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1872.] 375 [Price. 
dergone molecular change? Thoughts are not material growths ; are not 
buds or sprouts; are not protuberances or indentations, or eng caved 
lines ; or secretions or excretions of matter, or the shifting of any: mo- 
lecular living particles, by any testimony ever presented to the human 
mind. Men cannot conceive that matter can be thought, or thought 
matter; and all its phenomena declare it unlike all else in created nature, 
and without element of matter. The mind of man has, indeed, a like- 
ness unto God. 
Dr. Huxley says, “the fundamental doctrines of materialism, like 
those of spiritualism, and most other ‘isms,’ lie outside the limits of 
philosophical inquiry ;’’ says, ‘‘it is also in strictness true, that we know 
nothing about the composition of any body whatever as it is.’ But is 
not all knowledge within the limits of philosophical inquiry? And, 
though we cannot know how matter, or life, or mind can be, or what, in 
essence they are, yet we certainly can and do know much of the prop- 
erties and actions of each and all of them, and of their differences from 
each other. We must not become so far positivists as to refuse to know 
all that is knowable; and especially may we not ignore the human mind, 
It is our duty to search after all attainable truths, and when we haye 
come to the limit of our faculties, there reverently to pause, in the pres- 
ence of an infinity of knowledge known only to God. To seek knowledge 
only of things physical, and things of life, and there to set the limit of 
y, seems but the prudery of scientific caution, that can win no 
credit for wisdom, nor increase our trust in the authority of the teacher. 
inqt 
In this discourse we have assumed that, in its origin, life hada Creator, 
upon the logic that such effect must have an adequate and a far-trans- 
cending cause. As matter and life logically demanded a Creator of each, 
and neither produced the other, so does the mind or soul, by even higher 
claim, logically demand a H savenly Father. Its nature is too dis- 
tinguishable and transcending to be confounded with matter or life. Life 
dominates matter, mind dominates them both, and God them all. The 
soul asserts a higher than a generated parentage, and a large immunity 
from. the mutations of matter. Matter ever slides from under mind, but 
its integrity is untouched. The matter that has sustained the life of one 
as old as the writer, has wholly passed away from his body more than 
ten times ; and the more rapidly changing parts have been eliminated with 
vastly greater frequency. Yet the mind in this body has a memory of 
conscious identity from the year next before the first of the current cen- 
tury. Such imperishable mind can have no element of ever-shifting mat- 
ter in it; and must be a being of different origin and nature, both from 
the material of this body and the life of this body. That material is 
ever changing, and is often renewed, until the body’s death ; and when 
the life that maintained the organization shall have succumbed, and have 
ceased to exist, except as it has been continued in a living progeny, we 
justly infer that the mind, or soul will outlive the organization and the 
life, and will return to its Giver, to share His pleasure, or meet His. 
