(1) ’The most refined abstractions of logic conduct to a view of Life which, though startling to the apprehension, is in fact that which the habitual sense of its repeated combinations has extinguished in us.  It strips, as it were, the painted curtain from this scene of things.  I confess that I am one of those who am unable to refuse my assent[17] to the conclusions of those philosophers who assert that nothing exists but as it is perceived.  It is a decision against which all our persuasions struggle—­and we must be long convicted before we can be convinced that the solid universe of external things is “such stuff as dreams are made of.”  The shocking absurdities of the popular philosophy of mind and matter, its fatal consequences in morals, and their [? the] violent dogmatism concerning the source of all things, had early conducted me to Materialism.  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.  The difference is merely nominal between those two classes of thought which are vulgarly distinguished by the names of “ideas” and of “external objects.”  Pursuing the same thread of reasoning, the existence of distinct individual minds, similar to that which is employed in now questioning its own nature, is likewise found to be a delusion.  The words “I, you, they,” are not signs of any actual difference subsisting between the assemblage of thoughts thus indicated, but are merely marks employed to denote the different modifications of the one mind.  Let it not be supposed that this doctrine conducts to the monstrous presumption that I, the person who now write and think, am that one mind.  I am but a portion of it.’