22 
together in a continuous order, and that the apparent gulf 
between the animal and the vegetable, and the far greater 
abyss that separates man and the brutes, do not exist. 
Yet to establish this, it is necessary to neglect indications 
of a break of continuity which Nature itself suggests, — 
such as the fact that the animal in all its forms requires 
nutrition which living organisms alone produce, while the 
vegetable in all its forms can supply its waste from inorganic 
matter, — and, further, to argue illogically that because we 
cannot always distinguish the primary forms of each, there- 
fore distinctions do not exist, — which evolution from a 
structureless germ contradicts. While the distinctions be- 
tween the two classes which are more fundamental than 
those that are merely physical must be neglected for this 
purpose. The most highly - developed vegetable has no 
consciousness of its own existence, much less anything re- 
sembling intelligence. And if the physical characteristics 
of man differ less widely from those of the most highly- 
developed animal than the animal differs from the vege- 
table; yet reason, with its godlike powers of speech and 
abstract thought, its apprehension of the beautiful, and its 
conscience of good and evil, constitutes an essential distinction 
between the man and the mere animal, to which all the rest 
of Nature can supply no parallel. Why is Science to be 
searching for a unity in which these essential differences must 
be neglected, and violence done to the dictates of reason by 
denying them ? Surely, to the unprejudiced mind, they are 
in themselves sufficient to prove that the true basis of the 
unity of that universe in which differences so essential are 
found, must be sought in Him in whom all things, dead 
and living, rational or irrational, subsist. A belief in one 
living and true Gfod supplies a rational basis : nothing else 
can. 
11. The character of that order of Nature which Science 
desiderates in the inorganic world is very clearly exhibited in 
the world of organic existences. Indeed, the classification of 
these existences in the natural histories of the vegetable and 
animal kingdoms, if arranged according to the relations and 
connections of the organization of the several forms beginning 
from the lowest, illustrates, far more precisely than any 
definitions could explain, what is the meaning both of the order 
and of the unity of Nature, Without inquiring at present into 
the causes of the order, it is obvious that from the simplest 
forms both of vegetable and of animal life to the highest, Nature 
exhibits an ascending scale, — not that of an inclined plane, but 
in distinct steps, and these not running upwards all in one series 
