GOWER. This said Eye of Intelligence appears to me a pure fiction. What am I to make of a faculty which is above, and independent of, memory, reason, feeling, imagination,—without cognizance of those external influences (which at least contribute to make us what we are), and without organs, instruments, or means of any kind for doing any sort of work whatever? Surely this complete and perpetual separation between intuition and everything else within and without us, is a most unphilosophical dichotomy of the mind of man. ATHERTON. Equally so, whether it be regarded as natural to man or as a supernatural gift. Our intuitions, however rapid, must rest on the belief of some fact, the recognition of some relationship or sense of fitness, which rests again on a judgment, right or wrong. WILLOUGHBY. And in such judgment the world without must have large share. GOWER. For the existence of such a separate faculty as a spiritual gift we have only the word of Hugo and his brethren. The faith of Scripture, instead of being cut off from the other powers of the mind, is sustained by them, and strengthens as we exercise them. ATHERTON. President Edwards, in his _Treatise on the Affections_, appears to me to approach the error of those mystics, in endeavouring to make it appear that regeneration imparts a new power, rather than a new disposition, to the mind. Such a doctrine cuts off the common ground between the individual Christian and other men. According to the Victorines it would seem to be the glory of Christianity that it enables man, at intervals at least, to denude himself of reason. To me its triumph appears to consist in this, that it makes him, for the first time, truly reasonable, who before acted unreasonably because of a perverted will. Note to page 158. The treatise by Hugo, entitled _De Vanitate Mundi_, is a dialogue between teacher and scholar, in which, after directing his pupil to survey the endless variety and vicissitude of life, after showing him the horrors of a shipwreck, the house of Dives, a marriage feast, the toils and disputes of the learned, the instructor bids him shelter himself from this sea of care in that ark of God, the religious life. He proceeds to describe that inner Eye, that _oculus cordis_, whose vision is so precious. ‘Thou hast another eye,’ he says (lib. i. p. 172), ‘an eye within, far more piercing than the other thou speakest of,—one that beholds at once the past, the present, and the future; which diffuses through all things the keen brightness of its vision; which penetrates what is hidden, investigates what is impalpable; which needs no foreign light wherewith to see, but gazes by a light of its own, peculiar to itself (luce aliena ad videndum non indigens, sed sua ac propria luce prospiciens).