xxxii PREFACE. 
to organ in every living being, great or small: and in all their complexity still governed 
by law, and most nicely adapted to material nature, and to all the subtle elements within 
which God has placed them. 
How feeble I always felt myself whenever I touched upon subjects such as these! But 
my Class always heard me with respectful attention: for I did not introduce these subjects 
too often, nor did I dwell upon them too long. And I sometimes ventured to conduct my 
Class to thoughts of a still higher aim, connected with that being—Man—the last in order 
of creation, and made in the image of the Author of his being. Seeing that Man has 
the gift of prescience (small it may be, and vanishing from thought at once when we 
think of the Omniscient Prescience of God)—that he can design and contrive implements 
for his own use and of the nicest skill, which will give him new powers over material 
nature, and make him acquainted with things furthest removed from the ken of sense— 
the greatest and the least things accessible to the sight of man—that he has the capacity 
of abstract thought, and is capable of forming language, and making others understand it— 
that, using this as an implement of imagination, he can evolve thoughts which act upon 
the most powerful emotions of the heart, and fill the soul with images of glory—that he 
can invent another language of a mighty but far different power, which shuts out the imagi- 
nation, and deals only with the abstractions of pure reason—and that through the might of 
this new language, and working with it among the elements of pure reason, he can 
logically grasp results inaccessible to any other implements of human thought—that he can 
tell the ever-enduring speed at which light (the first-born of heaven) travels through 
astral space, and count the number of its waves—that working with this logic of pure 
reason he can tell the astronomer to lift up his telescope to a certain point in the sky 
and there behold a planet never before seen by the eye of man. 
That Man in his animal nature is to be counted but as one in the great kingdom of 
things endowed with life, we at once admit; but that in the functions and powers of his 
intellect (here just touched on by my feeble hand) he is absolutely removed from any 
co-ordination with the lower beings of Nature, is, I firmly believe, one of the most certain of 
well apprehended truths. We all admit that Nature is governed by law: but can we believe 
that a being like man is nothing but the final evolution of organic types worked out by 
the mere action of material causes? How are such organic evolutions to account for our 
sense of right and wrong, of justice, of law, of cause and effect, and of a thousand other 
abstractions which separate man from all the other parts of the animal world; and make him, 
within the limits of his duty, prescient and responsible. 
The facts and sentiments connected with that which marks Humanity,—the works 
of man’s hands, the visions of his eyes, the aspirations of his heart—appear to me utterly 
