10G LAY SERMONS, ESSAYS, AND REVIEWS. [vn. 



waters of a calm sea, but which drain away to mere films in the 

 hand which raises them out of their element ? 



Such objections as these must, I think, arise in the mind of 

 every one who ponders, for the first time, upon the conception of 

 a single physical basis of life underlying all the diversities of 

 vital existence ; but I propose to demonstrate to you that, not 

 withstanding these apparent difficulties, a threefold unity 

 namely, a unity of power or faculty, a unity of form, and a unity 

 of substantial composition does pervade the whole living 

 world. 



No very abstruse argumentation is needed, in the first place 

 to prove that the powers, or faculties, of all kinds of living 

 matter, diverse as they may be in degree, are substantially 

 similar in kind. 



Goethe has condensed a survey of all powers of mankind into 

 the well-known epigram : 



&quot; AVarum treibt sicli das Volk so und schreit I Es will sick ernahren 



Kinder zeu&amp;lt;;en, und die nahren so gut es verma^. 

 ***** 



Weiter bringt es kein Mensch, stelP er sich wie er auch will.&quot; 



In physiological language this means, that all the multifarious 

 and complicated activities of man are comprehensible under 

 three categories. Either they are immediately directed towards 

 the maintenance and development of the body, or they effect 

 transitory changes in the relative positions of parts of the body, 

 or they tend towards the continuance of the species. Even 

 those manifestations of intellect, of feeling, and of will, which we 

 rightly name the higher faculties, are not excluded from this 

 classification, inasmuch as to every one but the subject of them, 

 they are known only as transitory changes in the relative 

 positions of parts of the body. Speech, gesture, and every other 

 form of human action are, in the long run, resolvable into 

 muscular contraction, and muscular contraction is but a 

 transitory change in the relative positions of the parts of a 



