which it is the duty of Philosophy to explain, thus in his Ethics, Law, &c.

His main principle, however, which he so courageously and philosophically upholds throughout that we can know nothing out of ourselves, contains the leading idea of Modern Philosophy; and to him belongs the praise of having been the first to bring it into distinct consciousness.

THAT must be a very pleasant life indeed, wherein no enemy shall appear who cannot be easily subdued by a strong arm and an axe. Yet it seems to have been an enemy no more potent which drove men from free life in the woods, to the shackles of a closer congregation. It is the fashion to speak of the woodland life, as savage, barbarous, and brutal; and of the housed life, either in feudal castle or trading city, as refined, polished, and elevated. It might not be altogether wasted time to inquire whether this conclusion stands upon a true foundation or not. So many errors pass current as truths, that one may be not illiberally induced to investigate such a question, though it be one that the stricter student will deem of minor morality. Of such small questions, much that is of mighty import is not unfequently constructed.

That cosmogony which affirms for man the highest origin, represents him in his pristine creation as contravening his Creator's will, and in the very first generation, the very first vital act, as quarrelling with, and murdering his brother. If this be literally true of the external man, as it is now undoubtedly a true signature of operations in the human soul, the first wigwam was probably erected more as a defence from the assaults of man against his

brother, than from the assaults of uncongenial weather. When peace reigns in every human bosom, the free man may wander for food and for repose to whatever latitude the season shall render propitious to his feelings and his wants. The thought of erecting a house grew not out of human necessity so much as out of human rapacity. The love of power in some assailant, rather than the love of art in some pacific being, forced on man the utility of a house for his protection, while in a state of repose. at least defended him from too sudden a surprise, if it did not wholly protect him. The inclemency of a stronger brother, more than the inclemency of the weather, generated the thought of a stockade.

It

Passing over this consideration, let us contemplate the sylvan man in his native state, let us compare him with the civilian, and see to which the superiority must be awarded, both as respects nature and conditions. Behold, what it is difficult for us to imagine, an individual wholly free from the diseases consequent upon luxury and debauchery, and subject only to the little incidental ills of the exhilarating chase. Conceive of one to whom hereditary or chronic disease is unknown, to whom catarrh, and cough, and palsying apprehension of a cold never are disturbances. He walks erect, with elastic, almost bounding, step, expanded and uncovered chest, and limbs untrammelled by the ligatures of fashion. Health, strength, and agility, combined with an unchecked reliance on their continuance, are a living fund of joy, wonderfully contrasting with the disease, weakness, and imbecility of modern refinement.

Every sense in the primitive forester's frame is integrally preserved. He holds an immediate intercourse with nature herself, or at least by his unerring senses and the undeviating objects in nature, he is enabled intuitively to read off the living volume as it lies open and unpolluted before him. By mere sight and smell, he is at once inducted into a knowledge of the essential properties of plants, and can without experience, foretel their operations on the human system, as unerringly as the native sheep can select its suitable food, or the untamed wood-dove, can without schooling, essay a winged journey.

If after long labor and close study, the civic student knows something concerning nature from his books and

pictures, the sylvan student knows much of her and her laws before the record of book or graver was constructed. He is as a mother who knows of maternity, and a mother's feelings in a living and soul-participating manner, antecedent to all external observation, while the college student is comparable to the obstetric physician, who compiles a book from external observation only, and writes of feelings he never felt, and of experiences he never did or can experience.

The sylvan is present at the very fountain head, living in and with the works, productions, and operations which will, by and by, be recorded; the civilian is acquainted only with the record. The one is witness to the vital spring and birth of nature's offspring; the other's studies are comparable only to a poring over the parish register.

