hand, an enlightened understanding ennobles the feelings,--the heart must
be formed by the head.

The present age has witnessed an extraordinary increase of a thinking
public, by the facilities afforded to the diffusion of reading; the
former happy resignation to ignorance begins to make way for a state of
half-enlightenment, and few persons are willing to remain in the
condition in which their birth has placed then. Under these
circumstances it may not be unprofitable to call attention to certain
periods of the awakening and progress of the reason, to place in their
proper light certain truths and errors, closely connected with morals,
and calculated to be a source of happiness or misery, and, at all events,
to point out the hidden shoals on which the reason of man has so often
suffered shipwreck. Rarely do we arrive at the summit of truth without
running into extremes; we have frequently to exhaust the part of error,
and even of folly, before we work our way up to the noble goal of
tranquil wisdom.

Some friends, inspired by an equal love of truth and moral beauty, who
have arrived at the same conviction by different roads, and who view with
serener eye the ground over which they have travelled, have thought that
it might be profitable to present a few of these resolutions and epochs
of thought. They propose to represent these and certain excesses of the
inquiring reason in the form of two young men, of unequal character,
engaged in epistolary correspondence. The following letters are the
beginning of this essay.

The opinions that are offered in these letters can only be true and false
relatively, and in the form in which the world is mirrored in the soul of
the correspondent, and of him only. But the course of the correspondence