ultimately impressed. It is a fundamental law of our nature, that
the mind shall be subject to the operations of the body, and have
its powers developed through its influence; the organs being the
links in that chain of relations betwixt the mind and the material
world, without which the immaterial principle within could not be
approached. Since we are dwellers in a material world, it is necessary
that the spirit should be given up to the influence of a material
and organized body, without which it could neither feel, nor re-act,
nor manifest itself in any way.
I do not mean to aflirm that all the affections of the mind have
their source in the body, or their objects in the things presented
to the senses. As the Creator has established these necessary
relations of the mind with the materials around us, so has he implanted,
or caused to be generated in us, various higher intellectual
faculties. He has raised in every intelligent being emotions that
point, to him, affections by which we are drawn to him, and which
rest in him as their end. In the mind of the rudest slave, left
to the education of the mere elements around him, sentiments
are developed which lead him to a parent and creator. These
feelings cannot be traced to any source, they rise spontaneously,
they are universal, and not to be shaken off; furnishing an instance
of that adaptation of the mind to its various relations, of which
many examples might be given, but none better calculated to afford
us a conception of the author of our being, or tending more to raise
our estimation of ourselves, as allied to him.
This it was perhaps necessary to premise, when I am about to
prove the extensive influence of the corporeal on the intellectual
part of man.
Philosophers, in examining the properties of the mind, have too
much overlooked the influence of the body, by which is not meant
what are usually called the organs of the senses, those outward
parts in which are produced the corporeal processes that precede
sensation—I mean the gross frame-work of the body. It appears
to me that the frame of the body is a complex organ, I shall not
say of sense, but of intellectual operation, very analogous to the
operations of the organs of sense ; that it serves for the development
of certain states or conditions of the mind, as the organs of
the five senses serve to furnish ideas of matter.
There is no deception in the sensations which point to whereabouts
these emotions are seated. In the affections of the mind
we call passions, there is an influence which “ steals through the
veins and fans the awakened heart.” This is not asserted on the
mere proof of sensation seated thus deep in our breast during the
varying affections of the mind, nor on the language of mankind,
which gives universal assent to this proposition ; it is to be proved
by circumstances in expression, in which we cannot be deceived.
I shall make it manifest, that what the eye, the ear, or the finger