This he could

that would cause a dreadful civil war. not prove, and would be forced to confess, that his apprehensions might have no other foundation than ignorance and interest, which operated equally with other nations, who indulged religious but opposed political reform. Truth is, therefore, utterly unknown to mankindblack in one country is white in another-good is bad and bad good; and this owing to the medium or standard of prejudice and ignorance. The utility of truth is to be found only in the equality of standard and purity of medium presented by the religion of Nature.

O deluded mortals! rise from your iron beds of error, - turn your regard towards the moral orient-invoke the sun of reason to ascend; those who excite fears and apprehensions of its benign rays, are the robbers of liberty and reason, whose designs and operations suit best with the darkness of the atmosphere of interest and ignorance. Some feeble fellow creatures there are, who like the captives in the dungeon, dread the light; these are betrayed by their fears to join with the mitred and crowned robbers that suppress with calumny all reformers and with a verdict of sedition give them up, bound as victims, te these legal depredators, and perpetuate, unwittingly their own ignorance and misery.

Come then, fellow-parts, come to the enlightened communion of your integer, Nature-seek after intellec tual existence, acquired in the contemplation of this union matured into conviction: this regeneration will elevate you above animal, as animal does above the vegetable state-this makes happiness systematic, immortality comprehensible, and carries the intellectual faculties to the strongly-marked barrier of its boundaries-opens the secrets of Nature and infinity as far as it is necessary to well-being, and enables man to fill up the plenitude of his essence, and all of existence, and to run his course in the great orbit of Nature with tranquillity, resignation, and happiness, and to arrive at the periods of change, or renovation of form, without terror, or pain, and sleep, as it were, into the euthanasy of a happier existence.

THE EDUCATION OF NATURE

CONSISTS in the example and instruction of seniors to youth, to remove all dangerous inclinations to be wicked before judgment assumes its maturity, or to violate the liberty of our fellow-creatures, or to confound o suppress the maturity of judgment, by uttering falsehood: to corrupt and mislead it.

Parents are to be separated from their children as soon as judgment makes its appearance and Nature demands no longer parental care, lest the affectionate intercourse may tend to weaken the social habitudes, and prevent them from extending self into the comprehensive and ample existence of the orbit of Nature, the universal and common parent, who testifies the relation of humanity to supercede all other. While the mild and innocent example of seniors are guarding the passions from the evil propensities of violence in the early period of infancy, sports and pastimes are to be tauglit, that may give vigor, health and comeliness to the body. These bodily sports may be connected at the age of maturity, [puberty,] with mental amusements, as poetry, logic, music, painting, and mechanic arts. In all mental instructions, the will is to be led to them, and coercion of every kind must be unknown. Pleasure, both mental and corporeal of every kind, controlled by wisdom, is to be cultivated as the great object of life, and to be measured by judgment, improved and extended by reason and reflection.

Children are to mix with all the members of society, and parents are to withdraw themselves from all partial attentions, and the least partiality is to be guarded against, as an enemy to society. The example of seniors is to be the whole code of instruction, in doing no violence and speaking no falsehood-but taking care that the mouth is a faithful interpreter of the heart. The religion of

Nature, morality and polity will be afterwards communicated at an adult age, by the examples and conversation of society.

As cultivation in agriculture improves the vegetable, so does education improve the moral world. The present mode, like every other part of the moral system, is measured and adjusted by the short standard of relative truth.

Philology or language is the universal subject of study and instruction, for two reasons:

First, as it furnishes a key to unlock the treasures of knowledge, contained, according to the present fixed, and therefore sacred opinion, in the ancient authors of science and history;

And second, as enabling the student to improve the powers of speech, by which he may inculcate, explain and convince others of the truth of those ideas or knowledge, which habit and ignorance have called the wisdorn of antiquity.

This blind adoption of the ideas of the ancients proves, that many moderns possess not the capacity of forming new ideas; for a man of the least strength of mental faculties must discover, that as time in its progress chauges universally the circumstances of life, the idea that was wise yesterday, may be folly to-day, as it does not coincide with the new events of the new era; and it is this blind veneration for antiquity, that is both the origin and perpetuation of the present ignorance of mankind; for if the reasoning faculty of man had been well directed by education, it must, profiting of the boundless experience of past ages, have long ago arrived at the acme of its perfection.

The present detestable mode of beating the absurd ideas of the ancients into the posteriors, because Nature, spontaneously improving, refuses them admittance into the head, must be changed. The birchen scepters of tyrant and ignorant pedagogues must be broken, and virtuous, wise and amiable associates must assume their places. Instruction should be instilled into the mind

voluntarily and, as it were, imperceptibly, of which sports and pastimes should be the chief medium. Gymnastic exercises, and the early practice of ethics, or sympathy and probity, should form the whole code of instruction to the age of maturity, [puberty;] and then philology should be admitted in the vernacular language only. Those wonderful productions of human ingenuity, the Latin and Greek languages, should be studied at an adult age, not for what they contain, but for their unparalleled perfection, which reduces all modern languages, in comparison, to the most contemptible jargons. They should become the lingua Franca of the world, and as their very sound seems sense, what would be the effect of sense or reason, when communicated with their irresistible eloquence? It would certainly produce the unity of ideas, the unity of association, the unity of religion, and the last and perfect unity in the integer of Nature, the acme of human perfection.

THE MORALITY OF NATURE

CONSISTS in the means of procuring happiness or well-being to self, as generalized with society. The pleasures of the senses are particularly to be cultivated, and are to be directed by the following important and universal axioms:

GIVE UP A LESS PRESENT PLEASURE FOR A GREATER FUTURE.

SUFFER A LESS PRESENT EVIL TO AVOID A GREATER FUTURE.

To follow these axioms, the volition must be guided by an anticipative and reflective judgment that sees into futurity, and by a power or accuracy of decision, called taste, to transfer sensual pleasure to intellectual joy.

To illustrate these operations of the judgment, I will adduce examples borrowed from civilized society. To explain the first axiom, let us suppose a man possessed

of a yearly income of five hundred pounds. Should ne spend it all in one day, he will no doubt augment the sensual pleasures of that day, but the three hundred and sixty-four following will be days of pain; judgment brings this calculation to the conception of the mind, and the volition is regulated to economize pleasure, and perpetuate it by forbearance to the year's end.

The second axiom may be explained by the pleasure of helping our guests to the best of the repast at a convivial board; for the esteem and affection that affability and hospitality obtain from surrounding guests, in declining the best, and taking the less delicious parts of the viands, confer an intellectual comfort and complacency, that is of infinitely more value than the sensual pleasure which the palate would obtain by the mastication of those morsels.

Self being a part of Nature, organized, diversified and identified, though by no means separated from its integer, for that is impossible, it will never be directed by judgment to forego what is essential to its happiness, in order to promote that of another part of the same integer; for suppose that I am starving, and a fellow

* On this important subject all the powers of mind are to be exercised to calculate how far the happiness or existence of self are to be apparently or momentarily encroached upon, in order to promote that of a fellow-creature, which must ever co-operate with our own; and considered relatively to the common integer, Nature, be ultimately all our own.

Man may, in his relation to Nature, promote the happiness of self, by sacrificing the identity or existence of self, as is the case of a tyrant, who having subdued twenty millions of fellow-creatures continues to render them miserable by despotism and cruelty. It would be the interest of any self or identity to put him to death, tbough the end of its own existence might follow; for having removed a great proportion of evil from identity or existence of a great proportion of animated matter-self as a part of Nature, would, on its return to life under different combinations, meet with less evil.