This Materialism is a seducing system to young and
superficial minds: it allows its disciples to talk, and dispenses them
from thinking. But I was discontented with such a view of things as it
afforded. Man is a being of high aspirations, "looking both before and
after," whose "thoughts wander through eternity," disclaiming alliance
with transcience and decay; incapable of imagining to himself
annihilation; existing but in the future and the past; being, not what
he is, but what he has been and shall be. Whatever may be his true and
final destination, there is a spirit within him at enmity with
nothingness and dissolution. This is the character of all life and
being. Each is at once the centre and the circumference; the point to
which all things are referred, and the line in which all things are
contained. Such contemplations as these Materialism, and the popular
philosophy of mind and matter, alike forbid: they are only consistent
with the Intellectual System.... The view of Life presented by the most
refined deductions of the Intellectual Philosophy is that of unity.
Nothing exists but as it is perceived.
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