424 ADDITIONAL PHENOMENA OF NATURAL MAGIC. 



understand the separation of the material part or body of 

 the animal, for the matter of the one is not the matter 

 of the other, but we cannot so easily understand the 

 division of one life into two lives, or two lives into four, 

 for that is changing an identity into more than one. 

 Perhaps the Unitarians, who have so long denied the 

 existence of the Trinity, on the ground of its absolute 

 impossibility, will aid us with their logical taper here. 



Some of our readers will possibly think the argument am 

 ad hominem might be applied to us on this subject, on the 

 ground of what we have said ourselves in a preceding 

 page as to the fixity of truth, but it must be borne in 

 mind that we have never with the inherent consciousness 

 of our own purely contingent and dependent existence 

 ventured to assert, or been able to find any ground for 

 asserting, the essential fixity and unchangeableness of 

 anything, as being positive, eternal, or superior to Omnipo- 

 tence, and we have nowhere found science able to de- 

 monstrate anything of the kind. Manifestly nothing is 

 absolutely fixed in this life but by the choice of Omnipo- 

 tence, and only during the pleasure of that Great Power ; 

 and scientific men may ridicule miracles, and talk of 

 impossibility as they will, while they cannot demonstrate 

 to themselves, or to any one else, the primary law of their 

 own existence, or the permanency of it, or that what is 

 what they are most sure about, viz., their own lives may 

 not cease to be. If this, then, be all the certainty of 

 what men are most sure of, what becomes of other realities 

 on the argument of analogy ? Change is everywhere, and 

 something more than change in the mysterious region of 

 vitality creation and extinction, increase and diminution, 

 numerical as well as quantitative, are everywhere. 



