In this example, our intellectual states of mind, and our emotions, have for their objects things really existing without; but the external affections of our senses, though the most permanent, and usually the most vivid, and therefore the best remembered, of all the sources of our internal feelings are far from being necessary, in every instance, to the production of these. There is a constant, or almost constant succession of internal affections of mind, of thoughts, and emotions, following thoughts and emotions, which even though we were to be rendered incapable of a single new sensation,--if our animal life could in these circumstances be long protracted,--would still preserve to us also that _intellectual_ and _moral_ existence, which is the only life, that is worthy of the name. The knowledge which we acquire from _without_, lives in us _within_; and, in such a case as that which I have now imagined, our memory would be to us in some measure every sense, which we had lost, creating to us again that very world which had vanished before us. If we could compare and love or hate only things actually present, we should be far from the maturity and perfection of an infant's mind, and should scarcely be advanced to the rank of idiocy, which limited as it is in its range, still comprehends in its little sphere of foresight and memory, some few moments at least of the past, and even a moment or two of the future. It is with the future and with the past, that, intellectually and morally, we are chiefly conversant. To these high capacities of our being, the subjects, which can exercise our powers and feelings, however distant in time or place, are as it were _everlastingly present_,--like that mysterious eternal _now_, of which theologians speak,--in which past, present, and future are considered, as, in every moment of every age, alike visible to the omniscient glance of the Divinity. We love the virtues, of which we read, with the same sort of emotion, with which we love the virtues that are mingling with us in the present hour. The patriot of the most remote age,--of whom we know nothing, but the historical tale, of his voluntary perils or sufferings, in some generous cause,--is like the friend of our familiar intercourse; and the sacrifices, that wrought the happiness of millions of beings, who are now not merely _unknown_ to us, but of whom not a single name is remembered on the earth, awake a sort of veneration, that is almost combined with gratitude, as if we were in the presence of a personal deliverer. It is the same with absolute _unreality_, nor merely with that which no longer exists, but with that which never had existence. We are struck with the beauty of what we only imagine, in the same manner, though perhaps not with the same liveliness of feeling, as we are struck with the beauty of external things. Our emotions then, however dependent they may have been originally, are _now_ no longer dependent, on these external things.