70 BEING AND FACULTIES OF MAN. 



to be in a direction tending to promote and invigorate 

 healthy and natural action only. 



We are now in a condition to contemplate with some 

 degree of wonder that most astonishing of all the pheno- 

 mena of natural magic that fearfully and wonderfully 

 made compound of immortality and evanescence that 

 " paragon of animals," Man ! To .contemplate, too, after 

 more than four thousand years of recorded fact and phi- 

 losophy, how much and how very little we know of ourselves. 

 Familiar in daily life with those who are continually setting 

 up their arrogant and hasty opinions as the finality of 

 knowledge, though they have never exhibited intellectual 

 energy enough to penetrate or discover a fraction of what 

 such a work as this has recorded, or to know how much 

 and how long philosophy has laboured for so little, the 

 conclusion of the Preacher seems to hover like an abiding 

 epitaph over the achievements of man's boasted wisdom 

 in the sighing and disappointed trisyllable Vanity ! 



How small a portion of the great eternal whole is 

 man's present existence, and yet of how many varied and 

 wonderful combinations is it made up ! A physical 

 system which possesses powers of assimilating food and 

 matter, both by analysis and synthesis, which no labora- 

 tory can equal, no skill in science compare with a 

 system whose arrangements eclipse telegraphy by the 

 rapidity and completeness with which they communicate 

 from Will to Act, from sense to sense, intelligence and 

 mandate whose electro-mechanical motive power no 

 machinery of human invention has yet been able to 

 approach a system of pneumatic, hydrostatic, optic, 

 and acoustic combination, each finer in its parts and more 

 perfect in its action than ingenuity can even hope ever 

 fully to understand and added to all these, Life, and 

 Mind, and Feeling forming a metaphysical co-operation, of 

 which we can only say IT is, and then sink our vaunted 

 knowledge into lip-sealed and humbled ignorance. 



