internal eye to perceive relations, proportions, or equalities. And lastly, no impressions as to the loveliness or deformity of moral actions can take effect, where there is not an internal power or instinct to feel the varied and opposite emotions of moral senti

ment.

If these positions were not true, brutes might be made to feel and know most of those things which now distinguish and exalt human nature.*

SECT. II.

Of the office ard effect of Education compared with Culture.

Let us therefore properly understand the office and effect of education. It cannot be to introduce into the mind notions and relations of things which have

* According to Locke "White paper," (comparing it to the mind), "receives any characters;" but Cudworth appears to have had a clearer notion of the matter, when he said, "If Intellection and Knowledge were mere receptions of extraneous and adventitious forms, then no reason could be given at all why a mirror or looking-glass should not understand."

"If Intellection and Knowledge were a mere passive Perception of the soul from without, and nothing but sense or the result of it, then what Reason could be given, why brute animals, that have all the senses that men have, and some of them more acute, should not have Intellection also, and be as capable of logic, mathematics, and metaphysics, and have the same notions of Morality, of a Deity, and Religion, that men have?"-Treatise concerning Morality, p. 130.

no affinity to its own nature; to pour into it, as inte some passive receptacle, any sort of ingredients; to which it is to be considered as perfectly indifferent, as though it had no original tastes or predilections. Instead of having none, we find that it has opposite or contending tastes and predilections. Hence the office and effect of good education upon the mind must be to enlarge innate capacities and feelings essentially its own, to teach them to shoot in a virtuous direction, to convey proper nourishment by placing it in the circle of good example, to defend the opening buds of intellect, sensibility, and moral feeling, from every thing that would harm them;-in a word, to encourage the growth of the good seed planted in every mind, and to prevent the growth of evil propensities, and destroy those noxious principles, which, if allowed to spring up, would debase and deform the character.* For, as good example could never have effect, if there were not good principles in the mind to attract and cherish it; so bad example could not have effect, if there were not evil propensities to lay hold of it and embrace it. There is, therefore, antecedent to all instruction, a principle or seed, an appetite or affection, with instinctive tendencies towards certain external relations in cha. racter and in moral conduct, just as there is in the

"To teach the young Idea to shoot," is a beautiful and apt image; but, surely, no one ever thinks that the Idea so taught is some external representation brought incidentally into the mind. I take it to be the germ of thought itself.

structure of the eye a congruity to light, or in that of the ear to sounds, long before these organs receive any impressions. Education, therefore, is to the mind, what cultivation is to the plant or seed. It is that methodical training which leads to the gradual evolution and expansion of powers and principles and propensities, connate with the mind, and essential to its constitution. It cannot create new powers: but as a bad education may increase and cherish evil propensities, and produce bad fruit from the growth of evil seed; so a good education may foster virtuous propensities, and produce good fruit from the evolution of good seed.

Whatever, therefore, is received from without, must have a connatural affinity with some primary taste, capacity, or feeling within. For, if it have not this affinity or congruity, it can no more be assimilated and appropriated to the mind's improvement, than light can be perceived by the ear, or musical sounds by the eye. Every Sense has its peculiar and appropriate object or quality in nature; and so has every appetite; and the same may perhaps be said of every passion and emotion.

Every internal power has also its object in its external relations; and external impressions can never produce a practical effect further than they quicken, rouse, and animate the internal power to which they are appropriate, and upon which they act. Hence, by communicating or imprinting new thoughts, we only bring into the mind something possessing a close

adaptation in its nature, to the constitution of that inherent faculty to which it is applied, analogous to the nourishment which is conveyed to a plant, and assimilated to its substance. The outward senses, I need not repeat, take cognizance of the qualities of matter; the inward faculties, of intellectual abstractions in physics as well as of moral relations in human conduct. Thus, the eye has a natural affinity for light, the tongue for tastes, and the ear for sounds; and we might as well imagine that discord and harmony, bitter and sweet, odoriferous and putrid effluvia, should make the same impression, prior to experience, or be equally agreeable to their respective organs of sense; as that vice and virtue, right and wrong, truth and falsehood, gratitude and ingratitude, should, when first presented intelligibly to the mind, be indiscriminately and equally acceptable to the internal faculties or principles, which take cognizance of these different relations.

It must be obvious, then, that virtue is naturally lovely and vice hateful,-and it would be idle to set about explaining what these words mean,-in short, that virtuous actions are as universally agreeable, and vicious the contrary, as, to the generality of mankind, sugar is sweet, and gall is bitter. And it is the decree of Heaven and the constitution of human nature which make it so; and which have established these immutable distinctions.

We are compelled, therefore, to conclude, that there must be original affections, dispositions, talents,

)

-in other words, native seeds, implanted by the Creator, in every mind; without which it might labour in vain upon the imported materials, to fabri cate Truth and Science. But, whatever is thus imported must be congenial to its nature, and possess a fitness and congruity. Thoughts and impressions in the mind, acquired by education, are rather impulses from without by the Senses, acting on its own inherent energies, than any abstract metaphysical substances, under the name of ideas, introduced to its acquaint

ance.

What can we conceive but that a cold and insensible marble tablet, destitute of every original bias, might just as well receive one impression as another? And surely no reason can be assigned, why, on such a principle, one set of notions could be more congenial to the natural feelings than another; why falsehood should be less acceptable than truth, or gratitude than ingratitude, or vice than virtue; till men should be instructed by experience to give the preference to truth and virtue, as matter of expediency or cold conventional agreement, and not the effect of sacred immutable obligation, or rather of warm original impulse in the mind.

It is undoubtedly true, that certain qualities in human actions, related to the virtues, such as gratitude, generosity, humanity, fidelity, integrity, &c. are embraced and cherished by the affections of man, like the very life-blood by the heart; and the sympathetic