their combination. And should this combination be the legitimate result of some one truth, it will acquire, from that fact, that kind of consistency and unity, which are essential to the clear understanding of, and full faith in, any system. The author will endeavor in the following chapters to shew, not a priori merely, but by an experimental process, yielding an appropriate formula, that there is a truth which is competent to produce such a combination. He hopes to show that this truth, on its application to all sensuous and intellectual phenomena, operates as a law of unity, whereby it reveals, in a manner not altogether unlike the Newtonian idea of gravitation, the fact, that one grand order, subsisting from the Absolute Unit, pervades all matter and mind; and that all existences whether spiritual or material, subsist as one infinite whole, in the Eternal Soul of all things.

And now it may be a matter of some interest to the reader, to be informed what this truth or fact is, which promises such results. It is a truth, whose expression or formula, furnishes the author with his method of treating his subject; and to the end that the reader may more clearly understand the bearing of this truth on the problems to which its formula applies, he proposes, in the first instance, to distinguish between the method which it gives, and that which is in general use; in other words, to show where the latter method ends, and the former begins.

The ordinary method ends, not merely with the phenomena of consciousness-that is with perceptions, conceptions, imagination, memory, and generally with the laws of thought-but with the necessary inference of the existence of something distinct from the consciousness whence these phenomena and these laws proceed; or which, subsisting centrally in the conciousness, is itself the life and the law thereof. Every one, who has attentively observed the facts of consciousness, must have remarked that our thoughts arise and succeed each other without any special act of the will. We may, indeed, arrest a particular thought, or train of thoughts, and examine it in all its relations; nay, we may, by one of these relations, pass to other thoughts; but by no act of the will can we pass, as by a leap, from this to that distinct thought, having no connection with the former. Their connection or relation must be felt, and when it is felt, and apperceived, thought succeeds thought spontaneously, and as by a power or energy its own. In this, we witness the acts of the will on one side, and the acts of that which is not of the will on the other; in other words, of the self or me, and of that which is not the self, or is the not-me. We thus discover a power within, yet foreign to us, which gives law to

thought, and is in fact the parent of every mental phenomenon, that is not a mere volition.

Now I may designate this power, as the perfect Reason, the Logos, the Divine Presence; psychologically considered, it matters not what I call it, provided I ascribe to it no attributes other than those which it reveals in the consciousness. And this, I apprehend, is the utmost limit of the ordinary method, inward or upward.

But I may be satisfied, from observation and experience, that all other human minds present the like phenomena, and are governed by the same laws, which I observe in my own; and must I not, then, infer that the same reason, or divine power, or being, is present in all minds just as it is in my own? This is an inference which cannot be resisted; and then, if it be Deity that is thus present, does he exist by dif fusion, or does he multiply himself, and exist as so many distinct beings in the hundreds of millions of human minds that are now acting their distinct parts on this our planet?

Here are grave questions, to either of which an affirmative answer involves an apparent absurdity. I am therefore forced to the necessity of questioning my ideas concerning space and extension-concerning unity and plurality. What are they, and whence ?

It was during a consideration of this question that a fact was evolved, new at least to me, and which had, as I supposed, a material bearing upon it. It was a fact which gave, or seemed to give, a complete answer to the question, and with it, what may be called a new method of investigating, arranging, and of resolving into absolute unity, all spiritual and material natures, without disturbing their identity, or marring the unity into which they were resolvable-a method which, without interfering with the before mentioned strictly psycholygical method, aided it by giving logical combination and unity to its results. Indeed it seemed to go something further. It seemed necessarily to result in a system in which my own conscious being was resolved into a type, representative of the great whole. It revealed a being, in this not-me within, that seemed to involve all things in self, and to be at once present to my own, and to every other human mind-and that without division or diffusion. The result of this new idea of the Presence was, that it produced combinations its own-perfectly coincident, however, with all that falls within our experience. It brought like to like, revealed a law of assimilation, and resolved all the infinitude of particulars into entireties, and then the entireties themselves, in the last result, into the unity of the Reason or Logos. Yet it avoided panthe

ism, unless it were on the incomprehensible scale of the infinite, by recognizing a limited or quasi freedom in the human will.

And now, what is the fact?

I have no name for it; but I will endeavor to give the reader some idea of it by an illustration, or proof, drawn from the phenomenon of the single perception of an object from the double images of the retina.

Whilst engaged in studying Hartley's theory of vibrations, in reference to this phenomenon, the thought occurred to me that it might be accounted for on the principle that the space between the two images was not, to the percipient faculty, an object of visual perception; in other words, that two similar images would necessarily be as one, if there were no visible objects between them. The correctness of this conclusion I endeavored to establish by actual experiment-with what success the reader will judge when he has perused the next chapter.

Upon applying the formula which the experiment gave, I found that any number of similar visible objects was resolvable into unity, by the mere ideal abstraction of their separating spaces; and it hence followed, that space, abstractly considered, was nothing but the ascription of the Reason or Logos, or of some power operating as a law to the consciousness, of geometrical relations to a coexistent plurality of objects. And then, since we determined the extent of bodies in themselves by the relations of part to part, and of each part to the whole, any coexistent plurality-say resisting mathematical points or forces, having no dimensions, but by their resistance made obvious to the senses-would bring with it the idea of extension. But if this were so, then all objects of sense-the whole material universe, myself included, were resolvable into this Reason, Power or Presence. And I felt no difficulty in conceiving that ideas or imagery of the divine mind, subsisting from the absolute will, might be to me-a co-ordinate image and a finite will—the stern and unyielding realities which they seemed to be. Matter itself might be but the repetition, ad infinitum in the degree of the infinitesimal, of the absolute unit, and the various forms which it took, but the ultimates of ideas or conceptions in the divine mind.

