struggle--and we must be long convicted before we can be convinced that
the solid universe of external things is "such stuff as dreams are made
of." The shocking absurdities of the popular philosophy of mind and
matter, its fatal consequences in morals, and their [? the] violent
dogmatism concerning the source of all things, had early conducted me to
Materialism. This Materialism is a seducing system to young and
superficial minds: it allows its disciples to talk, and dispenses them
from thinking. But I was discontented with such a view of things as it
afforded. Man is a being of high aspirations, "looking both before and
after," whose "thoughts wander through eternity," disclaiming alliance
with transcience and decay; incapable of imagining to himself
annihilation; existing but in the future and the past; being, not what
he is, but what he has been and shall be. Whatever may be his true and
final destination, there is a spirit within him at enmity with
nothingness and dissolution. This is the character of all life and
being. Each is at once the centre and the circumference; the point to
which all things are referred, and the line in which all things are
contained. Such contemplations as these Materialism, and the popular
philosophy of mind and matter, alike forbid: they are only consistent
with the Intellectual System.... The view of Life presented by the most
refined deductions of the Intellectual Philosophy is that of unity.
Nothing exists but as it is perceived. The difference is merely nominal
between those two classes of thought which are vulgarly distinguished by
the names of "ideas" and of "external objects." Pursuing the same thread
of reasoning, the existence of distinct individual minds, similar to
that which is employed in now questioning its own nature, is likewise
found to be a delusion. The words "I, you, they," are not signs of any
actual difference subsisting between the assemblage of thoughts thus
indicated, but are merely marks employed to denote the different
modifications of the one mind. Let it not be supposed that this doctrine