But he detects far higher properties than the Darwinians have yet done.Man's mind was at first immersed in matter; but, by exerting its native power, it can act without the assistance of body, and transports itself into that ideal world which every man who believes in God must believe to be the archetype of this material world.But he insists that there has been a great degeneracy in the race, of which Moses' account of the fall of man is an allegorical version.Corruption of manners begins in every nation among the better sort, and from them descends to the people.He shows that there must be a total reformation of manners and morals; and, in doing so, be speaks of the effeminacy which has arisen from the use of clothes.But he is ever insisting on the difference between man and brute.The actions of man proceed from opinion, but not the actions of brutes.In the lower animals there is no consideration of means and ends.
He finds one great difference in the circumstance that man is dissatisfied, envies, and repines, which the brute creatures never do.
In volume vi.he treats of the being of God.Nothing can exist without a cause.A first cause, therefore, is necessary, and he inquires into what must be the nature of the cause of the world.The cause must be self-existent, necessarily existent, eternal, and unchangeable Of this nature must be the efficient cause of the world.But he agrees with Aristotle that there must also have been a natural cause from all eternity.In {254} his work on language he represents the theology of Plato as more sublime than that of Aristotle.The theology of Aristotle, so far as it goes, is a pure system of theism; but it is defective in two great points.First, the providence of God over all his works is not asserted; on the contrary, God is represented as passing his whole time in contemplation.Secondly, he does not make God the author of the material world, but only the mover; he does not derive from Him even the minds that animate this world.
His work on " The Origin and Progress of Language," in six vols.8vo., is less important.Still, it contains some shrewd remarks.By language he means the expression of the conceptions of the mind by articulate sounds.He does not think that language is natural to man.Men came to invent articulate sounds by the imitation of other animals.Apolitical state was necessary for the invention of language.
He had evidently some acquaintance with the affinities of the Teutonic, Persian, Greek, and Latin.He represents the Hebrew, Phoenician, Syriac, and Chaldaic, as having also an affinity.He believes that there may also be an affinity between the two groups.
He corrects a very common misapprehension of his day as to abstract and general ideas.In his work on metaphysics:
"Abstract ideas are different from general, though they be confounded by our modern philosophers; an idea must be first abstracted from the particular object from which it exists before it can be generalized." In his work on language, he shows that we may have a conception of a particular quality of any substance abstracted from its other qualities without averring such quality to belong to any other substance." In order to form the general idea, a separation or discrimination is necessary of these qualities one from another; and this kind of abstraction I hold to be the first act of human intellect, and it is here the road parts betwixt us and the brute; for the brute perceives the thing and perceives the perception in his memory just as the object is presented by nature-that is, with all its several sensible qualities united; whereas the human intellect separates and discriminates and considers by itself the color, <e.g.>, without the figure, and the size without either." {255}