286 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



To form a conception of the immortality of the soul, then, we must 

 place ourselves at that point of view to which men rarely and hardly 

 rise, of the simplicity and the indefectibility of all those principles of 

 force that fill the universe. We must train ourselves to understand 

 that what we see is nothing in comparison with what we do not see. 

 The whole force, the whole spring, of the most complex movements, 

 the most magnificent phenomena of Nature, and the most subtle opera- 

 tions of life, thought included, proceed from the infinite commingling 

 of an infinity of series of invisible and unextended principles, whose 

 activities ascend in the scale of perfection from simple power of move- 

 ment up to supreme reason. Human personality, such as we see and 

 know it, is only a coarse and complex result from those of these primi- 

 tive activities which are the best and deepest thing in us. It is not 

 that personality which is immortal that is no more immortal than 

 the motive force of a steam-engine is, or the electricity of a voltaic 

 battery, although movement and electricity are of themselves inde- 

 structible. It is not that personality which can aspire to a home in 

 the bosom of God. Our true personality, our real J, that which may 

 without illusion count on a future life, is unity released from every 

 material bond, and all concrete alloy; it is that force, necessarily pure, 

 which has a more or less clear consciousness of its own relations with 

 the infinity of like unities, and which more or less draws near to them 

 by thought and by love. It is beyond our power to conceive what 

 will become of that unity when, quitting its prison of flesh, and soaring 

 into the ideal ether, it will no longer have organs with which to act ; 

 but what we can affirm is that, precisely by reason of this freedom, it 

 will rise to a clearer knowledge of all that it had only known obscurely, 

 and to a purer love of what it had adored only through the veil of 

 sense. And this certainty, which is the ennobling and elevating force 

 of life, is also the consolation for death. Revue cles Deux Jfondes. 



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NATURE AND ORIGIN OF TOE DRIFT-DEPOSITS OF 



THE NORTHWEST. 



By Prof. N. H. WINCHELL, 



STATE GEOLOGIST OF MINNESOTA. 



II. Origin of the Drift. 



THE first records of exact observations pertaining to the drift seem 

 to have been made in the first quarter of the present century, 

 and are wholly confined to the appearances and positions of the bowl- 

 ders, or "travelled rocks," that constitute a striking object to the sci- 

 entific observer throughout the northern portions of Europe and 

 America. In 1819 the memoirs of the Wernerian Society of Edinburgh 



