ΤΟ SIR, BEING so great a lover of antiquities, it was reasonable to suppose, you would be very much obliged with any thing that was new.. I have been of late offended with many writers of essays and moral discourses, for running into stale topicks and threadbare quotations, and not handling their subject fully and closely all which errours I have carefully avoided in the following essay, which I have proposed as a pattern for young writers to imitate. The thoughts and observations being entirely new, the quotations untouched by others, the subject of mighty importance, and treated with much order and perspicuity, it has cost me a great deal of time; and I desire you will accept and consider it as the utmost effort of my genius. A TRITICAL ESSAY UPON THE FACULTIES OF THE MIND. PHILOSOPHERS say, that man is a microcosm, or little world, resembling in miniature every part of the great and, in my opinion, the body natural may be compared to the body politick and if this be so, how can the epicurean's opinion be true, that the universe was formed by a fortuitous concourse of atoms which I will no more believe, than that. the accidental jumbling of the letters of the alphabet, could fall by chance into a most ingenious and learned treatise of philosophy. Risum teneatis amici? [HOR.] This false opinion must needs create many more; it is like an errour in the first concoction, which cannot be corrected in the second; the foundation is weak, and whatever superstructure you raise upon it, must of necessity fall to the ground. Thus men are led from one errour to another, until with Ixion they embrace a cloud instead of Juno; or like the dog in the fable lose the substance in gaping at the shadow. For such opinions cannot cohere; but like the iron and clay in the toes of Nebuchadnezzar's image, must separate and break in pieces. I have read in a certain B 2 certain author, that Alexander wept because he had no more worlds to conquer; which he needed not have done, if the fortuitous concourse of atoms could create one but this is an opinion, fitter for that many headed beast the vulgar, to entertain, than for so wise a man as Epicurus; the corrupt part of his sect only borrowed his name, as the monkey did the cat's claw, to draw the chesnut out of the fire. However, the first step to the cure, is to know the disease; and though truth may be difficult to find, because, as the philosopher observes, she lives in the bottom of a well, yet we need not, like blind men, grope in open daylight. I hope I may be allowed, among so many far more learned men, to offer my mite, since a standerby may sometimes perhaps see more of the game, than he that plays it. But I do not think a philosopher obliged to account for every phenomenon in nature, or drown himself with Aristotle, for not being able to solve the ebbing and flowing of the tide, in that fatal sentence he passed upon himself, Quia te non capio, tu capies me. Wherein he was at once the judge and the criminal, the accuser and executioner. Socrates, on the other hand, who said he knew nothing, was pronounced by the oracle to be the wisest man in the world. (. But to return from this, digression: I think it as clear as any demonstration of Euclid, that Nature does nothing in vain; if we were able to dive into her secret recesses, we should find that the smallest blade of grass, or most contemptible weed, has its particular use but she is chiefly admirable in her minutest compositions, the least and most contemptible insect, most discovers the art of nature, if |