CHAP. VIII.J LIKENESSES IN ANIMALS AND PLANTS. 275 



neither of which can be denied ? The answer to this must 

 depend upon the philosophical system of him who Adec 

 answers the question, and especially on his accept- i uesfion - 

 ance of and his mode of conceiving a first cause. 



The teaching of what I regard as true philosophy is, 

 that the types shadowed forth to our intellects by material 

 existences, are copies of divine originals, and respond to pro 

 totypal ideas in God. Those who deny the existence of God, 

 or who deny that we can know anything as to such ex 

 istence, may, of course, consistently enough deny or doubt 

 the existence of such prototypal ideas. On the other hand, 

 the teaching referred to has been ridiculed as if the main- 

 tainers of it must necessarily either pretend to possess some 

 far-reaching intellectual power not shared by most natu 

 ralists, or else assert that the very natural phenomena were 

 themselves sufficient to make manifest such transcendent 

 conceptions. But, in fact, the acceptance of such prototypal 

 ideas follows as a consequence, not upon the investigation of 

 irrational nature considered by itself, but upon its investiga 

 tion considered as a portion of one great whole, of which the 

 human mind, endowed with intelligence and free-will, forms 

 a part, and which is consequently to be viewed as the creation 

 of God. Let the idea of God be once accepted, and then it 

 becomes simply a truism to say that the mind of the Deity 

 contains all that exists in the human mind, and infinitely 

 more. Thus it is that such hmmm conceptions, gathered 

 from nature, must, so considered, be asserted to be ideas in 

 the divine mind also, just as every separate individual that 

 has been, is, or shall be, is present to the same mind. Nay, 

 more, such human conceptions can be but faint and obscure 

 adumbrations of corresponding ideas which must exist in 

 perfection and in fulness in the mind of God. 



We have seen that even by viewing organisms from all 

 the points of view possible to us, we can but attain to a verv 

 imperfect comprehension of such organisms. But the wider 

 and wider generalizations of broader and better-informed 

 minds continually advance our power of comprehension. AH 



T 2 



