First. In general, and loosely, any mental operation is called thinking. Second. Specifically, all acts of reflection are thinkings. Under this head we notice two points. _a._ That act of the Understanding in which an object presented by the Sense is analyzed, and its special and generic elements noted, and is thus classified, and its relations determined, is properly a thinking. Thus, in the object cat I distinguish specifically that it is domestic, and generically that it is carnivorous. _b._ That act of the finite spiritual person by which he compares the judgments of the Understanding with the _a priori_ laws of the Pure Reason, and by this final standard decides their truth or error. Thus, the judgment of the young Indian warrior is, that he ought to hunt down and slay the man who killed his father in battle. The standard of Reason is, that Malice is criminal. This judgment is found to involve malice, and so is found to be wrong. Third, the intuitions of the reason. These, in the finite person, come _after_ a process of reflection, and are partly consequent upon it; yet they take place in another faculty, which is developed by this process; but they are such, that by no process of reflection _alone_ could they be. Thinking, in the Universal Genius, is the _sight_, at once and forever, of all possible object of mental effort. It is necessary and _spontaneous_, and so is an endowment, not an attainment; and is possessed without effort. We are prepared now to entertain the following statements:-- A. So far as it represents thinking as the active, _i. e._ causative ground, or agent of the condition, the dictum is not true. The fact of the thinking is not, cannot be, the ground of the condition. The condition of the object thought, whatever the form of thinking may be, must lie as far back at least as the ground of the thinker. Thus, God's self, as ground for his Genius, must also be ground for _all_ conditions. Yet men think of an object _in its conditions_. This is because the same Being who constructed the objects in their conditions, constructed also man as thinker, _correlated to those conditions_, so that he should think upon things _as they are_. In this view, to think is not condition, but is mental activity in the conditions already imposed. Thus it is with the Understanding; and the process of thinking, as above designated, goes on in accordance with the law stated in _a_, of the second general definition. It follows, therefore,