Nor, by the aid of the same formula, was it difficult to show how the Supreme Reason, in the unity of the personal divine, could be present, even in its entirety, as the central being of every human soul. For to it, in the absolute esse, there were no separating spaces, and all entities were as one. Nor did it seem difficult to conceive of an order of presence and a resulting law of assimilation, in and by which, like was classed with like, and the each and all, of the individualities of

each class, made to subsist as one idea, one image, in the divine mind. This I hope to make very clear in the following chapters; but for the present, I draw an illustration from our ideas of number.

The idiot, according to Hobbes, counts the strokes of the clock, one, one, one, on to twelve; yet he has no idea of twelve, as an entiretyas a sum, or abstract idea-which embraces within itself all the several units, and sums of which it is composed-that is every unit and every sum which may be formed by any number of them, from two to twelve. Yet such is the idea which the word twelve represents and expresses. Now, just as this idea involves all the units and sums that compose it, so this Reason or Logos, by virtue of its presence, involves within itself within its own unity-all individualities, species, genera, orders, classes; and gives the all to subsist as one idea-one form-within itself. And this I hope may excuse, if it cannot justify, the perhaps too ambitious language of the title page.

In endeavoring to prove the truth of this system, I shall not confine myself strictly to ontological and psychological methods. The point, from which I am to view the great problem, enables me to draw illustrations and proofs from the material world, and even from the history of the race; and I may at a future period, for the purpose of showing the conformity of the system even to the course of human events, conclude this treatise, by educing from the premises which it affords, a brief philosophy of history which shall appropriate, as a necessary part of it, the essentials of revealed religion.

Being in possession of a formula which gives a method, and discloses results, thus consonant to our experience, knowledge, and hopes, I have thought that it would, at least, be excusable to obtain from it whatever results it might fairly yield. And if I in doing this may seem to be too daring, let the reader recollect, that I am only following what I deem to be a fact, to its necessary results; and that I am responsible for those results, only to the extent of my responsibility for the truth of the fact from which they are educed.

But there may be those who will shrink from the perusal of a treatise which recognizes the divine attributes in aught that manifests itself in humanity; and who will confound the words "The Reason, The Logos," &c., as here used, with those which designate a faculty deemed merely human, and therefore fallible. For there are many of the best minds, who almost unconsciously adopt a sort of mechanical

*So one may count days, one, one, one, until they amount to a century, and yet form no idea of any combination of them as a unit, such as a week, a month, a year, a century. Each of these embrace their fractional parts, (which are themselves entireties,) as well as their combinations. The day, the week, the month, the year, the century, are all equally units and entiretics.

system of philosophy, which regards Nature as a whole, and even the mind of man itself as mere machines, which Deity has indeed created, but which he has left to move on to their destinies, under the government of impulses or laws which he has given them, but from which he has withdrawn his presence, as the essentially vital and actuating power. It is due to such persons-it is due to myself, on their account to state, more particularly, in what sense I use these terms.

The word Logos, is Greek. It is translated, in the first chapter of John the Evangelist, "The Word"-"In the beginning was the Word." But it also signifies the Reason, the Wisdom, and the like. I have adopted it here, following other writers on like subjects, as synonymous with the phrases, The Perfect Reason, The Supreme Reason, The Absolute Reason, the Omnipresent Reason, and others of corresponding import, varied to suit the phase, in which the idea is regarded; and I use the term Logos, frequently in connection with these phrases, merely for the purpose of keeping constantly in the mind of the reader the recollection, that that which these phrases designate, is, although it appear in the mind of man, something distinct from, and infinitely above the mere individual will, or aught that belongs to the individual self, or Me.

In this Reason, or Logos, we recognize the Divine Unit, from which all things have proceeded, and in which all things are. In it, we recognize Deity, as he manifests himself in the microcosm, man. When we recognise this Reason as not human-save when we pervert itbut as the Divinity within us, we recognize God in the centre of consciousness; and then we have a right to infer, He being a unit, and every where present, that what He is there, He is, mutatis mutandis, every where. Let me illustrate these ideas, by tracing the manifestations of this being, within the sphere of my own consciousness.

In the most elevated sphere of cognition or inference, I recognize Him as that absolute or supreme Reason, in which space, extension, and all the forms of the world of the senses are still ever immanent and ever subsistent, as a one continuous thought or conception. In this sphere, his dominion is absolute. But when I recognize the same being, as acting within the limited sphere of my finite self-which he has indeed created, but created finite-I recognize him as a reason which rules according to those partial and imperfect ideas, notions, or forms of thought, that by his presence he causes to arise within me, by occasion of the blind groping of the will. This Reason, or Deity, even then, however, still rules, and conducts us logically sometimes to the demonstration direct, sometimes to the reductio ad absurdum; as the