[spiritual] senses and perceptions. The first is the ordinary method of Divine Providence, the method by which the Holy Spirit comes to us to renew our hearts and relume our understandings. It is the method by which the angels of God constantly guide and strengthen us, by ever fresh infusions of the spirit of the heavenly world, sending its light into our minds, and its peace into our hearts. They are with us in trial and soothe us. In the day of conflict they breathe upon us, and our arm is nerved with conquering strength. Yea, the more our natures become like theirs, the more we live in their society. Though we see them not, they are with us like a camp of fire around.' This kind of influence from the spiritual world tends to unfold all our highest powers. It ennobles our nature. It fortifies our manhood. It acts within our faculties and gives them growth and enlargement, making our affections pure and angelic, and our reason the clear mirror of heavenly truth. In fine, it unfolds the angel from within us; and if received in sufficient measure, it could reveal to us the spiritual world, by making our natural faculties so clear, strong, and unerring, that they would anticipate its bliss and divine its laws.

"The other mode of communication with the spiritual world—that through the external perceptions-has precisely the opposite tendency. It would not unfold and strengthen our manhood, but overshadow and repress it. To be guided openly by a superior order of beings, and to receive truth at their dicta, would be to doom our own powers to inaction. If, indeed, there could be such a thing as constant and open communication between the spiritual world and this, that world, instead of acting within us to unfold our energies, would lie on our minds and hold them still, as by an awful enchantment. We should move in its spectral shadows, and follow its behests, losing all self-reliance, till reason had been degraded from its office.* And worse things than these might follow [on the supposition, that is, that the openly ruling spirits may possibly be false guides.] We do not believe that human nature undergoes any change by merely being ferried over the river of death. On that side, therefore, as well as on this, there may be those who hug their delusions and falsehoods, and who are just as zealous to make proselytes to them [from the inhabitants of earth] as they were while here. They may not have grown any wiser by their removal. They may even be profoundly ignorant of the laws of their own sphere— just as thousands in this world are ignorant of the laws that act all about them and through them, and which they daily violate without knowing it. If, therefore, men were at liberty to break down indiscriminately the barriers that separate between this world and the other, What guarantee is there that they might not open through their minds dykes and sluices through which they would be inundated with absurdities

* I cordially agree with these hypothetical predictions. They do not apply, it will be seen, to Swedenborg, because his will was firmly established in good, and his intellectual powers developed in the highest degree before the opening of his spiritual sight. Hence he walked with angels as companions, not as instructors, as he himself declares.

and lies? THE WORST KIND OF INSANITY MIGHT BE THE RESULT.* Hence this latter mode of communicating between this world and the other, has never entered into the plan of Divine Providence, except at special times, and for special purposes, and under such guards and conditions as would shield men from the dangers to which it might otherwise expose them."

After a caustic and just exposure of the low kind of spirits which dictated the book under review, supposing that it is not altogether an imposture, the editor concludes thus :

"On the whole we think it a good omen that these 'spiritual manifestations' are exciting attention and inquiry. They shew that there is a latent faith in the supernatural which needs only to be clarified and guided, to be raised to a more comprehending and spiritual theology, It is altogether more propitious than our gross materialism, or the hard and dogged scepticism that shuts its eyes upon the future and grovels in sense. And it suggests the hope, that elements may be at work, out of which may rise a system of faith that shall make the objects of immortality as vivid and real to the soul as matter is to the senses; which shall cause the spirit-world to fling its steady splendours over all earthly affairs. It will be the shame of our Christian guides and teachers, if they fail to meet the crisis and the hour."

The editor of the Register is not unacquainted with the writings of Swedenborg, for he remarks in his review, that Swedenborg says the books which were written in this world are reproduced from the memory in the other; but he does not say he believes this; whether he be a “receiver,” or not, will, perhaps, be a question with your readers.

W. M.

THE ORIGIN OF IDEAS.

