by the universality of adaptative order; and to such minds an opposite system is usually suggested, that, namely, in which the individual essence, developing itself in itself, and subject to the modification of reciprocal influences, becomes attuned to that perfect harmony of being in which alone the human heart and mind can find repose. I am far from supposing that I have exhausted in these insufficient sketches a subject which is so copious as to defy all methodical investigation. My only object has been to show, by a few illustrative examples, that not only all true religiousness, but every true system of religion, proceeds, in the highest sense, from the innermost harmony and correlation of man's processes of sensation.
Now, it is doubtless true, that the conceptions of design, order, correspondency, and perfection, or all that is purely intellectual in religious ideas, is wholly independent of peculiar methods of sensation or the necessary differences of character. But while we allow this, it becomes us to add that we are not now regarding these ideas in the abstract, but rather in their influence on men, who do not preserve that independency in the same degree; and to observe further, that such ideas are not by any means the exclusive property of religion. The idea of perfection is at first derived from our impressions of animate nature, and, thence transferred to the inanimate, it approaches, step by step, to the all-perfect, stripped of every barrier. But does not nature remain the same also for the contemplation of the moral man, and might it not be possible to advance through all the preceding gradations of approach, and still to pause before the last? Now, if all religiousness depends so absolutely on the varied phases and modifications of character, and more particularly of feeling, the influence it exercises on morality cannot be based on the sum and substance of accepted dogmas, but on the peculiar form of their acceptance—on con-
