Let us recollect our sensations as children.  What a distinct and intense apprehension had we of the world and of ourselves!  Many of the circumstances of social life were then important to us which are now no longer so.  But that is not the point of comparison on which I mean to insist.  We less habitually distinguished all that we saw and felt, from ourselves.  They seemed as it were to constitute one mass.  There are some persons who, in this respect, are always children.  Those who are subject to the state called reverie, feel as if their nature were dissolved into the surrounding universe, or as if the surrounding universe were absorbed into their being.  They are conscious of no distinction.  And these are states which precede, or accompany, or follow an unusually intense and vivid apprehension of life.  As men grow up this power commonly decays, and they become mechanical and habitual agents.  Thus feelings and then reasonings are the combined result of a multitude of entangled thoughts, and of a series of what are called impressions, planted by reiteration.

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.  The words I, and you, and they, are grammatical devices invented simply for arrangement, and totally devoid of the intense and exclusive sense usually attached to them.  It is difficult to find terms adequate to express so subtle a conception as that to which the Intellectual Philosophy has conducted us.  We are on that verge where words abandon us, and what wonder if we grow dizzy to look down the dark abyss of how little we know.  The relations of things remain unchanged, by whatever system.  By the word things is to be understood any object of thought, that is any thought upon which any other thought is employed, with an apprehension of distinction.