faculty of canine consciousness in the highest state of perfection and in unlimited degree. And yet, ignorant and superstitious men do something analogous to this, when, instead of 'walking humbly' with God, studying His Institutions and obeying His will, they ascribe to him their own qualities, praise Him, and implore Him to protect them as His devoted worshippers; they all the while violating His laws. In the words of Dr. Fellowes ('The Religion of the Universe'), "The only use which some religionists make of their understanding is to perplex it by inquiring into the nature of God. They leave the easy and feasible to attempt the impossible. They forsake the clear and simple to lose themselves in a region of clouds and darkness. For how can the finite hope to comprehend the infinite, the material the spiritual, the temporal the eternal? God can be known only in His works. THERE His agency is seen. THERE His will may be traced; there His laws be developed. But, what His nature is, or how He exists, must ever be past finding out. It is enough for us to know that He exists; but how He exists, it is vain, and indeed presumptuous to inquire.'"-("Science and Religion," by George Combe.) SECTION 1. DEATH. Like leaves on trees the race of man is found, They fall successive and successive rise; So generations in their course decay, So flourish these when those have passed away. We are such stuff as dreams are made of, "Thus I, considering everywhere Her secret meaning in her deeds, She often brings but one to bear," &c. Ask what is death, and why? Are God and Nature, then, at strife! But first, can we answer the question, What is Life? Herbert Spencer says it is "the continuous adjustment of internal relations to external relations ;" but these are only the conditions of its continued existence, and give no idea of what the "vital spark" is in itself. Schelling says, "Life is the tendency to individuation." I should say that Life is not only where the forces of nature are thus confined within definite limits, but also where they work towards a given object. But this again is only "its mode of action." But is not its mode of action all that we know of anything? Alas! we know not what Life is, whence it comes, or whither it goes. Whether, as Prof. Tyndall says, "not alone the more ignoble forms of animalcular or animal life, not alone the noble forms of the horse and lion, not alone the exquisite and wonderful mechanism of the human body, but that the human mind itself-emotion, intellect, will, and all their phenomena-were once latent in a fiery cloud;" or "whether, having waited until the proper conditions had set in, the fiat went forth, Let Life be," we do not know; but we do know that Life being here, Nature has made wonderful provision that the spark should not be blown out. An organic being is the result of all the forces and conditions which have been transmitted from frame to frame, each an improvement on the other, and nature has most bountifully provided that such improvements, the result of so much time and care, shall not be lost, but carried on. She brings forth at least fifty seeds for every one she is able to rear, and Life is kept at so high a pressure that there is not a plant or animal whose produce if left unchecked would not of itself soon cover the earth. "There is no exception to the rule," says Darwin, "that every organic being naturally increases at so high a rate, that if not destroyed, this earth would soon be covered with the progeny of a single pair." The rate of increase is geometrical. We have population always pressing on the means of subsistence, and this has been the mainspring of all progress and all order; for the most perfect order and arrangement exist in the mode in which life is kept within due bounds: the good and strong preserved, the weak destroyed, the object evidently being to keep the largest possible number in the greatest possible strength and vigour and capability of enjoyment-no respect being paid to our little individualities. In the scale of being, by a most systematic provision, we are all made comfortably* to fit into each other. The conversion of what is lower into what is higher is always *Perhaps it may be thought that "comfortably" applies as little in this case as when the hangman said his gallows would hold three comfortably; but the pain of death has always been greatly exagge rated for theological purposes. THE SCALE OF BEING. 249 going on, each animal is eaten and eater-end and beginning in succession. "The perch swallows the grub-worm, the pickerel swallows the perch, and the fisherman swallows the pickerel; and so all the chinks in the scale of being are filled." Man in his wisdom often tries to break this chain. He exterminates the crow, and the grubs eat his crops; he kills the little birds, and his crops fail altogether; he kills the owl, and mice abound; he kills the weasel, and he is eaten up with rats; and although the connection is less direct and the effects of less importance, if he were to get rid of his old maids, he would have no red clover or heart's-ease, for the old maids keep cats, and cats kill the mice, and the mice, if allowed to live, destroy the humble-bees, who alone are able to fructify and spread the red clover and heart's-ease. Near villages and small towns the nests of humble-bees are found to be more numerous than elsewhere, owing to the number of cats which destroy the mice. Alas for the butterfly, our emblem of immortality! however much he may dream of the life to come, he lives only till a new generation is begotten. His immortality is very short; but as he lives on nectar and love, he may consider that better than an eternity as a mere grub. His wife has so many children that it would destroy all man's hopes of "cabbage" if it were not for the ichneumon fly, who kills the caterpillars as they are hatched from the eggs. The oak alone is estimated to feed at least 200 kinds of caterpillars, so that the butterfly is immortal in the race, if not in the individual. Death is thus the parent of life: something always dies that another may live; one superabundant population supporting the life of other description of beings. But the new edition of life has generally been greatly improved; "the structure of an organism being a product of an almost infinite series of actions and reactions, to which all ancestral organisms have been exposed."*. This conservative power of greatly improved transmitted influences has Herbert Spencer. again to contend with its surrounding conditions, which ultimately again prevail, but not before all worth preserving has been passed into new bodies: every vacant place being filled up by some creature capable of increased enjoyment. "I disbelieve in the destruction of anything," says the author of the "Pilgrim and the Shrine," "of even a thought-but leaves a germ, idea, or cell of greater capacity than had before been possible, as a worthy result of the whole previous universe of being." "All death is nature in birth-the assumption of a new garment, to replace the old vesture which humanity has laid aside in its progress to higher being."* In this way is Death the parent of Life, and this is necessarily so, for Life is Force, and obeys all the laws of force, and the "invariability of the sum of all the energies of the universe forms the doctrine known as the Conservation of Energy." Thus Force is a fixed quantity, so that if it begins in one place it must necessarily be taken from another, or cause death elsewhere. "Each portion of mechanical or other energy which an organism exerts, implies the transformation of as much organic matter as contained this energy in a latent state," and "this organic matter yielding up its latent energy, loses its value for the purposes of life, and becomes waste matter needing to be excreted." It is dead, but it has been the parent of new life. All work implies waste; that is, organic matter yields up its latent energy, is exhausted and dies. "We cannot live, as to our total organism, unless we are always dying as to our atoms; every thought involves the death of some particle of the brain ;"‡ or, as Huxley says, 66 * * so much eloquence, so much of the body resolved into carbonic acid, water, and urea." This waste may be repaired, but the power of repairing is impaired with every exercise of "Memoir of Fichte," by W. Smith. "Principles of Biology," vol. 1, p. 176, by Herbert Spencer. Grindon, p. 34. |