Accept this as a testimony of my respect for your request, an acknowledgment of a due sense of the favor of your opinion, and an assurance of my good will and best wishes.

TO MR. WOODWARD.

MONTICELLO, March 24, 1824.

I have to thank you, dear Sir, for the copy I have received of your System of Universal Science, for which, I presume, I am indebted to yourself. It will be a monument of the learning of the author and of the analyzing powers of his mind. Whether it may be adopted in general use is yet to be seen. These analytical views indeed must always be ramified according to their object. Yours is on the great scale of a methodical encyclopedia of all human sciences, taking for the basis of their distribution, matter, mind, and the union of both. Lord Bacon founded his first great division on the faculties of the mind which have cognizance of these sciences. It does not seem to have been observed by any one that the origination of this division was not with him. It had been proposed by Charron more than twenty years before, in his book de la Sagesse, B. 1, c. 14, and an imperfect ascription of the sciences to these respective faculties was there attempted. This excellent moral work was published in 1600. Lord Bacon is said not to have entered on his great work until his retirement from public office in 1621. Where sciences are to be arranged in accommodation to the schools of an university, they will be grouped to coincide with the kindred qualifications of Professors in ordinary. For a library, which was my object, their divisions and subdivisions will be made such as to throw convenient masses of books under each separate head. Thus, in the library of a physician, the books of that science, of which he has many, will be subdivivided under many heads; and those of law, of which he has few, will be placed under a single one. The lawyer, again, will distribute his law books under many subdivisions, his medical under a single one. Your

idea of making the subject matter of the sciences the basis of their distribution, is certainly more reasonable than that of the faculties to which they are addressed. The materialists will perhaps criticize a basis, one-half of which they will say is a nonexistence; adhering to the axiom of Aristotle, "nihil est in intellectu quod prius non fuerit in sensu," and affirming that we can have no evidence of any existence which impresses no sense. Of this opinion were most of the ancient philosophers, and several of the early and orthodox fathers of the christian church. Indeed, Jesus himself, the founder of our religion, was unquestionably a materialist as to man. In all his doctrines of the resurrection, he teaches expressly that the body is to rise in substance. In the Apostles' Creed, we all declare that we believe in the " resurrection of the body." Jesus said that God is spirit [rev] without defining it. Tertullian supplies the definition, "quis negabit Deum esse corpus, etsi Deus Spiritus? spiritus etiam corporis sui generis in suâ effigie." And Origen, "or accipi, docet, pro eo quod non est simile huic nostro crassiori et visibli corpori, sed quod est naturaliter subtile et velut aura tenue." The modern philosophers mostly consider thought as a function of our material organization; and Locke particularly among them, charges with blasphemy those who deny that Omnipotence could give the faculty of thinking to certain combinations of matter.

Were I to re-compose my tabular view of the sciences, I should certainly transpose a particular branch. The naturalists, you know, distribute the history of nature into three kingdoms or departments : zoology, botany, mineralogy. Ideology or mind, however, occupies so much space in the field of science, that we might perhaps erect it into a fourth kingdom or department. But, inasmuch as it makes a part of the animal construction only, it would be more proper to subdivide zoology into physical and moral. The latter including ideology, ethics, and mental science generally, in my catalogue, considering ethics, as well as religion, as supplements to law in the government of man, I had placed them in that sequence. But certainly the faculty of thought belongs to animal history, is an important portion of it,

and should there find its place. But these are speculations in which I do not now permit myself to labor. My mind unwillingly engages in severe investigations. Its energies, indeed, are no longer equal to them. Being to thank you for your book, its subject has run away with me into a labyrinth of ideas no longer familiar, and writing also has become a slow and irksome operation with me. I have been obliged to avail myself of the pen of a granddaughter for this communication. I will here, therefore, close my task of thinking, hers of writing, and yours of reading, with assurances of my constant and high respect and esteem.

TO MR. EDWARD EVERETT.

MONTICELLO, March 27, 1824.

DEAR SIR,-I have to thank you for your Greek reader, which, for the use of schools, is evidently preferable to the Collectanea Græca. These have not arranged their selections so well in gradation from the easier to the more difficult styles.

