and stickle for the sabbath; and who, if necessary, would change their religion! and yet, if all would be truthful and sincere, we should be saved from much of this fearfully demoralizing hypocrisy and cant; and there would soon be an end to persecution and the reign of terror. Men, again, desire a continuance of existence, and a renewed life yet it is not the future they want, but a continuance of the present, for they shrink from every change, and struggle against every new truth, and with a bitterness and alarm that shows like insanity: but no wise man will desire that any one thing be true in preference to another; nor that nature should stand still for his special gratification; and when he is in error, he will be most thankful for correction, and receive the news as gladly as if he had discovered a new truth. Nor must we forget that all conditions of things and opinions are right, and the best they can be in the time in which they exist having their place in the plan of nature's progressive development. Again, that evil to individuals is universal good, and the calamities of life the occasion for magnanimity and the highest virtues - Pain or pleasure-good or evil report, will follow as a consequence of our acts; but must never be the reason or motive of action: and men must be admonished that the recognition of philosophical Necessity, or the sense of universal Law, will not, as some suppose, set men loose from restraint to indulge their passions and evil desires. These good people seem strangely possessed with

notions of Man's innate wickedness. On the other hand, it will not induce people "to lie down in a ditch and die," because they cannot help themselves. The reverse will be the fact: for a knowledge of the cause will give a reason for exertion, and a confidence they did not possess before. The knowledge of the cause will present a means to an end, and induce the application: and those who believe in freedom, (that is, in a cause uncaused in the will, and which, after all, would not be freedom,) are those who are most indolent and doubting, believing, as they do, in a kind of chance, (which is the most fatal of all fatalisms,) though, at the same time, inconsistently enough by their prayers, teachings, and preaching, rewards and punishments, &c., acknowledging, in practice, a belief in moral results from sufficing causes. In a strange confusion of ideas, they neglect true fundamental causes, and the study of the Laws of Man's Nature and Development, and even deny the existence of such laws. But none are to blame, though so many are in error: - in error from want of knowledge, and a clear, untarnished mind, and a Right Method of Inquiry.

APPENDIX.

A.- (Page 52.)

"DIVINATION hath been anciently and fitly divided into artificial and natural : whereof artificial is, when the mind maketh a prediction by argument, concluding upon signs and tokens: natural is, when the mind hath a presentation by an internal power, without the inducement of a sign. Artificial is of two sorts: either when the argument is coupled with a derivation of causes, which is rational; or when it is only grounded upon a coincidence of the effect, which is experimental; whereof the latter, for the most part, is superstitious; such as were the heathen observations upon the inspection of sacrifices, the flights of birds, the swarming of bees, and such as was the Chaldean astrology, and the like. For artificial divination, the several kinds thereof are distributed amongst particular knowledges. The astronomer hath his predictions, as of conjunctions, aspects, eclipses, and the like. The physician hath his predictions, of death, of recovery, of the accidents and issues of diseases. The politician hath his predictions, 'O, urbem venalem, et cito perituram, si emptorem invenerit!' which staid not long to be performed in Sylla first, and after in Cæsar; so as these predictions are now impertinent and to be referred over. But the divination which springeth

from the internal nature of the soul, is that which we now speak of; which hath been made to be of two sorts, primitive, and by influxion. Primitive is grounded upon the supposition, that the mind, when it is withdrawn and collected into itself, and not diffused into the organs of the body, hath some extent and latitude of pre-notion, which therefore appeareth most in sleep, in ecstasies, and near death, and more rarely in waking apprehensions; and is induced and furthered by those abstinences and observances which make the mind most to consist in itself: by influxion, is grounded upon the conceit that the mind, as a mirror or glass, should take illumination from the foreknowledge of God and spirits; unto which the same regi men doth likewise conduce. For the retiring of the mind within itself, is the state which is most susceptible of divine influxions, save that it is accompanied in this case with a fervency and elevation, which the ancients noted by fury, and not with a repose and quiet, as it is in the other.". Bacon: The Advancement of Learning.

"If there be any force in the imagination and affections of singular persons, it is probable the force is much more in the joint imaginations and affections of multitudes: as if a victory should be won or lost in remote parts, whether is there not some sense thereof in the people whom it concerneth; because of the great joy or grief that many men are possessed with at once? Pius Quaintus at the very time when that memorable victory was won by the Christians against the Turks, at the naval battle of Lepanto, being then hearing of causes in consistory, brake off suddenly, and said to those about him, 'It is now more time we should give thanks to God for the great victory he hath granted us against the Turks: it's true, that victory had a sympathy with his spirit: for it was merely his work to

conclude that league. It may be that revelation was divine; but what shall we say then to a number of examples amongst the Grecians and Romans? where the people being in Theatres at plays, have had news of victories and overthrows, some few days before any messenger could come." -Bacon: Natural History, 10th Century.

"But if Plutarch, besides several examples that he produces out of antiquity, tells us of his certain knowledge, that in the time of Domitian the news of the battle lost by Anthony, in Germany, was published at Rome many days' journey thence, and dispersed throughout the whole world the same day it was fought and if Cæsar was of opinion that it has often happened that the report has preceded the event, shall we say that, forsooth, these simple people have suffered themselves to be deceived with the vulgar, not having been so clear-sighted as we?"- Montaigne, ch. xxvi.

"Our souls, then, having this inbred power, though weak, obscure, and hardly able to express their apprehensions; yet sometimes they spread forth and recover themselves, either in dreams or in the time of sacrifice or religious worship, when the body is well purified, and is indued with a certain temperature proper to this effort; or when the rational or speculative part being released and freed from the solicitude after present things, joins with the irrational and imaginative part, to think of, and represent what is to come; for it is not, as Euripides saith, that he is the best prophet who guesses well; but he is the wisest man, not whose guess succeeds well in the event, but who, whatever the event be, takes reason and probability for his guide. Now the faculty of divining, like blank paper, is void of any reason or determination