3. Public amusements of all kinds, such as a horse race, a cockpit, a chase, the theatre, the circus, masquerades, public dinners, and tea parties, all exert an artificial stimulus upon the system, and thus supply the defect of the rational exercises of the mind.
4. The love of dress is not confined in its stimulating operation to persons in health. It acts perceptibly in some cases upon invalids. I have heard of a gentleman in South-Carolina, who always relieved himself of a fit of low spirits by changing his dress; and I believe there are few people who do not feel themselves enlivened, by putting on a new suit of clothes.
5. Novelty is an immense source of agreeable stimuli. Companions, studies, pleasures, modes of business, prospects, and situations, with respect to town and country, or to different countries, that are new, all exert an invigorating influence upon health and life.
6. The love of fame acts in various ways; but its stimulus is most sensible and durable in military life. It counteracts in many instances the debilitating effects of hunger, cold, and labour. It has sometimes done more, by removing the weakness which is connected with many diseases. In several instances it has assisted the hardships of a camp life, in curing pulmonary consumption.
7. The love of country is a deep seated principle of action in the human breast. Its stimulus is sometimes so excessive, as to induce disease in persons who recently migrate, and settle in foreign countries. It appears in various forms; but exists most frequently in the solicitude, labours, attachments, and hatred of party spirit. All these act forcibly in supporting animal life. It is because newspapers are supposed to contain the measure of the happiness or misery of our country, that they are so interesting to all classes of people. Those vehicles of intelligence, and of public pleasure or pain, are frequently desired with the impatience of a meal, and they often produce the same stimulating effects upon the body[101].
8. The different religions of the world, by the activity they excite in the mind, have a sensible influence upon human life. Atheism is the worst of sedatives to the understanding and passions. It is the abstraction of thought from the most sublime, and of love from the most perfect of all possible objects. Man is as naturally a religious, as he is a social and domestic animal; and the same violence is done to his mental faculties, by robbing him of a belief in a God, that is done by dooming him to live in a cell, deprived of the objects and pleasures of social and domestic life. The necessary and immutable connection between the texture of the human mind, and the worship of an object of some kind, has lately been demonstrated by the atheists of Europe, who, after rejecting the true God, have instituted the worship of nature, of fortune, and of human reason; and, in some instances, with ceremonies of the most expensive and splendid kind. Religions are friendly to animal life, in proportion as they elevate the understanding, and act upon the passions of hope and love. It will readily occur to you, that christianity, when believed and obeyed, according to its original consistency with itself, and with the divine attributes, is more calculated to produce those effects than any other religion in the world. Such is the salutary operation of its doctrines and precepts upon health and life, that if its divine authority rested upon no other argument, this alone would be sufficient to recommend it to our belief. How long mankind may continue to prefer substituted pursuits and pleasures to this invigorating stimulus, is uncertain; but the time, we are assured, will come, when the understanding shall be elevated from its present inferior objects, and the luxated passions be reduced to their original order. This change in the mind of man, I believe, will be effected only by the influence of the christian religion, after all the efforts of human reason to produce it, by means of civilization, philosophy, liberty, and government, have been exhausted to no purpose.
Thus far, gentlemen, we have considered animal life as it respects the human species; but the principles I am endeavouring to establish require that we should take a view of it in animals of every species, in all of which we shall find it depends upon the same causes as in the human body.
And here I shall begin by remarking, that if we should discover the stimuli which support life in certain animals to be fewer in number, or weaker in force than those which support it in our species, we must resolve it into that attribute of the Deity which seems to have delighted in variety in all his works.
The following observations apply more or less to all the animals upon our globe.