160 LIFE IN NATURE. 



desire and love ; and in the end we receive it back, 

 increased a thousandfold. Laid in the ground and 

 dying, the seed bears much fruit. 



I say, the authority of our instincts and emotions 

 with respect to Life is restored, and more than 

 restored. They 'rise into a liberty which could 

 hardly have been conceived before ; for, in truth, 

 all investigation into the laws of the material world, 

 and the discovery of the undisturbed dominion of 

 those laws in the organic kingdom, is but the casting 

 off of the shackles which constrain and bind them 

 down. We cannot think worthily of Life, until we 

 see that it is not in these physical things at all, 

 which possess but the shadows and appearances of 

 it; till we carry our thoughts beyond. For which 

 deliverance the needful condition is that our false 

 thought of Life, as an agent having its seat in the 

 few poor things that we call living, should be wholly 

 set aside. When we are freed from that persuasion 

 our minds can rise up and walk ; the palsy of our 

 limbs is cured. 



There is no such life as that which thus there 

 seems. There cannot be. The conception of such 



