severally, or as
being distinguishable into parts? There can, I think, be no such division
respecting that which is perfectly pure and indivisible in its essence;
and, I would ask, is not simple continuity apt to exclude it from our
conception of every thing which appears with uniform coherence? Dr. Beattie
says, "It appears to me, that, as all things are individuals, all thoughts
must be so too."--_Moral Science_, Chap, i, Sec. 1. If, then, our thoughts
are thus divided, and consequently, as this author infers, have not in
themselves any of that generality which belongs to the signification of
common nouns, there is little need of any instrument to divide them
further: the mind rather needs help, as Cardell suggests, "to combine its
ideas." [37]

8. So far as language is a work of art, and not a thing conferred or
imposed upon us by nature, there surely can be in it neither division nor
union that was not first in the intellect for the manifestation of which it
was formed. First, with respect to generalization. "The human mind," says
Harris, "by an energy as spontaneous and familiar to its nature, as the
seeing of colour is familiar to the eye, discerns at once what in many is
one, what in things dissimilar and different is similar and the
same."--_Hermes_, p. 362. Secondly, with respect to division. Mechanical
separations are limited: "But the mind surmounts all power of concretion;
and can place in the simplest manner every attribute by itself; convex
without concave; colour without superficies; superficies without body; and
body without its accidents: as distinctly each one, as though they had
never been united. And thus it is, that it penetrates into the recesses of
all things, not only dividing them as wholes, into their more conspicuous
parts, but persisting till it even separate those elementary principles
which, being blended together after a more mysterious manner, are united in
the minutest part as much as in the mightiest whole."--_Harris's Hermes_,
p. 307.

9. It is remarkable that this philosopher, who had so sublime conceptions
of the powers of the human mind, and who has displayed such extraordinary
acuteness in his investigations, has represented the formation of words, or
the utterance of language, as equalling in speed the progress of our very
thoughts; while, as we have seen, an other author, of great name, avers,
that thought is "as instantaneous as the impression of light on the eye."
Philosophy