to the important question, Whence originates the motion of the first body? Now attending to this question, there appears not to be one motion on our Earth, or in the whole system of Nature, which does not refer itself to mind, to the will of mind, such as is acknowledged to exist in man. The motions, which pass under our observation, are either such as are produced by the instrumentality of man, or are referable to the design and plan of the great Author of Nature. In the history of human agency, a single fact is illustrative of them all. A stone lies upon the earth, and there to the end of time would lie, if the hand of man, or some mediate instrument obedient to his will, did not remove the stone. The action of the

hand, or the mediate instrument on the stone, is what strikes the senses, but they are not the cause, the originating cause; without the will commanding the instruments, no motion would ensue, no action of body upon body-the stone would lie. In the structures of human art, simple or complicated,

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plicated, we behold only the creatures of the human will. This is so universally acknowledged, that if the simplest form, similar to what man constructs, indicating design and use, should present itself to a casual wanderer, in any deserted part of the Earth, it would without hesitation be referred to the will of some human mind; and the man would be laughed to scorn, who should refer it to the voluntary movement of earths, and stones, and woods, in order to fabricate the structure. If it be urged, that as body acting upon body is necessary in all the suc cessive motions, this prime agent, called the will, must also be body;-this would be to ask the whole question. If it be body, it must be such as we have no acquaintance with, and for which, as an assumption, we have not one authority. All the properties, which acknowledged body reports, have been noticed; these constitute its definition,' and all that we know of it. All the properties which mind reports have also been noticed, and in-like manner constitute its

definition,

definition, and the whole that we know of mind. And now, in the history of the whole activity of man, of all his interesting movements, we discover this further discriminating character of each, that mobility is the attribute of body, but to give motion the appropriate attribute of mind.

Let us now direct our attention to the phænomena of Nature, the motions which constitute the grand, the beautiful, and the useful in this wonderful universe, among which I include the involuntáry motions of the human system. These are so numerous, that to examine them all, and trace them to their originating cause, would be as impossible, with respect to time, as it is unnecessary with respect to use. A few of the most striking characters may suffice; and none are surely more so, than the diurnal and annual motions of our Earth, together with gravity, that truly wonderful law, from which so many of the salutary phanomena of our globe, and so much of the mechanism of man derive themselves. A

point of the Earth on the surface of the equator is carried at the rate of a thousand miles an hour, by the diurnal rotation of the earth on its imaginary axis. Where is the body, which by its impulse gives to our globe this rapid rotatory motion? Here is a motion, immense in its magnitude, and constantly sustained without diminution, presented every moment to our senses, yet without the intervention of any body, that man has ever seen, and I should suppose without the supposition of any body as necessary to the original commencement of the motion. According to all that we know of the law which regulates bodily impulse, if this could be supposed to have been the first immediate cause, a rectilinear and not a rotatory motion would have been the effect of a simple impulse of some huge body on our Earth. But if such impulse be incompetent to the effect, and if such impulse be too ridiculous for the most capricious imagination to entertain, there is no cause, where to our senses a cause is absolutely ne

cessary,

cessary, but the will of that Mind, which said, Let there be light, and light was.

Again, the whole mass of the Earth, in its annual motion round the sun, is hurled at the rate of sixty-three thousand miles an hour, or more than a thousand miles a minute. The motion of the Earth and of every planet in our system, round the sun in elliptic orbits, is resolved into two forces; the one its projectile or centrifugal force, the other centripetal, or its gravitation towards the sun. A projectile force produced by the impulse of a body on our globe, and communicating to it a motion at the rate of 63000 miles an hour, is a postulatum, charged with all the ridicule and absurdity of the preceding supposition, and greater only in respect of magnitude. They who maintain, that the impulse of body upon body is necessary to the production of motion, have no refuge that I see, but in the admission, that Deity himself is this body, adequate to the impulses, which, in the establishment of our system, gave to the orbs

therein