of which the mind was forever to be susceptible. What susceptibilities the mind has exhibited in the ordinary circumstances in which it has been placed, we know, and they have been limited to a certain number, corresponding with the feelings which have arisen in these circumstances. But the Almighty Power, who fixed this particular number, might have increased or lessened the number at His pleasure, in the same manner, as He might, at His pleasure, have multiplied or diminished the whole number of his animated creatures; and, where there has been no limit, but the will of the _Limiter_, it is experience only which can give us any knowledge of the actual limitation. We are always too much inclined to believe, that we know what must have been, because we know what is,--and to suppose ourselves acquainted, not merely with the gracious ends which Supreme Goodness had in view, in creating us, but with the very object, which each separate modification of our intellectual and moral constitution was intended to answer. I would not, indeed, go so far as Pope, in that passage of the Essay on Man, in which he seems to imply, that our ignorance of the wise and harmonious intentions of Providence, in the constitution of our mind, is like the ignorance of the inferior animals, as to the motives which influence the follies and inconsistencies of their capricious master. “When the proud steed shall know, why man restrains His fiery course, or drives him o'er the plains, When the dull ox, why now he breaks the clod, Is now a victim, and now Egypt's God,-- Then shall man's pride and dulness comprehend His action's, passion's, being's, use and end; Why doing, suffering, check'd, impell'd; and why This hour a slave, the next a deity.”[37]