42 MEMOIR OF LAMARCK. 



are made to emanate from a certain relation of parts 

 and organs, — a particular conformation of material 

 substances, just as a desired result is obtained by 

 arranging in a certain order the parts of a piece of 

 mechanism. 



" But who can believe that such a faculty, so 

 divine, so godlike and spiritual, can be the mere 

 result of organization? That any juxta-position of 

 material molecules, of whatsoever nature, from 

 whatever source derived, in whatever order and 

 forms arranged, and wherever placed, could generate 

 thought, and reflection, and reasoning powers, could 

 acquire and store up ideas and notions, as well con- 

 cerning metaphysical as physical essences, may as 

 safely be pronounced impossible, as that matter and 

 spirit should be homogeneous. Though the intel- 

 lectual part acts by the brain and nerves, yet the 

 brain and nerves, however ample, however de- 

 veloped, are not the intellect, nor an intellectual 

 substance, but only its instrument, fitted for the 

 passage of the prime messenger of the soul, its 

 nervous fluid or power to every motive organ. It 

 is a substance calculated to convey instantaneously 

 that subtile agent, by which spirit can act upon 

 body, wherever the soul bids it to go and enables it 

 to act. When death separates the intellectual and 

 the spiritual from the material part, the introduction 

 of a fluid, homogeneous with the nervous, or related 

 to it by a galvanic battery, can put the nerves in 

 action, lift the eyelids, move the limbs ; but though 

 the action of the intellectual part may thus be 



