Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: PREFACE. 1 O a mind intent upon a sober estimation of personal merit, two sorts of relations naturally offer themselves for consideration. The one subsisting between the Creator and his creatures, is permanent ; the other, confined to these last, is mutable.— Should we adopt the choice of piety in this alternative, we might, perhaps, be led to conjecture, not only that the souls of all men have the same essential parts, but that these parts were originally the same also in degree ; and that the immense variety of talent, sentiment and character, existing in the world, owes its being wholly to a correspondent variety in the material constitutions of its subjects. If such be, indeed, the fact; if the philosopher and the fool may ascribe their difference to a transient cause ; if Newton's mind was clearer than others only because it was less obstructed in its operations : what exalted notions may we not indulge of that intellectual change which awaits an entire disenthralment; what admiration of the powers that even the meanest spirit of earth will display when restored by death to the perfect liberties of sim'ple, unincumbcred being ? Howthen, reverting to the present state, shall we distinguish the grades of human excellence ? or how dis-- cover; any excellence at all ? Verily the expiring maniac, to whose final groan God answers " Live !" shall supplicate the pity of his Father on the poor wisdom of this world. But we must speak in the language of common remark. We must leave this humbling, unfrequented side of the alternative, and pass over to the wilderness of particular relations, where myriads resort, where temporal honors have a name, and where all the passions of our nature hunt their prey. Yet we come not hither to challenge those honors for our author. They cannot be... --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.