these
powers or faculties, and it is evident that a definite number must be
required: some writers enumerate more, others less, and it is not
unusual for some of these metaphysical projectors to split a single and
presumed faculty into a variety of subdivisions. To the acute and
patient observer, it will appear that the operations of Nature are
contrived with admirable simplicity; but man, in his endeavours to
explain them, has generally resorted to a mysterious and discouraging
complexity. Thus, as might be expected, the same faculty, according to
different authorities, has dissimilar energies,--one is detected to
encroach on the boundary of another, and when the mechanism of mind,
fabricated by these scholastic dictators, is attempted to be set in
motion, it is found incapable of working. For the grand moving power we
have an undefined, and consequently unintelligible doctrine of _Ideas_,
of supposed spiritual and directing agency; the admission of which
would destroy the responsibility of a human being both here and
hereafter, and degrade his ennobled condition to the instinct of the
speechless brute. To endow these insubstantial and reflected phantasms
with some activity and mimic play, a theory of the _association of
Ideas_ has been erected, without having previously established that they
are capable of such confederation. A wearisome catalogue of faculties,
many of which are conjectural, has been enumerated; Abstraction,
Conception, Contemplation, Consciousness, Comparison, Imagination,
Judgment, Memory, Recollection, Reminiscence, Retention, Perception,
Sensation, Reflection, Thought, Understanding, Volition, and many others
that caprice has created, or a subtle discrimination helped to multiply.
These are the materials out of which scholastic metaphysicians have
fashioned their unresembling model, and deserted Nature. It is not
intended in this abbreviated essay to settle the pretensions of these
numerous faculties, the discussion of which would require an ample
volume: and the award might probably be protracted, till the claim was
forgotten. When we contemplate the dexterities that the hand performs,
and the monuments of skill and taste that it has elaborated; it would
only create unnecessary distinctions to affirm that it possessed the
faculties of sculpturing, painting, writing, spinning, weaving, sewing,
and numberless other manipulations: besides those that ulterior
discoveries may enable it to accomplish.