that we have observed in the scale of being up to man, how a single animated object in the creation regulates its own movements. The mechanism is not its own contrivance: and with this the unthinking animal has as little to do, as the infant with a knowledge of the structure and functions of its brain or heart.

There is a strict alliance, then, between man and every thing beneath him and around him;-an alli ance in the elements of his body, in the mode of its production, of its nourishment, and its decay. He is dependent upon the grass of the field. He has appetites and passions like the reptile and the brute.

But, with all these powerful affinities that bind him to the earth, he has within him a principle that looks beyond the present world; that tells him all he sees and contemplates in this life relates only to the inferior propensities of his nature; and that convinces him he alone is the visible lord of the creation, for whom all these things were made; and consequently that he must be the connecting link between the visible and invisible worlds.

Consider the higher operations of the human mind. Calculate its wonderful capacities. Examine the range of its contemplations, and its conceptions of ideal happiness and perfection, even when unaided by revelation. Observe the good man in adversity,-his mind supporting itself with a godlike magnanimity :-And what relation have these sparks of a brighter flamethese indications of a noble and superior nature, to

the present constitution of things?-what congruity have these gleams of light that are now and then permitted to shine over us, with the darkness and changeableness, and reptile forms, that are here continually before our eyes!

Whatever the materialist may theoretically conclude, he cannot seriously persuade himself, that a little difference in form, or a nicer texture in the brain, constitutes all the difference between himself and the highest order of brutes.

Human imagination cannot conceive a being destined to fill the station occupied by man on this earth, with a different constitution of body from the present, to which numberless objections might not be readily advanced by any considerate mind. Of what elements, it might be asked, would the materialist have the human structure to be composed? If they were essentially different from those every where else observable in nature, there could be neither affinity nor harmony between them: and their growth, increase, and dissolution, would be quite inconceivable. If the elements were the same, the body must be subject to the same laws. But, if subject to the same laws, and other creatures inferior in the scale were also designed by infinite wisdom as necessary to complete the chain; and that these also should be subject to the same natural laws; their organization must needs have exhi bited various lines of affinity and outward resemblance to that of man. Hence, the resemblance to the brute, in all that concerns the material structure of the

human frame, can be no reasonable argument in favour of materialism; nor the gradual ascent, from the living movements of a plant, through the several motions of zoophytes, molluscæ, insects, fishes, birds, and beasts, up to man, any argument of the human mind being composed of the same essence in its higher powers, with the inferior propensities of animated nature. And, in the whole chain of our reasoning, we have found it necessary to suppose an active energy operating in every particle of matter, organic and inorganic, according to its laws - an energy so efficient and intelligent as to entitle it to no other appellation than that of divine-to no lower origin than that of omnipotence.

CHAP. VII.

ON THE ZOOLOGICAL LECTURES OF
WM. LAWRENCE, F.R.S.

Ir may not be irrelevant in this place to notice what different conclusions may be drawn from the same facts. Since most of the preceding observations have been written, I have had the curiosity to examine some of the reasonings of the respectable writer whose name is at the head of this Chapter: and a few remarks have occurred to me on reading a passage in his third Lecture, which seem to be intimately connected with this subject. The passage to which I refer so much resembles the view I have taken, that it would seem to have been written purposely for my argument.

This author had, just before, been endeavouring to prove, that "the same kind of facts, the same reasoning, the same sort of evidence altogether, which show digestion to be the function of the alimentary canal, motion (that) of the muscles, the various secretions of

their respective glands, prove that sensation, perception, memory, judgment, reasoning, thought, in a word, all the manifestations called mental or intellectual, are the animal functions of their appropriate organic apparatus, the central organ of the nervous system: i. e. the brain."

The author does not merely state the analogy of the two cases, or two classes of effects; which might, possibly, in a qualified sense at least, have been admitted; but he goes farther, and maintains that a material organization does actually produce the phe. nomena in question;-not only those of the bodily system, but the highest operations of mind.* We cannot read the following sentence without being convinced that the writer wholly identifies himself with the materialists. "The immaterialists will not concede the obvious corallary of all these admissions -that the mind of man is merely that more perfect exhibition of mental phenomena, which the more complete developement of the brain would lead us to expect, and still perplex us with the gratuitous difficulty of their immaterial hypothesis."

The author discards a vital principle. He discards an immaterial principle. He also discards a material but very subtle and invisible agent, superadded to the obvious structure of the body, to enable it to exhibit vital phenomena :-each of which notions has been warmly maintained by others. I leave the reader to

* See 4th Lecture.