a connection of things as they exist and
operate in the material and intellectual world, and that it is not in
the power of man to frame a sentence, to think or speak, but in
conformity with these general and exceptionless laws.

This important consideration meets us at every advancing step, as if to
admonish us to abandon the vain project of seeking a knowledge of
language without an acquaintance with the great principles on which it
depends. To look for the leading rules of speech in set forms of
expression, or in the capricious customs of any nation, however learned,
is as futile as to attempt to gain a knowledge of the world by shutting
ourselves up in a room, and looking at paintings and drawings which may
be furnished by those who know as little of it as we do. How fallacious
would be the attempt, how much worse than time thrown away, for the
parent to shut up his child in a lonely room, and undertake to impress
upon its mind a knowledge of man, beasts, birds, fish, insects, rivers,
mountains, fields, flowers, houses, cities, &c., with no other aid than
a few miserable pictures, unlike the reality, and in many respects
contradictory to each other. And yet that would be adopting a course
very similar to the one long employed as the only means of acquiring a
knowledge of language; limited to a set of arbitrary, false, and
contradictory rules, which the brightest geniuses could never
understand, nor the most erudite employ in the expression of ideas. The
grammars, it was thought, must be studied to acquire the use of
language, and yet they were forgotten before such knowledge was put in
practice.

* * * * *

A simple remark on the principles of _relative_ action, and we will pass
to the consideration of _agents_ and _objects_, or the more immediate
_causes_ and _effects_ of action.

We go forth at the evening hour and look upon the sun _sinking_ beneath
the horizon; we mark the varying hues of light as they appear, and
change, and fade away. We see the shades of night _approaching_, with a
gradual pace, till the beautiful landscape on which we had been gazing,
the hills and the meadows; the farm house and the cultivated fields, the
grove, the orchard, and the garden; the tranquil lake and the babbling
brook; the dairy returning home, and the lambkins gambolling beside
their dams; all _recede_ from our view, and _appear_ to us no longer.
All this is _relative_ action. But so far as l