Besides actual, sensible impressions, I suppose that there is a common principle of thought, a superintending faculty, which alone perceives the relations of things and enables us to comprehend their connections, forms, and masses. This faculty is properly the understanding, and it is by means of this faculty that man indeed becomes a reasonable soul. Without this surrounding and forming power, we could never conceive the idea of any one object, as of a table or a chair, a blade of grass or a grain of sand. Every one of these includes a certain configuration, hardness, colour, size, &c. _i.e._ impressions of different things, received by different senses, which must be put together by the understanding before they can be referred to any particular object, or considered as one idea. Without this faculty, all our ideas would be necessarily decomposed, and crumbled down into their original elements and fluxional parts. We could assuredly in this case never connect the different links in a chain of reasoning together, for the very links of which this chain must consist would be ground to powder. We could neither form any comparison between our ideas, nor have any ideas to compare. There would be an infinite divisibility in the impressions of the mind, as well as in the parts of material objects. Each separate impression must remain absolutely simple and distinct, unknown to and unconscious of the rest, shut up in the narrow cell of its own individuality. No two of these atomic impressions could ever club together to form even a sensible point, much less should we be able to arrive at any of the larger masses or nominal descriptions of things. The most that sensation could possibly do for us would be to furnish the mind with ideas of some of those which Mr. Locke calls the simple qualities of objects, as of colour or pressure, though not as a general notion or diffused feeling, for it is certain that no one impression could ever contain more than the tinge of a single ray of light, or the puncture of a single particle of matter. Perhaps we might in this way be supposed to possess an infinite number of microscopic impressions and fractions of ideas, but there being nothing to arrange or bind them together, the whole would present only a disjointed mass of blind, unconscious confusion. All nature, all objects, all parts of all objects, would be equally ‘without form and void.’ _The mind alone is formative_, to use the expression of Kant; or it is that which by its pervading and elastic energy unfolds and expands our ideas, that gives order and consistency to them, that assigns to every part its proper place, and fixes it there, and that frames the idea of the whole. Or in other words, it is the understanding alone that perceives relation, but every object is made up of a bundle of relations. In short, there is no object or idea which does not consist of a number of parts arranged in a