'518 THE SENSORIAL FUNCTIONS. 



slowly developed. While the vital organs are 

 actively engaged in the execution of their different 

 offices, while the digestive apparatus is exercising 

 its powerful chemistry, while myriads of minute 

 arteries, veins, and absorbents are indefatigably at 

 work in building and modelling this complex frame, 

 the sentient principle is no less assiduously and no 

 less incessantly employed. From the earliest dawn 

 of sensation it is ever busy in arranging, in com- 

 bining, and in strengthening the impressions it 

 receives. Wonderful as is the formation of the 

 bodily fabric, and difficult as it is to collect its 

 history, still more marvellous is the progressive 

 construction of the human mind, and still more 

 arduous the task of tracing the liner threads which 

 connect the delicate web of its ideas, which fix its 

 fleeting perceptions, and which establish the vast 

 system of its associations; and of following the 

 long series of gradations, by which its affections are 

 expanded, puritied, and exalted, and the soul pre- 

 pared for its higher destination in a future stage of 

 existence. 



Here, indeed, we perceive a remarkable inter- 

 ruption to that regular gradation, which we have 

 traced in all other parts of the animal series; for 

 between man and the most sagacious of the brutes 

 there intervenes an immense chasm, of which we 

 can hardly estimate the magnitude. The functions 

 which are purely vital, and are necessary for even 

 the lowest degree of sensitive existence, are pos- 

 sessed equall)^ by all animals : in the distribution 

 of the faculties of mere sensation a greater in- 

 equality may be perceived : the intellectual facul- 

 ties, again, are of a more refined and nobler 