ALL our ideas come of marriages; ideas being the fruit of the communion of the soul, through the media of the senses, with the forms and phenomena of the external world. Ideas are not the result of thought, but its subject-matter; for there can be no thought without the antecedent acquisition of ideas whereon the thinking powers can employ themselves. Ideas are the property of the Intellect, as feelings or emotions are of the Affections. Hence their very name, which is

* What a solemn warning thus comes to us across the Atlantic not to run after clairvoyants! As to any of these people having the power, at their own caprice, or in obedience to the caprice of others, of calling down SWEDENBORG from his heavenly mansion, whenever they think fit to put their impertinent questions to him, it is utterly absurd. If the repose of heaven can thus be intruded upon, this land of ours is better than the mansions of heaven, for here " every man's house is his castle," and no silly intruder can summon us forth at his will.

founded on the correspondence of the intellect with the Eye; just as it is with the ear that the affections are in chief correspondence, so beautifully verified by music. Literally, an idea' is something seen', and in its primitive, physical sense, which is the key to all subsequent ones, denoted the exterior configuration of things, as viewed by the bodily sight. Well-known and striking illustrations of this primitive sense, are Pindar's idéa te kaλòv, 'beautiful in shape,' (Olymp. 10, 22.) Aristophanes' á ávarais idéais, ‘immortal forms', (Clouds. 289.) and the phrase in St. Matthew's Gospel, ĥv dè ñ idéa avtôv ås ảσтpañǹ, 'his countenance was like lightning'. (xxviii. 3.) Similar uses of it are not infrequent in the English literature of the 16th century.

But no word ever did or can rest in its original, physical sense. It must of necessity pass on, so soon as framed, to the possession of a figurative meaning. Idea,' accordingly, while in the first place it designates the aspect of things as viewed by the bodily eye; denotes in the second, the spiritual images or pictures of them received into and garnered up in the soul, wherein the mind's eye' reviews them at its pleasure. In the figurative sense of the word, an idea' therefore, is simply the recollection of a thing, and primarily, of a thing seen. It goes on to denote the recollections of tastes, smells aud sounds, because sight is the chief of the senses, and a type of them all, and therefore the natural and fitting metaphor for knowledge gained through any organ of sense whatever. This is everything that the word idea, rightly regarded, is either significant of, or applicable to, seeing that it reaches, in the compass we have described, from the physical to the utmost limits of the figurative, the latter likewise rightly regarded. For figure, like everything else, has its laws, definite and immutable; and while to obey them is to conform to nature, and therefore to be universally intelligible, to infringe them is to darken and bewilder. Few words however have more suffered in this respect, than the one before us, through the careless use of it, first by Descartes, and afterwards by Locke. With the latter it is at different times a synonym for principle, opinion, theory, hypothesis, desire, instinct, habit, and a dozen other things, for all of which, under the influence of his unfortunate example, it has since become so indiscriminate a name, that it now holds no positive meaning whatever. unless accompanied by a statement of the particular one intended by the user.* Locke is himself one of the chief sufferers, because to minds which ask for precision, half unintelligible through the uncertainty of his phraseology.

* See an Essay on the Signs of Ideas, by Dr. Carbutt, in the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society's Transactions, vol. 3, p. 241. 1819.

