LETTER II. Nature distinguished into the Visible and the Invisible-Sacred History's Connexion with the Latter-Man, as the Superior Being upon Earth, has a Sacred History attached to his Existence, in which nothing else participates-all Nature is a Special Creation with specific ends in view -Man peculiarly so the Sacred History is founded on these-Erroneous ideas of the Ancients on the Origin of Man and Nature of Things, and of the Deity. MY DEAR SYDNEY, Or the divine philosophy, which I have been recommending to you, the sacred history of the world will be the most important subject; and of this, the principal compartment, or at least that which cannot but be paramount to us, is the sacred history of man. For, although this earth has not been devised or made for him alone, yet it has been manifestly formed with great and continual reference to him; and he is, beyond dispute, the pre-eminent being upon it, at least, of all that wears a visible shape, and by that, has become cognizable by us. Our eyesight, indeed, cannot be taken at any time as an absolute criterion of the existing. The apparent rising, semicircular journey, and evening departure of the sun, are a daily testimony to our judgment, that our vision alone is not the certain teacher of the true. Nature is always indicating this circumstance to us, that we may not be led to call her invisibilities into question. We never see the warmth that delights us so often in a vernal day, when the cloud conceals from us "day's garish eye;" nor the cold which freezes us, although he is shining as gayly on his winter throne. Thus the perception of the visible never authorizes us to confine every thing to it, nor to deny the existence of what is otherwise. Some have from singularity chosen to limit the knowable by the visible; but this would be only wilfully consigning ourselves to ignorance of some of the grandest realities of existing things; and whenever this feeling operates, it is the weakness, not the strength of the individual mind, that leads any one to indulge it. Nature consists of both these descriptions of beings; of the unseen as well as of the seen; of that which is perceptible by our senses, and of that by which they are not affected. Nothing exists because we are conscious of it, nor depends upon our acquaintance with it, nor ceases to be or never has been, because it has not become a subject of our sensorial excitations. Invisibility is as much a character and state of creation as visibility and tangibility likewise are. Many things exist which we cannot touch, as well as others which we cannot see. Matter is in some of its forms as invisible to us as spirit, and even often imperceptible in its tenuity by any of our senses. But to be attenuated is no more non-existence than to be unseen. It therefore resembles a childish error to disbelieve what we cannot see, or to suppose that nothing exists but what our eyes can behold. This seems so obvious, that it is almost chimerical to allude to it; and yet I have known that it has been recommended, and very earnestly, in France, to educate from infancy on this principle; a strange condemnation of the young, ingenuous mind, which naturally loves truth, and all truth, and would willingly cherish it in all its shapes, to be narrow and contracted, and imperfect both in its knowledge and its judgment. The visibility of which we are conscious is no natural quality of any thing, for all things naturally are invisible to each other. It is an artificial effect produced on our frame, and in that of all the animated classes, by the wonderful laws assigned to the luminous fluid, and by the as wonderful construction and adaptation of the optical organ. Nothing is visible where no light thus acts, nor to what has no nerVous matter in its frame. Nothing is visible to the living principle in plants, any more than to the limestone, to the diamond, or to the dewdrop, although in the two latter a marvellous agency of the matter of light so brilliantly oper ates. But it is a part of our Creator's plan of his animal kingdom, that we and our fellow brutes should have that knowledge of external things which arises from the impressions that constitute sight; and he has therefore contrived and placed within us a most delicate and complicated organization, by which outward substances should be caused to become objects of our consciousness. Visibility is therefore merely that artificial result of these admirable and benevolent provisions as to light and our material eyes, and the association of our mental principle with them, which makes this to have such a sensation from external things, and to form the perceptions from them, which become our sight and the knowledge we derive from it. No visibility can therefore extend beyond the extent of these special provisions. Our Creator has extended them to every thing which he designs us to be thus acquainted with in our present age and world; but he has not carried our power of seeing farther. It is our deficiency, and not our merit, that we cannot see what is smaller or finer, or more distant than that which so affects us, or which, from being immaterial, never can so act upon us. But nature is always warning us not to commit the mistake of disbelieving, because we cannot see. Her largest expansion of material substance, though everywhere enveloping us, the air, which ascends so loftily above us, and presses so densely upon us, yet is always invisible to us.