use of his animal system he is nearly as independent of the science of it, as any inferior creature who is incapable of science and who nevertheless in the freshness and buoyancy of its own spontaneous powers can expatiate at large in the element that is suited to it; and either revel in fields of air, or sport itself in the waters of the sea, or luxuriate on the pastures of earth-and all by the adaptations of a self-mechanism, of the workings of which, nay even of the existence of which it is wholly unconscious. 3. All this is abundantly obvious but it has not been sufficiently attended to, that the remark is nearly as applicable to man's moral as to his animal constitution. That this constitution be in a wholesome state, or that its various faculties and functions should be in right adjustment, it is not necessary for man the owner of this constitution to take a reflex view of it, or become theoretically acquainted with the nature and the workings of this inner mechanism. What has been said of physical may be as emphatically said of moral and spiritual health. The vigorous clown may have all the use or enjoyment of it-while all the science of it belongs to the sickly valetudinarian. And in like manner the first may never have heard of a moral sense, and yet both promptly discern and powerfully feel the obligations of morality-while the second can subtly analyze that conscience, whose authority he bids away from him. The truth is, that often when man is most alive to the sense of what is duteous and incumbent, it is not to himself that he looksbut to a fellow man whether an applicant for justice or charity who at the time is present to his sight, or to God the sovereign claimant of piety and of all righteousness, who at the time is present to his thoughts. So that all the while he may have been looking outwardly to an object, and never once have cast an introverted view upon himself the subject. He may have been looking objectively or forth of himself, and never subjectively or towards himself. He may have taken in a right sensibility from the object that is without him, and have been practically urged thereby in a right direction. There has been a real inward process in consequence-but the process has only been described or undergone; it has not been attended to. The organ whether of feeling or of perception may be justly impressed with the object that is addressed to it while the man is wholly taken up with the object; and meanwhile all consciousness of the organ is suspended. It is precisely like the man who can see rightly that which is before him, although he should never think of the eye's retina nor be aware of its existence. Notwithstanding his well-conditioned moral state he may be as ignorant of the moral, as many a peasant in a well-conditioned physical state is ignorant of the physical anatomy. In the construction of our ethical systems, this distinction has not been enough adverted to-between a knowledge of the objects of the science, and a knowledge of the faculty by which these objects are perceived or judged of. Certain it is, that without the latter knowledge there may, practically, be a most correct intelligence and feeling in regard to the question of right and wrong-nay the principles of this question may be philosophically arranged, and a complete moral philosophy be framed without that peculiar analysis which is resorted to by those who blend the moral with the mental philosophy. 4. But the same is also true of our intellectual constitution. It may be in a sound state and may operate soundly-though we should never have bestowed one thought upon it. That the under standing may proceed aright on the many thousand objects of human thought, it is not necessary that it should take any cognizance of its own processes. We admit that the procedure of the human understanding forms one, and that too a most interesting topic of inquiry. But it is not necessary to have mastered this topic, ere we are qualified to enter on other topics of inquiry. The truth is, that a man may have put forth his understanding with wisdom and with a warrantable confidence on every other department of human knowledge and yet be a stranger to that one department, the knowledge of his own intellectual processes. In a word the understanding may understand every thing but itself ~we mean every thing that is within the circle of our mental acquisitions. We may work well with an instrument, though we do not attend to the workings of the instrument. We do not first look to the instrument of thought, and then to the objects of thought or first to that which understands, and then to that which is to be understood. We investigate without one thought of the investigating mind-just as to ascertain the visible properties of that which is before it, the eye, instead of looking to itself, looks openly and directly forth of itself, and on the outer field of contemplation. 5. There are many who exercise their intellectual powers vigorously and soundly, without ever once casting an introverted eye on their mode of operation who, in contact only with the objects of reasoning, never once bestow a formal or express thought on the act of reasoning, yet reason conclusively and well-who, busied with nothing |