NATURE AND HER HARMONIES. 47 



with such opinions. But let us strive as we may to see that 

 these things are so, it is all in vain. 



" For then my thoughts 

 Will keep my drooping eye-lids open wide, 

 Looking on darkness which the blind do see ; 

 Save that my soul's imaginary sight 

 Presents this shadow to my sightless view." 



Still the living revelation will be denned to us "Life 

 in one linked continuous chain from the Godhead to 

 the atom I" We can see that the universe has no abrupt 

 gradations I That Facilis descensus is the law so far as we 

 can trace it from inessential spiritual being down to man, 

 and certainly from man down to the atom. 



The process of beginning at the atom, and tracing the gra- 

 dations of life up to man, furnishes the most complete train 

 of analogical argumentation the mind is capable of realizing. 

 The microscopic observation of Physical Philosophy through 

 atomic existences up to sensible ones, has discovered here as 

 well a perfect chain of life, with an individual standing between 

 the extremes of each species, and partaking of the character 

 of both. 



When we arrive at the sensible, or visible, no ordinary 

 thinker, who has walked with his eyes open, can have failed 

 likewise of being astonished at the perfect symmetry of this 

 gradation. 



Who has not seen in the Sensitive Plant, the first faint 

 stir as in a dream before awakening, of the great active 

 principle of life which slumbers so profoundly passive in 

 the mountain and the forest ; and then in the (diona mits- 

 dpula) Fly-catching Plant, the smiling play of an odd 

 conceit across the features of the half-aroused sleeper ; and 

 then the full waking in the Hydra Polypus, this strange 

 creature, forming the link between vegetable and animal life, 

 sharing the character of both capable of dissection into a 

 thousand fragments yet reproducing from each a living 



