NATUEE AND HER HARMONIES. 
47 
witli such opinions. But let us strive as we may to see that 
these things are so, it is all in vain. 
" For then my thoughts 
Will keep my drooping eye-lids open wide, 
Looking on darkness Avhich the blind do see ; 
Save that my soul's imaginary sight 
Presents this shadow to my sightless view." 
Still the living revelation will be defined to us — "Life 
in one linked continuous chain from the Godhead to 
the atom I" We can see that the universe has no abrupt 
gradations I That Facilis descensus is the law so far as we 
can trace it from inessential spiritual being down to man, 
and certainly from man down to the atom. 
The process of beginning at the atom, and tracing the gra- 
dations of life up to man, furnishes the most complete train 
of analogical argumentation the mind is capable of realizing. 
The microscopic observation of Physical Philosophy through 
atomic existences up to sensible ones, has discovered here as 
well a perfect chain of life, with an individual standing between 
the extremes of each species, and partaking of the character 
of both. 
When we arrive at the sensible, or visible, no ordinary 
thinker, who has walked with his eyes open, can have failed 
likewise of being astonished at the perfect symmetry of this 
gradation. 
Who has not seen in the Sensitive Plant, the first faint 
stir as in a dream before awakening, of the great active 
principle of life which slumbers so profoundly passive in 
the mountain and the forest ; and then in the (diona mus- 
cipula) Fly-catching Plant, the smiling play of an odd 
conceit across the features of the half-aroused sleeper ; and 
then the full waking in the Hydra Polypus, this strange 
creature, forming the link between vegetable and animal life, 
sharing the character of both — capable of dissection into a 
thousand fragments — ^yet reproducing from each a living 