It is the boast of modern experimental philosophy, that it has abandoned or overturned the Aristotelian method of study by words, adopting that of studying things. But it pursues its objects by means of crucibles, retorts, and balances, as deceptive, vague, and unsatisfactory as the studies they have superseded; for these, after all, stood as near the moral source as modern science. Whereas the pure, unsophisticated human body, is a retort, a test, far surpassing all the instruments which the highest science can boast. By the sylvan man all nature is affectionately felt; by the civilized it is only intellectually scanned. The warmth of life is characteristic of one; the coldness of death the distinguishing mark of the other. Chymical science, the great boast and wonder worker of our enlightened age, cannot even discern those delicate differences and lineaments in nature, which optics can reveal, and it can do nothing in any department of nature, until the object is reduced to its mineral state. In the grand and noble field of life it is powerless. Vegetables and animals, as such, in their living beauty are fruitlessly presented to the chymist's skill. He has weights and measures, but cannot compute living motion any more than he can fathom. moral emotion. He has testing apparatus, but no taste. But our natural chymist only sees and knows such objects in life and motion. With his unassisted eye, he perceives varieties which the chymist never learns, and by an unvitiated palate, he detects in the living volume of nature the

occult essential qualities of plants, which the last analysis in the laboratory rarely or never can reveal. The forms, odors, statures of plants, as they simply stand before him, are types in the boundless volume of which the scientific student seems ever destined to peruse merely the title page. The eye, the nose, the palate, the touch, and every sense is an inlet direct from the book of nature, a first impression, which to the civilized student rarely comes otherwise than at second hand. He must refer to his printed authority, and his human classification, his encyclopedia, his constructed circle of circumferential science; while our nature-student has in himself the authority, knows truly the real author, and feels himself to be at the centre of science, of which the circumference lies about him. "The unity of the Sciences," the last pleasing thought of labored skill, the key-stone with which studious industry has at length crowned its self-wondrous arch, is no novelty to the free soul. He never felt knowledge otherwise than as a unity; nature or natural objects never were thus dissectively presented to him. He sees objects analytically without doubt, as well as synthetically; but always perhaps under both aspects at once, always in their individual existence as well as united to an antecedent unity, the parent of them all.

For all the purposes of life, for all the utilities of his life, the science of the forest man is complete. All the wants which in such a life are generated, in the immediate world about him, find their supplies. The pressure of hunger, the needful clothing, even the ornaments which he desires, with their tasteful forms, and superadded tints, he obtains without difficulty or danger to himself or fellow man. Not so is it with the wants and wishes generated in civic life. These know no bounds, but expand with every gratification; their victims at once boasting over their expansion, and groaning over their denial. No sea or land is unexplored to create new wants, or to supply excited and extraneous appetites, and carrying with him to the innocent and pure, disease and vice of the cruellest kind, civilized man boasts the extension of his domain, the multiplication of his likeness.

A darker age presumes upon its false illumination, to call antecedent ages dark. A busy, wandering, restless

civilization ventures from the point of its own worthless activity, to pronounce the contented child of nature savage and barbarous. Literally, perhaps, these epithets are justly applied. If savage means a dweller in the wood, and barbarian one who does not denude his chin of hair; if the terms be taken to mean no more than these, there would be clearly no greater injustice or condemnation in them, than in calling one a civilian who dwells in a city. But the design in using these words is to affirm that the heights of mind, elevation of thought, purity in sentiment are denied to man in one condition of life, and granted in the other.

That those who are most ready to use these allusions aspersively ever think about the matter, or are capable of thinking very profoundly, may, until they feel more benignly, very charitably be doubted. But there is sufficient evidence on record to prove that the sublimest conceptions have not been withheld from the mind of the North American native, any more than from the highly taught sons of civilization. A narrative not unworthy of Swedenborg, or even of Plato, is reported in David Brainerd's Diary, kept while he was a missionary among the natives of New Jersey, about one hundred years ago. Of its correctness there is very little room to doubt; since the recorder mourns over it in every aspect, and that the seer could have acquired it from any other person, there is no ground whatever to suspect. It is given in these words:

"What increases the aversion of the Indians to Christianity, is the influence their powwows have upon them. These are supposed to have a power of foretelling future events, of recovering the sick, and of charming persons to death. And their Spirit, in its various operations, seems to be a Satanical imitation of the spirit of prophecy, that the church in early ages was favored with.

"I have labored to gain some acquaintance with this affair, and have for that end consulted the man mentioned in my journal, of the 9th of May, who since his conversion to Christianity has endeavored to give me the best intelligence he could of this matter. But it seems to be such a mystery of iniquity, that I cannot well understand it, and so far as I can learn, he himself has not any clear notions of the thing, now his spirit of divination is gone from him. However, the manner in which he says he obtained this spirit, was, he was admitted into