“This light and darkness, in our chaos join'd, What shall divide? The God within the mind.” There is, indeed, a chaos, in the mind. But there is a spirit of inquiry, which is forever moving over it, slowly separating all its mingled elements. It is only when these are separated, that the philosophy of mind can be complete, and incapable of further discovery. To say that it is now complete, because it has in it every thing which can be the subject of analysis, is as absurd, as it would be to suppose that the ancient chaos, when it contained merely the elements of things, before the spirit of God moved upon the waters of the abyss, was already that world of life, and order, and beauty, which it was after to become. The difficulty which arises in the physical investigation of the mind, from the apparent simplification of those thoughts and feelings which, on more attentive reflection, are felt to be as if compounded of many other thoughts and feelings, that have previously existed together, or in immediate succession, is similar to the difficulty which we experience in the physics of matter, from the imperfection of our senses, that allows us to perceive masses only, not their elemental parts, and thus leads us to consider as _simple_ bodies, what a single new experiment may prove to be composed of _various_ elements. In the _intellectual_ world, the slow progress of discovery arises, in like manner, from the obstacles which our feeble power of discrimination presents to our mental analysis. But, in mind, as well as in matter, it must be remembered, that it is to this very feebleness of our discriminating powers, the whole analytic science owes its origin. If we could distinguish instantly and clearly in our complex phenomena of thought, their constituent elements--if, for example, in that single and apparently simple emotion, which we feel, on the sight of _beauty_, as it lives before us, or in the contemplation of that ideal beauty, which is reflected from works of art, we could discover, as it were, in a single glance, all the innumerable feelings, which, perhaps, from the first moment of life, have been conspiring together, and blending in the production of it--we should then feel as little interest in our _theories of taste_, as in a case formerly supposed, we should have done in our theories of combustion, if the most minute changes that take place in combustion had been at all times distinctly visible. The mysteries of our intellect, the “altæ penetralia mentis,” would then lie for ever open to us; and what was said poetically of Hobbes, in the beautiful verses addressed to him on his work _De Natura Hominis_, would be applicable to all mankind, not poetically, but in the strictness of philosophic truth. “Quæ magna cœli mœnia, et tractus maris, Terræque fines, siquid aut ultra est, capit, Mens ipsa tandem capitur; Omnia hactenus Quæ nosse potuit, nota jam primum est sibi.