Man and Nature. 285 



raised, mountains are lowered, and continents are 

 chained together. 



Herbert Spencer eloquently apostrophises man as 

 " a product of to-day," but the constituents of our 

 body are as old as the universe, and our energy 

 coeval with eternity. Though mortal, we have also 

 an immortality, for even when dead our atoms shall 

 in other forms live for ever. Some of our past im- 

 mortality is now smiling at us in the flowers, some 

 now laughing at us in the air, some now fascinating 

 us in a bewitching face; while our present mortality 

 is but that " Bridge of Sighs " which spans the silent 

 River of Death, and joins one form of immortality 

 with another. Immortal we thus are, ever have been, 

 and ever shall be. Existing from the beginning, we 

 shall last to the end. Coeval with the Deity, we shall 

 outlast the Judgment. But the present mortality is 

 the hey-day of being. We not only live and exist 

 now as men, but existence itself is conscious and 

 luminous in us. We have truly lived before, but 

 darkly. Now we are active volcanoes of being, the 

 flames and torches of creation leaping above the 

 dead uniformity of denseness, and forming one grand 

 illumination of intelligence ; nature at a white-heat 

 of evolution, burning and betraying itself to itself in 

 its flame, lighting up the outer darkness of hitherto 

 impenetrable mystery, and in its own consumption 

 rising again from its embers with ever-renewed youth, 

 vigour, and prescience to re-run the race of being. 

 Tongues of flame, therefore, we are, which shine as 



