When the doctrine of species, as modified, in the dark and barren age of Dialectics, by all the additional absurdities, which the industrious sagacity of the schoolmen could give to it, had, at length, lost that empire, which it never should have possessed, the original difficulty of accounting for perception, remained as before. If the cause was to be linked, in some manner or other, with its effect, how was matter, so different in all its properties, to be connected with mind?
The shortest possible mode of obviating this difficulty, was, by denying that any direct causation whatever took place between our mind and our bodily organs? and hence arose the system of occasional causes, as maintained by the most distinguished of the followers of Des Cartes,—a system, which supposed, that there is no direct agency of our mind on matter, or of matter on our mind,—that we are as little capable of moving our own limbs by our volition, as of moving, by our volition, the limbs of any other person,—as little capable of perceiving the rays of light, that have entered our own eyes, as the rays which have fallen on any other eyes,—that our perception or voluntary movement is, therefore, to be referred, in every case, to the immediate agency of the Deity, the presence of rays of light, within our eye, being the mere occasion on which the Deity himself affects our mind with vision, as our desire of moving our limbs is the mere occasion, on which the Deity himself puts our limbs in motion.
It is of so much importance to have a full conviction of the dependence of all events on the great Source of Being, that it is necessary to strip the doctrine, as much as possible, of every thing truly objectionable, lest, in abandoning what is objectionable, we should be tempted to abandon also the important truth associated with it. The power of God is so magnificent in itself, that it is only when we attempt to add to it in our conception, that we run some risk of degrading what it must always be impossible for us to elevate.
That the changes which take place, whether in mind or in matter, are all, ultimately, resolvable into the will of the Deity, who formed alike the spiritual and material system of the universe, making the earth a habitation worthy of its noble inhabitant,—and man an inhabitant almost worthy of that scene of divine magnificence, in which he is placed, is a truth, as convincing to our reason, as it is delightful to our devotion. What confidence do we feel, in our joy, at the thought of the Eternal Being, from whom it flows, as if the very thought gave at once security and sanctity to our delight; and how consolotary, in our little hour of suffering, to think of Him who wills our happiness, and who knows how to produce it, even from sorrow itself, by that power which called light from the original darkness, and still seems to call, out of a similar gloom, the sunshine of every morning. Every joy thus becomes gratitude,—every sorrow resignation. The eye which looks to Heaven seems, when it turns again to the scenes of earth, to bring down with it a purer radiance, like the very beaming of the presence of the Divinity, which it sheds on every object on which it gazes,—a light
“That gilds all forms
Terrestrial, in the vast, and the minute;
The unambiguous footsteps of the God,
Who gives its lustre to an insect's wing,
And wheels His throne upon the rolling worlds.”[126]