awful event to which we are
subject, as not being the termination of his existence. We see the
body of our friend become insensible, and remain without motion, or
any external indication of what we call life. We can shut it up in an
apartment, and visit it from day to day. If we had perseverance enough,
and could so far conquer the repugnance and humiliating feeling with
which the experiment would be attended, we might follow step by step the
process of decomposition and putrefaction, and observe by what degrees
the "dust returned unto earth as it was." But, in spite of this
demonstration of the senses, man still believes that there is something
in him that lives after death. The mind is so infinitely superior
in character to this case of flesh that incloses it, that he cannot
persuade himself that it and the body perish together.

There are two considerations, the force of which made man a religious
animal. The first is, his proneness to ascribe hostility or benevolent
intention to every thing of a memorable sort that occurs to him in the
order of nature. The second is that of which I have just treated, the
superior dignity of mind over body. This, we persuade ourselves,
shall subsist uninjured by the mutations of our corporeal frame, and
undestroyed by the wreck of the material universe.

ESSAY II. OF THE DISTRIBUTION OF TALENTS.

{Greek--omitted} Thucydides, Lib.I, cap. 84.

SECTION I.

PRESUMED DEARTH OF INTELLECTUAL POWER.--SCHOOLS FOR THE EDUCATION OF
YOUTH CONSIDERED.--THE BOY AND THE MAN COMPARED.

One of the earliest judgments that is usually made by those whose
attention is turned to the characters of men in the social state, is
of the great inequality with which the gifts of the understanding are
distributed among us.

Go into a miscellaneous society; sit down at table with ten or twelve
men; repair to a club where as many are assembled in an evening to relax
from the toils of the day--it is almost proverbial, that one or two of
these persons will perhaps be brilliant, and the rest "weary, stale,
flat and unprofitable."

Go into a numerous school--the case will be still more striking. I have
been present where two men of superior endowments endeavoured to enter
into a calculation on the subject; and they agreed that there was not
above one boy in a hundred, who would be found to possess a penetrating
understanding, and to be able to strike into a path of intellect that
was truly his own. How