ON IMMOKTALITY. 163 



Nature's behaviour in the past to man has really been, 

 what her good and peaceful intentions to him when he 

 quits this life really are. 



We are assured, indeed, by Bishop Butler, that there 

 is no true analogy in all Nature which would lead us to 

 think that death will prove the destruction of a living 

 creature ; * none, save the delusive semblance of analogy, 

 furnished by the decay and dissolution of the vegetables. 

 But, we must ask, is not the life of the vegetable, the 

 plant, palpably arrested and destroyed at its dissolution ; 

 and is not the life of the animal, including man, as 

 palpably? And as the plant dies for ever as an indi- 

 vidual plant, as all that goes to constitute it a plant is 

 dissolved and scattered at the consummation of the event 

 called death, so dies the animal in like manner. The 

 phenomenon, whether to the eye of sense or of reason, 

 is the same in both instances. Further still, there is no 

 rigid line of separation between the plant and the animal; 

 the naturalist cannot say when he has passed the boun- 

 daries of the one kingdom and entered into the other; 

 on this account also we must conclude that death, which 

 destroys the one, destroys the other. As the plant dies, 

 then, so dies the animal, and as the animal dies, so also 

 the man, for in like manner there is no rigid line of 

 separation between them, and no special reason to be 

 urged why man is to have an exceptional immortality. 

 But since the candid and philosophic bishop wrote more 

 than a century ago, only too many analogies have been 

 suggested by Science for her several regions of inquiry 

 astronomy, geology, physiology, natural history all 

 pointing to the one conclusion that all individual things 

 must die, the animal as the vegetable, the man as the 

 animal; nay, even the stars, the sun, the earth itself, 



* Analogy, ch. i., " On a Future Life." 



