Works Author:Thomas Chalmers Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: ter of the common people rise and fall with each other—insomuch, that, while on the one hand their general destitution is the inevitable result of their general ... more »worthlessness, they, on the other, by dint of wisdom and moral strength, can augment indefinitely, not the produce of the earth, nor the produce of human industry, but that proportion of both which falls to their own share. Their economic is sure to follow by successive advances in the career of their moral elevation; nor do we hold it impossible, or even unlikely—that gaining, every generation, on the distance which now separates them from the upper classes of society, they shall, in respect both of decent sufficiency and dignified leisure, make perpetual approximations to the fellowships and the enjoyments of cultivated life. CHAPTER V. Adaptations of the Material World to the Moral and Intellectual Constitution of Man. 1. If by External Nature be meant all that is external to mind, then the proper subject of the argument, in this Fourth Book, should be the adaptation of the Material to the Mental World. But if by External Nature be meant all that is external to one individual mind, then is the subject very greatly extended; for, beside the reciprocal influence between that individual mind and all sensible and material things, we should consider thereciprocal influence between it and all other minds. By this contraction of the idea from the mental world to but one individual member of it; and this proportional extension in the idea of external nature from the material creation to the whole or that living, as well as inanimate creation, by which any single man is surrounded—we are introduced not merely to the action and re-action which obtain between mind and matter; but, which is far more prolific of evidence fo...« less