254 MENTAL CONSTITUTION OF ANIMALS. 



What has chiefly tended to take mind, in the eyes of learned 

 and unlearned, out of the range of nature, is its apparently 

 irregular and wayward character. How different the manifes- 

 tations in different beings ! how unstable in all ! at one time 

 so calm, at another so wild and impulsive ! It seemed impos- 



called sensations of the same? Is not, therefore, the wonder of matter 

 also receiving the consciousness of other matter called ideas of the inind, 

 a wonder more flowing out of and in analogy with all former wonders, 

 than would be, on the contrary, the wonder of this faculty of the mind 

 not flowing out of any faculties of matter ? Is it not a wonder which, 

 so far from destroying our hopes of immortality, can establish that 

 doctrine on a train of inferences and inductions more firmly established 

 and more connected with each other than the former belief can be, as- 

 soon as we have proved that matter is not perishable, but is only liable 

 to successive combinations and decombinations ? 



" Can we look farther back one way into the first origin of matter than 

 we can look forward the other way into the last developments of mind ? 

 Can we say that God has not in matter itself laid the seeds of every 

 faculty of mind, rather than that he has made the first principle of mind 

 entirely distinct from that of matter? Cannot the first cause of all we 

 see and know have fraught matter itself, from its very beginning, with all 

 the attributes necessary to develop) into mind as well as he can have from 

 the first made the attributes of mind wholly different from those of 

 matter, only in order afterwards, by an imperceptible and incomprehen- 

 sible link, to join the two together ? 



" . . . . [The decombination of the matter on which mind rests] is 

 this a reason why mind must be annihilated ? Is the temporary reverting 

 of the mind, and of the sense out of which that mind develops, to their 

 original component elements, a reason for thinking that they cannot 

 again, at another later period and in another higher globe, be again 



recombined, and with more splendour than before ? The New 



Testament does not, after death here, promise us a soul hereafter uncon- 

 nected with matter, and which has no connexion with our present mind 

 a soul independent of time and space. That is a fanciful idea, not 

 founded on its expressions, when taken in their just and real meaning. 

 On the contrary, it promises us a mind like the present, founded on 

 time and space ; since it is, like the present, to hold a certain situation 

 in time, and a certain locality in space ; but it promises a mind situated 

 in portions of time and of space different from the present: a mind com- 

 posed of elements of matter more extended, more perfect, and more glo- 

 rious : a mind which, formed of materials supplied by different globes, 

 is consequently able to see farther into the past, and to think farther 

 into the future, than any mind here existing : a mind which, freed from 

 the partial and uneven combination incidental to it on this globe, will 

 be exempt from the changes for evil to which, on the present globe, 

 mind as well as matter is liable, and will only thenceforth experience 

 the changes for the better which matter, more justly poised, will alone 

 continue to experience : a rnind which, no longer fearing the death, the 

 total decomposition, to which it is subject on this globe, will thenceforth 

 continue blest and immortal." HOPE, on the Origin and Prospects of 

 Man, 1831. 



