Our Exchanges are rapidly increasing, and they are an interesting and motley group. They wear all the colors of the spectrum; and their banners and devices, their objects and methods, are numerous and ingenious. One of them, a most excellent Journal, seeks to disclose the nature and extent of "Mind in Nature," and its efforts are often instructive, and sometimes amusing. Another is unconcerned about mind anywhere, and devotes itself wholly to the body, for whose sake alone mind is ever mentioned or alluded to, and then it does not know whether thought or feeling is mind or matter, and thinks it no matter which. It has certainly the merit, whatever that may be, of being utterly free from metaphysics. It is the "People's Journal of Health," that is, bodily health. It assumes that there is no other kind of health to be thought of. It is nicely got up, and it is full of the sagest advices and directions to secure and maintain this by physical means; and it fairly bewilders simple thinkers and metaphysicians like us with its multitudinous array of symptoms and suggestions and precautions; so that, as we read, we become alarmed with the fear and feeling that all possible organic evils are already assailing us, or surely will very soon. Our only remedy is to shut the book—not our eyes. Then Mind resumes its normal action, and we are once more free.
But at this rate time would fail us to give solution to all our official and periodic visitors. Here is the "Kingdom," which in these days of republican autocracy sounds as if it were rather late; and so, while it makes Mind to be the source of all good, it conditions the divine beneficence on his getting good pay in blood beforehand; which in our view very much mars his merit to the last degree.
