IT might be thought that the idea of a deadness in man, affecting his condition in all respects, and causing his impressions and natural convictions to differ from the truth, would present difficulties to the understanding, and run counter to the feelings. But the case is not so. The contrary idea, that our natural impressions must be taken as true, subjects us to embarrassment and constraint. Clinging to these, we forge chains for our own hands; but to understand that the world is truly different from that which we feel it to be, more than it is to us, sets us free. Surely our apprehension of the universe must be inadequate; that which we think, no more equal to its truth, than that which our senses represent to us. We know that the universe is more than corresponds to our conception; what, therefore, can be more natural than that we should distinguish in our thought between that which truly exists and that which we can conceive? It can be no hard task to recognise in a new bearing the familiar truth that our condition and relation to things determine the mode in which we are affected by them. We only apply to the whole that mode of judging which we have already applied to particular things.