REV. JAMES MARTINEAU AND BELFAST ADDRESS. 247 



with the aids furnished by Science, enable us to observe ; 

 nothing more. The evidences as to consciousness in 

 the vegetable world depend wholly upon our capacity to 

 observe and weigh them. Alter the capacity, and the 

 evidence would alter too. Would that which to us is 

 a total absence of any manifestation of consciousness 

 be the same to a being with our capacities indefinitely 

 multiplied ? To such a being I can imagine not only 

 the vegetable, but the mineral world, responsive to the 

 proper irritants, the response differing only in degree 

 from those exaggerated manifestations, which, in virtue 

 of their magnitude, appeal to our weak powers of obser- 

 vation. 



Our conclusion, however, must be based, not on 

 powers that we imagine, but upon those that we possess. 

 What do they reveal ? As the earth and atmosphere 

 offer themselves as the nutriment of the vegetable 

 world, so does the latter, which contains no constituent 

 not found in inorganic nature, offer itself to the animal 

 world. Mixed with certain inorganic substances 

 water, for example the vegetable constitutes, in the 

 long run, the sole sustenance of the animal. Animals 

 may be divided into two classes, the first of which 

 can utilise the vegetable world immediately, having 

 chemical forces strong enough to cope with its most 

 refractory parts ; the second class use the vegetable 

 world mediately ; that is to say, after its finer portions 

 have been extracted and stored up by the first. But in 

 neither class have we an atom newly created. The 

 animal world is, so to say, a distillation through the 

 vegetable world from inorganic nature. 



From this point of view all three worlds would con- 

 stitute a unity, in which I picture life as immanent 

 everywhere. Nor am I anxious to shut out the idea 

 that the life here spoken of, may be but a subordinate 



