336 The Spiritual in Animals * [May, ! 
declining. This, rightly or wrongly, is taken as a proof 
that we were intended for a higher destiny than this world 
can offer. But the lower animals likewise become life- 
weary ; the gaiety and buoyancy of their earlier days j 
vanishes ; they, too, feel inclined to exclaim with the poet — 
“ Life is had, 
And then we sigh and say, can this be all ?” 
! 
The melancholy which all animals experience in the ! 
evening of their day is fundamentally the same. From the 
vanitas vanitatum of Solomon to the sadness of “ a gib-cat, j 
ora lugged bear, or an old lion,” there is one continued 
series of phenomena, differing in degree, but alike in kind 
and in cause. 
Have the lower animals, then, no right to say that life | 
has palled on their taste — that this world does not satisfy , 
their cravings ? It is possible, indeed, that if a draught of j 
some magic elixir could restore to them all they have left j 
behind in the flight of years, — their youthful vigour and 
their flow of spirits, — this melancholy would disappear. But 
would not a similar change come over man ? 
Again we proclaim that our being is in part spiritual, on 
the very satisfactory ground that mere matter cannot be 
supposed to think, remember, reason, or even see or hear, 
and that spirit, being of its own essence indestructible, our 
immortality necessarily follows.* Be it so : the lower 
animals also see and hear, think, and remember. On our 
own showing, then, their nature, like our own, is partly 
spiritual, and like ourselves — if spirit is essentially in- 
destructible — they may look forward to a future life. What 
that life may be for them we have not the faintest know- 
ledge. It may have relations with-that which awaits our- 
selves, or it may be totally distinct. We question if the 
more highly organised among them would find the prospect 
of annihilation satisfactory. To a transmigration of souls 
they would also have good right to object. To be perhaps 
born again as men of the nineteenth century — heirs to 
“ competitive examination, sewage irrigation, and inter- 
national arbitration,” with the woman’s rights movement 
* A strange writer in a somewhat heterodox journal, whilst assigning souls 
to animals, plants, and, if we understand him rightly, to minerals, and whilst 
fully admitting the immortality of the spiritual part of man, does not consider 
such part as indivisible. On the contrai) , he maintains that the soul of every 
animal is an offset from that of its male parent. Every spermatozooid — or, as 
he holds, spermatozoon — contains a portion of the soul of the animal by which 
it is secreted. The female parent contributes merely the material part of the 
young animal. How all these points were ascertained it does not appear. 
