But whatever may be the arbitrary division or arrangement which we may form either of our sensations themselves, or of the organs that are previously affected, the susceptibility of the mind, by which it is capable of being affected by the changes of state in our mere bodily organs, must be regarded as, in every sense of the word, of primary value in our mental constitution. To the individual, indeed, it may be said to be in itself all the things which are around him, however near or afar; because it is truly that, by which alone all things near or afar become known to him. It constitutes by this mutual relation, which it establishes, a power of more than magic agency, before which the great gulf, that appeared to separate forever the worlds of matter and of spirit, disappears,--which thus links together substances, that seemed, in their nature, incapable of any common bond of union,--and which, bringing the whole infinity of things, within the sphere of our own mind, communicates to it some faint semblance of the omnipresence of its Author. “What is that organ,”--says an eloquent French writer, speaking of the eye,--“what is that astonishing organ, in which all objects acquire, by turns, a successive existence,--where the spaces, the figures, and the motions, that surround me, are as it were _created_,--where the stars, that exist at the distance of a hundred millions of leagues, become a part of myself,--and where in a single half inch of diameter, is contained the universe?” This power of external sense, which first awakes us into life, continues, ever after, to watch, as it were, round the life which it awoke, lavishing on us perpetual varieties of instruction and delight; and if, from the simple pleasures, and simple elementary knowledge which it immediately affords, we trace its influence, through all the successive feelings to which it indirectly gives rise, it may be said to exist, by a sort of intellectual and moral transmutation, in the most refined and etherial of all our thoughts and emotions. What Grey says of it,--in the commencement of his beautiful fragment De Principiis Cogitandi, addressed to his friend West, is not too high a panegyric,--that every thing delightful and amiable, friendship and fancy, and wisdom itself, have their primary source in it. “Non illa leves primordia motus Quanquam parva, dabunt. Lætum vel amabile quicquid Usquam oritur, trahit hinc ortum; nec surgit ad auras, Quin ea conspirent simul, eventusque secundent. Hinc variæ vitai artes, ac mollior usus, Dulce et amicitiæ vinclum: Sapientia dia Hinc roseum accendit lumen, vultuque sereno, Humanas aperit mentes, nova gaudia monstrans. Illa etiam, quæ te (mirum) noctesque diesque Assidue fovit inspirans, linguamque sequentem Temperat in numeros, atque horas mulcet inertes, Aurea non alia si jactat origine Musa.”[67]