the representation of objects in the order in which they co-existed in place; and it is not wonderful, that the feeling of the relation of their order in time should have a similar influence on our emotions, by giving unity of connexion, and thus, as it were, additional and more interesting reality to all which we remember. The priority and subsequence of the events remembered, according to this slight accidental relation, may have arisen, indeed, from circumstances the most unimportant in themselves; but it is enough to our feelings, that they arose thus successively, constituting a part of the very history of our life, and forming some of the many ties which connect us with those of whom the very remembrance is happiness. What was truly casual in its origin, almost ceases to appear to us casual, by the permanent connexions which it afterwards presents to our memory. Other successions of events may be imagined, which would have been more interesting to others, and in which it would have been easier to trace some principle of original connexion. But, though more regular, and more interesting to others, they would not have been the events of our youth; as a scene might perhaps readily be imagined far more lovely to other eyes than the landscape of our early home, but in which our eyes, even in admiring its loveliness, would look in vain for a charm, which, if it be not beauty itself, is at least something still more tenderly delightful.

The relation even of casual succession, then, by the connexion and grouping of events to which it gives rise, and the consequent aid and interest which it yields to our remembrance, affords no slight accession of enjoyment and permanent utility. The relations of invariable antecedents and consequents, however, which are felt by us to be essentially different from

mere casual proximity, and to be all that is truly involved in our notion of power or causation, are of much greater importance to that intellectual, and moral, and physical life, which may almost be said to depend on them. Even if they gave us nothing more than our knowledge of the uniform connexions of past events, as objects of mere speculative science, at once constituting and explaining the phenomena that excited our astonishment, and awoke that early curiosity which they have continued to busy ever since, they would furnish, by the view which they open of the powers of nature, and of all the gracious purposes to which those powers have been subservient, one of the sublimest delights of which our spiritual being is capable.

This gratification they would yield to us, even if we were to regard them only in the past, as objects of a science purely speculative. But, when we consider the relations of events, in their aptitudes to precede and follow, as equally diffused over the time that is to come, as presenting to us, everywhere in the past or present sequences observed by us, the source of some future good or future evil; of good which we can obtain, and of evil which we can avoid, merely by knowing the order in which these past sequences have occurred; the knowledge of these invariable relations of succession becomes to us inestimable, not as a medium only of intellectual luxury, but as the medium of all the arts of life, and even of the continuance of our very physical existence, which is preserved only by an unceasing adaptation of our actions to the fitnesses or tendencies of external things.

All practical science is the knowledge of these aptitudes of things in their various circumstances of combination, as every art is the employment of them, in

conformity with this knowledge, with a view to those future changes which they tend to produce in all the different circumstances in which objects can be placed. To know how to add any enjoyment to life, or how to lessen any of its evils, is nothing more, in any case, than to know some form of that particular relation which we are considering the relation which objects bear to each other, as antecedent and consequent. In the conclusion of my last Lecture, I treated of it, in regard to the physical sciences and arts,-those intellectual energies, which have given to the savage man, and consequently to all mankind,—since, in every state of society, refined or rude, in the palace, as much as in the hut, or in the cave, man must be born a savage, another life, a life almost as different from that with which he roams in the woods, as if he had been suddenly transported from the barren waste of earth to those Elysian groves of which poets speak, and that god-like company of bards, and heroes, and sages, with which they have peopled the delightful

scene.

Of the importance of the feeling of this relation to the physical sciences, which is abundantly evident of itself, it would be vain to attempt to give any fuller illustration. But it must be remembered, that the mind is a subject of this relation as much as the body; that there are aptitudes of producing certain feelings, as much as of producing certain material changes; and that the power which discerns or feels the mere aptitude, in the one case, is not essentially distinct from the power which discerns or feels the mere aptitude, in the other case. The particular relations that are felt, are indeed different as the relative objects are different, but not that general susceptibility of the mind, by which it is capable of feeling the relation

of fitness or unfitness. To foreknow, in mechanics, what combination of wheels and pulleys will be able to elevate a certain weight, is to feel one sort of fitness, or relation of antecedence. To foreknow, in chemistry, what more powerful attraction will overcome an affinity that is weaker, and precipitate a substance, which we wish to obtain, from the liquid that holds it in solution, is to feel another sort of fitness. The particular feelings of relation, in these cases, imply acquirements that are very different; but no one, on account of this mere difference of the objects of which the relation of antecedence and consequence is felt, thinks of classing the chemical foresight as indicative of an intellectual power essentially different from that which, in the applications of mechanic foresight, feels the relation of the weights and pulleys in a machine, and foresees, by a knowledge of this relation, the equilibrium or preponderance which is to result. The experience which gives the foresight is indeed different, but the power which reasons from that different experience is the same. The susceptibility of the same feeling of the relation of productive aptitude, however, has, in certain mental cases, been supposed to be different, merely because its objects are different; and discriminations of mere fitness or unfitness, which are truly referable to the same simple capacity of relative suggestion, that foresees the future by knowing the present, have been formed into a class apart, as if not the discriminations only were different, but the power itself which has formed them.

When we feel any of the mechanical or chemical relations of succession, and predict, accordingly, events which are to take place, we are commonly said to do this by the power of reasoning. Even in many of the mental phenomena, when we venture, in like manner,

to predict the future, from our knowledge of the relation of feelings to each other, as uniformly successive, we are said to make the prediction by the power of reasoning. When a statesman, for example, meditates on the probable effects of a particular law which is about to be enacted, and from his knowledge of the interests, and passions, and prejudices, the wisdom and the very ignorance of man, calculates the relative amount of good and evil which it may possibly produce to those frail, half-stubborn, half-yielding multitudes, whom he must often benefit against their will, and save from the long evil, of which they see only the momentary good, there is no one who hesitates in ascribing this political foresight to the sagacity of his power of reasoning, or of drawing accurate conclusions, as to future sequences of events, from his observations of the past. In the calculation of the motives which may operate in the general mind, however, nothing more is implied than a knowledge of the relation of certain feelings to other feelings, as reciprocally antecedent and consequent. But, if the states of mind, the relation of which, as successive to other states of mind, is felt by us, be of a different order; if, instead of a legislator, feeling accurately the relation of certain feelings to certain attendant emotions in the mind of the people, we imagine a critic feeling, with equal precision, the relation of certain perceptions of form, or colour, or sound, to certain emotions of admiration or disgust that are to arise in the mind of him who has those perceptions, though all which is felt, in both cases, is a certain relation of customary antecedence, we are instantly said to speak of a different power of the mind. The power which we consider, is said to be the power of Taste.

This distinction of the power of taste, in appreciat