may hold as to the source of life and world-forces; to the unseen, to the unknown, his questioning soul will soar, and shrink to fall from light, or be into darkness hurled.

'Angels of light, ye spirits of the air,

Peopling of yore the dreamland of our youth,
Ye who once led us through those scenes so fair,
Lead now, and leave us near the realm of Truth ;
So, if in dreams some truths we chanced to see,
Now in the truth some dreams may haply be."

Samuel Waddington, From Night to Night.

It is Life, whatever that be in its source and essence, which weaves every form of organic existence. Life is as a flame of which our body is the lamp; as a candle, placed in a candlestick. Intelligence is that in us, by which we use the light; and see that all things bear the relation of instruments to the principal agent; and by which we are conscious that there is something which matter embodies, which intelligence represents the Eternal Substance, the Eternal Mind, the Eternal God.1 There is no other scientific or philosophical way of explaining how it is that, while the outer man perishes day by day; the inner man, day by day, is renewed.

That which we arrive at by common experience, science, and philosophy, is: The soul is not beyond the bounds of our experience; it lies at the bottom of all, and consists of "two chief parts, differing in office only, not in essence-the understanding, which is the rational power apprehending; the will, which

1 Thomas Aquinas says in his "Summa," "All inanimate and irrational Nature bears to the Divine Being the relation of an instrument to the principal agent' "-" Tota irrationalis natura comparatur ad Deum sicut instrumentum ad agens principale,”

This will, and this

is the rational power moving."1 rational power, are assurance that we ought to live as if for ever; and that, therefore we can. At the basis of our moral existence lies the sense of freedom and of immortality. Reason prescribes that we use our freedom for the attainment of that condition of perfectness which is the true aim of our being. Thought is more than a function of our bodily organism; the brain, in a scientific sense, is not the cause of thought, but the agent of thought-causing power. The heart does not cause pulsation, nor do the lungs create breathing; they are agents by which particular effects are wrought. The lowest as well as the highest mental operations are separated from mere physiological pro- . cesses, not only by the chasm between mechanical motion and sensation, but by that further depth parting the intellectual from the sensitive. Those who speak of life as the efflorescence of matter, and of thought as a material product, are juggling with words. They know that life is not a product of matter, that consciousness is not a necessary product of life, that thought is not a necessary product of consciousness, and that the moral sense is not a necessary product of thought. Something was added to matter; and, by that addition, every advance was effected. Whatever that something was, it is now as the quintessence of our being. It searches the secret of the universe, and says, "I have found it, God!" the great aim of our life, and exclaims, "Immortality!" It is the inmost nerve, life, power, of art, of science herself; of philosophy; of religion. Is this greatest, best,

1 Burton's "Anatomy of Melancholy: The Soul," Part I, sect, i, subs, ix,

highest, thing in us; so blind and stupid, so foolishly wasteful of our best energies, as to make us throw away our labours for that which is nothing at all! To more than this does the falsely called scientific argument tend. We are told our individual consciousness, the species, the earth, the sun, our system, all systems, will perish; and eternal night and nothingness set in. It cannot be true. It puts to confusion our understanding; separates all things from reason; and is contradicted by the indisputable fact, confirmed by all far-reaching investigation, that Nature is a manifestation of the Highest Reason.

What we already know warrants the conviction that there are kinds of existence, modes of being, unnamable by us, and more to be desired than all that we can think. Those greater and better things that our men of genius, our poets, our artists, mentally saw; that gave to the enthusiast rapture, to the scientist visions of beauty. Knowing, as we do, that by nature's force is neither creation nor annihilation, but only a change of state, “it would be absurd," said Mill," to assume that our worlds exhaust the possibilities of Being. There may be innumerable modes of it which are inaccessible to our faculties, and which consequently we are unable to name." It is reasonable and safe to act upon the premonition of our heart, that we confront the future with duty well done and a life well spent. We have assurance that what takes place finally will be just and rational; for reason rules" from the atom to the star, from the solar and sidereal systems to our more wonderful bodily and mental systems." We are sure that something "Examination of Sir Wm. Hamilton's Philosophy," p. 14.

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better is the growing purpose of things; for we are not only capable of greater, juster, more rational things ; we continually reach after and attain them. The present is not the close of any existing thing: every scientist knows that. We have before us a strange and eventful history: every Christian believes that. The one universal, mighty, all-pervading Spirit; our Father in Heaven; impels all things, gives us all objects of thought, all power of thought, and leads us to the glory that excelleth.

RESEARCH XXIV.

PERSONAL IMMORTALITY.

History testifies to the fact that loss of belief in a Personal God is first a partial, then a total eclipse of virtue; and that, unless belief rises into a conception of eternal life, it cannot save men from moral death."Note-Book.

"For me, the genial day, the happy crowd,

The sport half-science fill me with a faith,
This fine old world of ours is but a child

Yet in the go-cart. Patience, give it time,
To learn its limbs; there is a hand that guides.”

LORD TENNYSON, The Princess.

WHEN we look at a varied landscape, from all visible points in it, however minute, there enters the eye, every second, a pencil of light that has travelled from the sun about one hundred and eighty-six thousand miles. This immense length is filled with undulations ranging about fifty thousand to the inch. If the landscape be contemplated by a multitude of persons, that vast length and those many undulations will enter the eye of every spectator every second of time. These many streams, in all sorts of directions, cross one another's paths without the slightest mutual disturbance, noise, or loss. This is not the dream of an enthusiast; it is capable of mathematical proof; and when we consider the subject of vision, in its entirety; the properties of light, and the