sturb
his contemplations; he is the master, and can command a silence equal to
that of the tomb, whenever he pleases.

In this sense every man feels, while cribbed in a cabin of flesh,
and shut up by the capricious and arbitrary injunctions of human
communities, that he is not at home.

Another cause of our discontent is to be traced to the disparity of the
two parts of which we are composed, the thinking principle, and the body
in which it acts. The machine which constitutes the visible man, bears
no proportion to our thoughts, our wishes and desires. Hence we are
never satisfied; we always feel the want of something we have not; and
this uneasiness is continually pushing us on to precipitate and abortive
resolves.

I find in a book, entitled, Illustrations of Phrenology, by Sir George
Mackenzie, Baronet, the following remark. 'If this portrait be correctly
drawn, the right side does not quite agree with the left in the
region of ideality. This dissimilarity may have produced something
contradictory in the feelings of the person it represents, which he may
have felt extremely annoying(7).' An observation of this sort may be
urged with striking propriety as to the dissimilar attributes of the
body and the thinking principle in man.

(7) The remark thus delivered is applied to the portrait of the author
of the present volume.

It is perhaps thus that we are to account for a phenomenon, in itself
sufficiently obvious, that our nature has within it a principle of
boundless ambition, a desire to be something that we are not, a feeling
that we are out of our place, and ought to be where we are not. This
feeling produces in us quick and earnest sallies and goings forth of the
mind, a restlessness of soul, and an aspiration after some object that
we do not find ourselves able to chalk out and define.

Hence comes the practice of castle-building, and of engaging the soul in
endless reveries and imaginations of something mysterious and unlike
to what we behold in the scenes of sublunary life. Many writers, having
remarked this, have endeavoured to explain it from the doctrine of
a preexistent state, and have said that, though we have no clear and
distinct recollection of what happened to us previously to our being
launched in our present condition, yet we have certain broken and
imperfect conceptions, as if, when the tablet of the memory was cleared
for the most part of the traces of what we had passed through in