THE DOCTRINE OF FINAL CAUSES. 521 



that, after venturing into the region of life and 

 feeling and will, we are led to believe the fountain, 

 of life and will, not to be itself unintelligent and 

 dead, but to be a living mind, a power which aims 

 as well as acts. To us this doctrine appears like 

 the natural cadence of the tones to which we have 

 so long been listening; and without such a final 

 strain our ears would have been left craving and 

 unsatisfied. We have been lingering long amid 

 the harmonies of law and symmetry, constancy and 

 developement ; and these notes, though their music 

 was sweet and deep, must too often have sounded 

 to the ear of our moral nature, as vague and un- 

 meaning melodies, floating in the air around us, but 

 conveying no definite thought, moulded into no 

 intelligible announcement. But one passage which 

 we have again and again caught by snatches, though 

 sometimes interrupted and lost, at last swells in our 

 ears full, clear, and decided; and the religious 

 " Hymn in honour of the Creator," to which Galen 

 so gladly lent his voice, and in which the best 

 physiologists of succeeding times have ever joined, 

 is filled into a richer and deeper harmony by the 

 greatest philosophers of these later days, and will 

 roll on hereafter, the "perpetual song" of the 

 temple of science. 



