ties, most wonderfully compounded and harmonized."

"To know, to desire, to act, or accurately to observe and meditate, to perceive and wish, to possess the powers of locomotion and resistance,these, combined, constitute man an animal, intellectual, and moral being.

"Man, endowed with these faculties, with this triple life, is in himself the most worthy subject of observation, as he likewise is himself the most worthy observer. In him each species of life is conspicuous; yet never can his properties be wholly known except by the aid of his external form, his body, his superficies. How spiritual, how incorporeal soever, his internal essence may be, still he is only visible and conceivable from the harmony of his constituent parts. From these he is inseparable. He exists and moves in the body he inhabits, as in his element. This material man must become the subject of observation before we can study the immaterial.”

So far Lavater, who confined himself to the surface alone; proceeding upon the simple proposition that, "The organization of man peculiarly distinguishes him from all other earthly beings; and his physiognomy, that is to say, the superficies and outlines of his organization, show him to

be infinitely superior to all those visible beings by which he is surrounded."

If such, then, be the external characteristics of man, the mere outlines of an organization which he enjoys in common with the brute, though with modifications corresponding to the outlines, what shall be said of that internal essence which is endowed with attributes that have no analogies in the brute creation?

It is this great prerogative, and the relation of the immaterial to the material part, which it is my present object to consider. I shall distinguish, therefore, what has been commonly designated the spiritual, from the material man, though it be obvious, that, however spiritual, how incorporeal soever, the internal essence may be, it is yet inseparable from the mechanism of the body. I shall carry the distinction farther than is recognized by any physiologist of our own times, and shall endeavor to sustain my conclusions by facts alone. I shall not, therefore, entangle you in any metaphysical obscurities, nor shall I, like the materialists, assume imaginary data, or like them, reason from factitious analogies.

It must be allowed a misfortune that the subject of mind has been, till a recent day, in the keeping of Metaphysicians. Learned, and able, and

devoted as they may have been to the prerogatives of reason, and with all the lustre they have shed upon mind, their ignorance of anatomy, and of the laws of organization, has led them to consider the spiritual part of man too abstractedly from his structure, and not unfrequently to wander from the path of Nature. Their abstract philosophy, and the well-meaning subtleties of the less gifted, have engendered a reaction which now assumes the form of undisguised materialism. Nor is that all; for with the correlative aid of innovations upon organic life from those philosophers who reduce the whole to the maxims of physics, the more revolting doctrine of spontaneous origin not only takes rank in the science of life, but is even practically illustrated in the Acarus Crossii,--side by side with the Homo DEI! And what part, think you, that these corruptions in Science and Religion have taken in the general insensibility which now prevails in relation to Divine subjects, and which led the distinguished President of Harvard University, in his late eulogy on President Adams, to speak of "a reverence for sacred things as almost obsolete"?

I have said that the bold materialism of our age is, in no small degree, the parent of the greater evils. And, that you may know the extent of the doctrine both as to the soul, and organic life, I

shall quote several of our most applauded authors. To many of you, I have no doubt, the opinions will be new and startling, because you may be yet uninitiated in the dogmas, which may have had no part in your former education. You may have only witnessed the remote consequences. But you are now entering upon inquiries where you will see the springs which have contributed most largely to the turbulent movements of the world; and they will be urged upon you as the fruits of a high advance in science, or of civilization. I say, of the world in its most comprehensive sense; for the revolutionary spirit is not confined to our own science, nor to general literature and philosophy, but strikes at the more absolute foundations of society. It has reached the purlieus of popular factions, and hails an Ilias malorum as its proudest trophy. In its wildest desolation it was shadowed forth by the prophetic ken of genius relying upon Retributive Justice.

"Vengeance, vengeance will not stay!

It shall burst on Gallia's head
Sudden as the Judgment-day
To the unsuspecting dead.

From the Revolution's flood
Shall a fiery Dragon start;

He shall drink his mother's blood,
He shall eat his father's heart.

Nurst by anarchy and crime,

He-but distance mocks my sight!
O--thou great Avenger, Time!

Bring thy strangest birth to light!"

"Prophet! thon hast spoken well,

And I deem thy words divine.” *

Let the enlightened stand by each other in the terrific crisis. A single one of them may surpass in power all the Potentates of the earth. The "New World" looks on with almost unruffled composure, but with a moral bearing that will ultimately restore the equilibrium of society; while, for the present, a mighty people in Europe, through the same benign, though more active influences, is the immediate arbiter of the approaching destinies of the human race.

For many of the movements to which I have referred we can readily assign the proximate causes, and some of the instances, it is not improbable, may take the rank of reformations. But it is not so easy to comprehend the obliquity which sees nothing but matter in the constitution of mind, and nothing but accident in living beings. Far be it from me to impugn the motives which have flooded society with these unhappy opinions, or to detract from the learning and intellect which

* Montgomery's Wanderer of Switzerland.