of the absence or presence of the Will. Our various sensations,
perceptions, and movements were classed as active or passive, or as
media partaking of both. A still finer distinction was soon
established between the voluntary and the spontaneous. In our
perceptions we seem to ourselves merely passive to an external power,
whether as a mirror reflecting the landscape, or as a blank canvass on
which some unknown hand paints it. For it is worthy of notice, that
the latter, or the system of Idealism may be traced to sources equally
remote with the former, or Materialism; and Berkeley can boast an
ancestry at least as venerable as Gassendi or Hobbes. These
conjectures, however, concerning the mode in which our perceptions
originated, could not alter the natural difference of Things and
Thoughts. In the former, the cause appeared wholly external, while in
the latter, sometimes our will interfered as the producing or
determining cause, and sometimes our nature seemed to act by a
mechanism of its own, without any conscious effort of the will, or
even against it. Our inward experiences were thus arranged in three
separate classes, the passive sense, or what the School-men call the
merely receptive quality of the mind; the voluntary; and the
spontaneous, which holds the middle place between both. But it is not
in human nature to meditate on any mode of action, without inquiring
after the law that governs it; and in the explanation of the
spontaneous movements of our being, the metaphysician took the lead of
the anatomist and natural philosopher. In Egypt, Palestine, Greece,
and India the analysis of the mind had reached its noon and manhood,
while experimental research was still in its dawn and infancy. For
many, very many centuries, it has been difficult to advance a new
truth, or even a new error, in the philosophy of the intellect or
morals. With regard, however, to the laws that direct the spontaneous
movements of thought and the principle of their intellectual mechanism