REV. J. MARTINEAU AND BELFAST ADDRESS. 245 



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 im- 

 agine not only the vegetable, but the mineral world, re- 

 sponsive 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 observation. 



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 th? 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 chemi- 

 cal forces strong enough to cope with its most refrac- 

 tory 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 

 part and function of a Higher Life, as the living mov- 

 ing blood is subordinate to the living man. I resist 

 no such idea as long as it is not dogmatically imposed. 

 Left for the human mind freely to operate upon, the 

 idea has ethical vitality; but, stiffened into a dogma, the 



