THE FRIEND.

SECTION THE FIRST.

ON THE PRINCIPLES OF POLITICAL KNOWLEDGE.

Hoc potissimum pacto felicem ac magnum regem se fore judicans, n si quam plurimis sed si quam optimis imperet. Proinde parum =e putat justis præsidiis regnum suum muniisse, nisi idem viris uditione juxta ac vita integritate præcellentibus ditet atque honestet. imirum intelligit hæc demum esse vera regni decora, has veras opes. ERASMUS EPIST. AD EPISC. PARIS.

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and therefore the power of acquainting itself with invisible realities or spiritual objects. This organ is his reason. Again, the understanding and experience may exist * without reason. But reason cannot exist without understanding; nor does it or can it manifest itself but in and through the understanding, which in our elder writers is often called discourse, or the discursive faculty, as by Hooker, Lord Bacon, and Hobbes: and an understanding enlightened by reason Shakespeare gives as the contradistinguishing character of man, under the name "discourse of reason." In short, the human understanding possesses two distinct organs, the outward sense, and the mind's eye, which is reason: wherever we use that phrase, the "mind's eye," in its proper sense, and not as a mere synonyme of the memory or the fancy. In this way we reconcile the promise of revelation, that the blessed will see God, with the declaration of St. John, No man hath seen God at any time.†

I will add one other illustration to prevent any misconception, as if I were dividing the human soul into different essences, or ideal persons. In this piece of steel I acknowledge the properties of hardness, brittleness, high polish, and the capability of forming a mirror. find all these likewise in the plate glass of a friend's carriage; but in addition to all these I find the quality of transparency, or the power of transmitting, as well

* Of this no one would feel inclined to doubt, who had seen the poodle dog, whom the celebrated BLUMENBACH, -a name so dear to science, as a physiologist and comparative anatomist, and not less dear as a man to all Englishmen who have ever resided at Göttingen in the course of their education,-trained up, not only to hatch the eggs of the hen with all the mother's care and patience, but to attend the chickens afterwards, and find the food for them. I have myself known a Newfoundland dog, who watched and guarded a family of young children with all the intelligence of a nurse, during their walks. +1 Ep. iv. 12.—Ed.

of reflecting, the rays of light. The application is vious.

If the reader therefore will take the trouble of bearing mind these and the following explanations, he will ve removed before hand every possible difficulty from he Friend's political section. For there is another use the word, reason, arising out of the former indeed, but ss definite, and more exposed to misconception. In is latter use it means the understanding considered as sing the reason, so far as by the organ of reason only e possess the ideas of the necessary and the universal; nd this is the more common use of the word, when it is pplied with any attempt at clear and distinct concepons. In this narrower and derivative sense the best efinition of reason, which I can give, will be found in he third member of the following sentence, in which the understanding is described in its three-fold operation, and From each receives an appropriate name. The sense,'is sensitiva vel intuitiva―perceives: vis regulatrix-the understanding, in its own peculiar operation-conceives: is rationalis—the reason or rationalized understanding -comprehends. The first is impressed through the Organs of sense; the second combines these multifarious impressions into individual notions, and by reducing these notions to rules, according to the analogy of all its former notices, constitutes experience: the third subordinates both of them, the notions, namely, and the rules of experience, to absolute principles or necessary laws: and thus concerning objects, which our experience has proved to have real existence, it demonstrates, moreover, in what way they are possible, and in doing this constitutes science. Reason therefore, in this secondary sense, and used, not as a spiritual organ, but as a faculty, namely, the understanding or soul enlightened by that organ,—

reason, I say, or the scientific faculty, is the intellection of the possibility or essential properties of things by means of the laws that constitute them. Thus the rational idea of a circle is that of a figure constituted by the circumvolution of a straight line with its one end fixed.

Every man must feel, that though he may not be exerting different faculties, he is exerting his faculties in a different way, when in one instance he begins with some one self-evident truth,-that the radii of a circle, for instance, are all equal,-and in consequence of this being true sees at once, without any actual experience, that some other thing must be true likewise, and that, this being true, some third thing must be equally true, and so on till he comes, we will say, to the properties of the lever, considered as the spoke of a circle; which is capable of having all its marvellous powers demonstrated even to a savage who had never seen a lever, and without supposing any other previous knowledge in his mind, but this one, that there is a conceivable figure, all possible lines from the middle to the circumference of which are of the same length; or when, in another instance, he brings together the facts of experience, each of which has its own separate value, neither increased nor diminished by the truth of any other fact which may have preceded it; and making these several facts bear upon some particular project, and finding some in favour of it, and some against it, determines for or against the project, according as one or the other class of facts preponderate : as, for example, whether it would be better to plant a particular spot of ground with larch, or with Scotch fir, or with oak in preference to either. Surely every man will acknowledge, that his mind was very differently employed in the first case from what it was in the second;

all men have agreed to call the results of the first s the truths of science, such as not only are true, but ch it is impossible to conceive otherwise: while the lts of the second class are called facts, or things of erience: and as to these latter we must often content selves with the greater probability, that they are so o, rather than otherwise—nay, even when we have no bt that they are so in the particular case, we never sume to assert that they must continue so always, and der all circumstances. On the contrary, our concluns depend altogether on contingent circumstances. w when the mind is employed, as in the case first entioned, I call it reasoning, or the use of the pure ason; but, in the second case, the understanding or udence.

This reason applied to the motives of our conduct, and mbined with the sense of our moral responsibility, is e conditional cause of conscience, which is a spiritual nse or testifying state of the coincidence or discordance E the free will with the reason. But as the reasoning onsists wholly in a man's power of seeing, whether any vo conceptions which happen to be in his mind, are, or re not in contradiction to each other, it follows of ecessity, not only that all men have reason, but that very man has it in the same degree. For reasoning, or eason, in this its secondary sense, does not consist in he conceptions themselves or in their clearness, but imply, when they are in the mind, in seeing whether hey contradict each other or no.

And again, as in the determinations of conscience the nly knowledge required is that of my own intentionwhether in doing such a thing, instead of leaving it indone, I did what I should think right if any other person had done it; it follows that in the mere question