On the subject of the Greek ablative, I dare say that your historical explanation is the true one. In the early stages of languages, the distinctions of cases may well be supposed so few as to be readily effected by changes of termination. The Greeks, in this way, seem to have formed five, the Latins six, and to have supplied their deficiences as they occurred in the progress of development, by prepositive words. In later times, the Italians, Spaniards, and French, have depended on prepositions altogether, without any inflection of the primitive word to denote the change of case. What is singular as to the English is, that in its early form of Anglo-Saxon, having distinguished several cases by changes of termination, at later periods it has dropped these, retains but that of the genitive, and supplies all the others by prepositions. These subjects, with me, are neither favorites nor familiar; and your letter has occasioned me to look more into the particular one in question than I had ever done before. Turning, for satisfaction, to the work of Tracy, the most pro

found of our ideological writers, and to the volume particularly which treats of grammar, I find what I suppose to be the correct doctrine of the case. Omitting unnecessary words to abridge writing, I copy what he says: "Il y a des langues qui par certains changemens de desinence, appellés cas, indiquent quelquesuns des rapports des noms avec d'autres noms; mais beaucoup de langues n'ont point de cas; et celles qui en ont, n'en ont qu'un petit nombre, tandis que les divers rapports qu'une idée peut avoir avec une autre sont extrêmement multipliés: ainsi, les cas ne peuvent exprimer qu'en general, les principaux de ces rapports. Aussi dans toutes les langues, meme dans celles qui ont des cas, on a senti le besoin de mots distincts, separés des autres, et expressement destinés à cet usage; ils ce qu'on appelle des prepositions." 2 Tracy Elemens d'Ideologie, c. 3, § 5, p. 114, and he names the Basque and Peruvian languages, whose nouns have such various changes of termination as to express all the relations which other languages express by prepositions, and therefore having no prepositions. On this ground, I suppose, then, we may rest the question of the Greek ablative. It leaves with me a single difficulty only, to-wit: the instances where they have given the ablative signification to the dative termination, some of which I quoted in my former letter to you.

I have just received a letter from Coray, at Paris, of the 28th December, in which he confirms the late naval success of the Greeks, but expresses a melancholy fear for his nation, "qui a montré jusqu'à ce moment des prodiges de valeur, mais qui, delivrée d'un joug de Cannibass, ne peut encore posseder ni les leçons d'instruction, ni celles de l'expérience." I confess I have the same fears for our South American brethren; the qualifications for self-government in society are not innate. They are the result of habit and long training, and for these they will require time and probably much suffering.

I salute you with assurances of great esteem and respect.

TO EDWARD LIVINGSTON.

MONTICELLO, April 4, 1824.

DEAR SIR, It was with great pleasure I learned that the good people of New Orleans had restored you again to the councils of our country. I did not doubt the aid it would bring to the remains of our old school in Congress, in which your early labors had been so useful. You will find, I suppose, on revisiting our maritime States, the names of things more changed than the things themselves; that though our old opponents have given up their appellation, they have not, in assuming ours, abandoned their views, and that they are as strong nearly as they ever were. These cares, however, are no longer mine. I resign myself cheerfully to the managers of the ship, and the more contentedly, as I am near the end of my voyage. I have learned to be less confident in the conclusions of human reason, and give more credit to the honesty of contrary opinions. The radical idea of the character of the constitution of our government, which I have adopted as a key in cases of doubtful construction, is, that the whole field of government is divided into two departments, domestic and foreign, (the States in their mutual relations being of the latter;) that the former department is reserved exclusively to the respective States within their own limits, and the latter assigned to a separate set of functionaries, constituting what may be called the foreign branch, which, instead of a federal basis, is established as a distinct government quoad hoc, acting as the domestic branch does on the citizens directly and coercively; that these departpartments have distinct directories, co-ordinate, and equally independent and supreme, each within its own sphere of action. Whenever a doubt arises to which of these branches a power belongs, I try it by this test. I recollect no case where a question simply between citizens of the same State, has been transferred to the foreign department, except that of inhibiting tenders but of metallic money, and ex post facto legislation. The causes of these singularities are well remembered.

I thank you for the copy of your speech on the question of