My last Lecture, Gentlemen, was employed in considering the great question of the Identity of the Mind, as one and permanent, amid all the infinite variety of our feelings; and particularly, in stating the two most forcible objections, which I can imagine to be urged against this identity,--_one_ founded on the striking contrasts, intellectual and moral, which the same mind exhibits in different periods of life, and in different circumstances of fortune,--the _other_, more abstract, and, therefore, less obvious, but not less forcible, founded on the mere diversity of our temporary feelings, as itself inconsistent with identity, at least with that strict and absolute identity, to which, as in the case of the mind, nothing can have been added,--from which nothing can have been taken away,--and which, by its very nature, as simple and indivisible, must have been incapable of any elementary change. Since the exposure of the fallacy, on which these objections are founded, would, however, afford only a sort of _negative_ evidence of that great truth which they oppose, it will be of advantage, before entering on an examination of the objections themselves, to state, in the first place, the nature of that _positive_ evidence, which does not, indeed, lead us to the belief of the unity and permanence of our spiritual being, by that slow process which is denominated reasoning, but constitutes to us, primarily and directly, an impossibility of disbelieving it. I do this the more readily, from the opportunity which it gives of making you acquainted with the paramount importance of those principles of _intuitive belief_, which are essential to philosophy in all its forms, as they are physically essential, indeed, to the very preservation of our animal existence; and which the rash and unphilosophic extension of them by one class of philosophers, and the equally unphilosophic misapprehension of them by other writers who controverted them, have rendered more necessary, than it would otherwise have been, to state to you with precision.