* The wind, which tosses up like a football the ponderous masses of the ocean, and breaks down the mightiest trees, cannot be seen, however dreadfully its moving force is felt. All the component elements and primary combinations of the most solid substances are in the same predicament. Thus, the invisibilities of nature are an essential and universal portion of it; and it will be always unphilosophical to make our sight the sole judge or standard for our belief as to external things. His At the head of all the invisible existences that we know of is the gracious Deity himself, from whom they proceed, and whom they in this respect resemble. He is the eternal being, who perceived by the intelligent essences which surround his immediate throne, according to the laws of their nature, but whom "no man hath seen or can see." government, his providence, and his influences, must be as invisible as himself. The sacred history of his worlds is the history of his operations among them, and, like himself, can never be an object of human sight. We must trace it in our own by our reasoning, and by its effects: and in these, his divine agency, wisdom, and power will be, as the fine * "Its pressure or weight on all parts of the earth is fifteen pounds to one square inch. The greater portion of the atmosphere is always within fifteen or twenty miles of the earth's surface, though it has been inferred to extend to forty or forty-five miles in height."-Dr. Prout's Bridg. Treatise, p. 188, 9. chorus of Haydn, in its rich and sweet harmonies, proclaims them to be in the material creation, "Never unperceived; Ever understood;" if we will apply our minds as steadily to discern them in the one case as in the other.* But for all the unseen realities in our earth beyond his omnipresence and directing providence and agencies, it will be proper to require rational evidence correspondent to its importance. We must not create in the imagination, what does not exist in nature. The habit of this fallacy produced most of the ancient superstitions. Conjecture must be subordinate to fact in all earthly things, and never be indulged beyond the legitimate deductions from it. Hence, though our Milton's grand conception pleases the fancy, and may be as true as the absence of what it intimates, yet we have not become conscious of any phenomena which entitle the supposition to become a subject of our decided belief. What Shakspeare has made his Hamlet express with such acute good sense and graceful ease, may be admitted by the most cautious reasoner in its undefined generality: "There are more things in heaven and earth Horatio !" But with an impression of this sort we must rest satisfied. The sentiment of the prince is an intellectual truth, which, in all our investigations of nature, should never be forgotten. Our sensorial knowledge is the groundwork and the material of all our science and certainties; but never should be mistaken by us to be the whole of what is subsisting, or the standard of what is true. *The apostle impressed this fact on the attention of his Roman friends: "The invisible things of Him, even his eternal power and godhead, are, from the creation of the world, clearly seen; being understood by the things that are made."--Rom. c. i. v. 20 Milton cherished the same thought :-- Yet these declare "To us invisible! or dimly seen Millions of spiritual creatures walk the earth Ib book is With this view of nature let us proceed with our inquiry, recollecting that in this, as in all natural philosophy, the unknown, which is actually in existence, though yet undiscernible by us, will for a long time far exceed what human sagacity has succeeded in making the common property of all. The greatest minds feel this, but are not therefore discouraged from trying to enlarge the general stock.* In the same spirit, though with inferior ability, we will endeavour so to combine fact and reasoning as to make some parts of our sacred history more intelligible to us than it has been by many allowed to be; and as both of us think that what is true, or what seems most likely to be so, is alone deserving of our notice, all mere speculation or conjectural theories should be carefully avoided. It is no self-flattery to consider man as the paramount being on our globe, for we can compare him, both in form and actions, with all the brute animals that we know of; and the more minutely we do so, the more we perceive his established and intended superiority. He is the monarch of the earth, although he is not its sole possessor; and from the natural relation and sympathy which always exist between intellect and intellect in proportion to its excellence, we may, without presumption, not unreasonably infer that his transcending mind has been the most interesting as it is the most favoured production of his intelligent Creator. Nothing else on earth has received such a magnificent gift as the human spirit; and the humblest and the poorest may be *The last sentence uttered by the distinguished La Place was, "What we know, is little; what we are ignorant of, is immense.”— Powell's Hist. Nat. Phil. p. 378. This was only a more brief expression of the same sentiment, which Sir Isaac Newton, a short time before his death, as if with a kindred feeling, thus mentioned: "I do not know what I may appear to the world; but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, while the vast ocean of truth lay still undiscovered before me."-Dr. Brewster's Life of Sir Isaac Newton, p. 338; Powell, 359. Few great minds estimate highly their own achievements: these are too natural to them to be felt to be extraordinary. Newton's remark showed both the largeness and the correctness of his own genius. Though he had far exceeded his fellows, yet he perceived that, compared with the infinitudes of nature which had not been explored or even approached, his discoveries were no larger a part of the boundless universe, than the shellfish is of the seas which roll over him. Indeed, it is only later investigations which have ascertained how far beyond our planets his system seems to bo justly applicable. |