Regarding the word 'idea' in the original, genuine sense above indicated, (to which it would be well to restore and restrict it,) the impossibility of general ideas' and of innate ideas' is made apparent. All ideas, as we have seen, must be individual, particular, specific. What are meant by 'general ideas' are collections of ideas. A' general idea' of Brazil for instance, to a person who has never been there, is a collection of ideas acquired from time to time, from pictures, specimens of natural productions, &c., such as he has reason to believe, furnish in their total, an approximative likeness of that country. He has no actual idea of Brazil till he has travelled in it. As to innate ideas', how can anything be innate which is only existent through the exercise of the senses? God alone has innate ideas. Innate ideas are what Plato meant by ideas, namely, the primitive thoughts in the mind of God, of which all material things are embodiments, and our own ideas the spiritual echoes. As the plan of a city is pre-arranged by its projector, so, teaches Plato, God first framed the world in thoughts or spiritual designs, and then presented it outwardly in material objectivity; as nearly, that is, as it is possible for the inexpressible beauty and perfection of the Divine, spiritual, eternal archetypes to be pourtrayed to the apprehensions of corporeal sense. Grand as this lofty doctrine reads in the Parmenides, it acquires new force and beauty in the magnificent Philo Judæus, Plato's profoundest admirer, who calls the material universe the younger son of God', the elder being the ideal Moyos which he retains within himself.* Philo regards the Platonic doctrine of ideas as involved even in Genesis.

Abstract ideas are equally fabulous; that is to say, abstract ideas absolutely so called. All the ideas which we receive into our minds are relatively abstract; because it is only the pictures of things, to which the mind, as a spiritual substance, can give admission. This, however, is not the popular acceptation of the term. Abstract ideas, commonly so called, are our ideas of love, goodness, power, &c., which it is supposed to be possible to 'abstract' or detach from the objects wherein the several qualities are observed, and to think of as independent entities. But our ideas of love, goodness, power, &c., and of all qualities whatever, are in reality our ideas or pictures of the persons or things wherein the respective qualities have been observed. Let any one attempt to think what the metaphysicians call an 'abstract idea', without at the

*On the Unchangeableness of God'; Works, vol. 1, p. 277, Mangey's edit., 1742. The book 'On the Mosaic Cosmogony', wherein the doctrine above alluded to is most fully treated, is the finest commentary on the exordium of the inspired writings which has ever been offered on the altar of theosophy.

same time thinking of a person or an object, and he will find he is thinking of nothing. When for instance, we think of green, we find, on examination, that it is grass, or some other green object that we are thinking of. Goodness, power, love, bitterness, sweetness, greenness, and so on, can, in a word, only exist, and therefore only be truly thought of, or had in idea, as the contents or characters of a containing form and substance. This is the most beautiful proof not only that man has a soul, or spiritual body, in which his goodness, love, and other qualities reside; but of the personality likewise of the Almighty, to think of whom merely as Infinite Power, Wisdom, Goodness, &c., is to think of a mere catalogue of manifestations, which apart from a containing Form AS A DIVINE MAN, can have no existence.

Now the intercourse of the soul with the external world, and its consequent acquisition of a family of ideas or pictures thereof, is like marriage between man and woman, and the ensuing acquisition of offspring. Every idea is an intellectual child. And if it be a pleasant thing to have physical sons and daughters, as plants grown up in their youth; as corner-stones polished after the similitude of a palace;' if they be 'as arrows in the hand of a mighty man,' and if 'happy is the man that hath his quiver full of them;'-what are the power, the opulence, the enjoyments, of him who abounds in ideas, the beautiful and immortal sons and daughters of the soul? Well did the far-seeing Greeks make the Muses the daughters of Mnemosyne or Memory, saying thereby that all philosophy and imagination, all that can delight, enrich and fertilize the intellect of man, comes of ideas collected from the survey of the external world, and stored up in the picture gallery of the mind. Unless provided with a well-filled memory, that is, with abundance of ideas or pictures of objective forms and phenomena, the intellectual powers have neither means nor opportunity of exerting themselves. For the memory is their storehouse of material, and if it be empty or ill-supplied, they must stand idle. So dependent is the intellect on supplies from without, that 'mind' and 'memory' are synonymous:

'My mother's love!

I mind me that it used to be
My spirit's sunshine!'

:

To remind is to recall to the recollection; to be unmindful is to forget. The more intimately that the soul associates itself with nature; the more fondly that it embraces her sweet loveliness; the fonder and more grateful is her conjugal response. Whatever our position with regard to men or to possessions, here there are always sympathy and friendship, here there are shining and imperishable riches.