666 
AN ESSAY ON THE FUTURE EXISTENCE 
if animals can see, hear, and perform all the functions peculiar to 
their nature without any kind of spiritual substance, and if man 
cannot see, hear, or feel, without the possession of a spiritual sub- 
stance, then it would follow that the bodies of brutes are more 
effectual than our own*.” Then it is actually necessary, in order 
to maintain the inferiority of brutes compared with human nature, 
that animals should actually possess some kind of spiritual sub- 
stance by which we can account for their motives. 
It must be allowed that the connexion existing between mind 
and matter is certainly of a very arbitrary nature, as a perfect dis- 
play of mental capacity can only arise from a perfect development 
of organic form. We behold every where that perception, and all 
the faculties of the mind are inseparable from perfection of organ- 
ization in the brain and organs of sense : whenever the latter are 
defective and impaired, perception and its modes become impaired 
also. It is this arbitrary connexion that has furnished the material- 
ist with the main pillar of his argument. In this, however, he 
seems to have committed an error, very common in inquirers after 
nature, — that of confounding effects with their causes. The actions 
of life are the effects of organic structure ; — yet that organic struc- 
ture itself is only the effect of the operative power of a living prin- 
ciple, which is the primum mobile. This principle of life is the 
great architect which models all the organs of the body ; it is the 
essence of the perfect structure of parts ; it is, in fact, a first cause, 
of which organization is only an effect. 
We are entirely ignorant of the grand principle acting upon 
matter. If we follow it through a series of whatever length we may, 
it leaves us as much in the dark at the thousandth step as it did at the 
first one. This principle, acting upon matter in a wonderful and mys- 
terious manner, originates every species of living being, and brings 
it gradually to the full development of its species. Here, however, 
there is a limit. The principle, in every known individual case, ex- 
hausts itself, until the fabric which it had elaborated is brought to 
the common storehouse of mere matter. We witness this daily. 
We know that, when the living action of the body has ceased, the 
substantive matter of which it is composed is given up to the com- 
mon laws of inorganic matter. But to know this, and to know the 
death of animal life, are very different things. If life was the 
result of organization, then it necessarily follows that it would 
cease to exist when the body dies. But the organization is the 
product of the life, and, therefore, it must be evident that the life 
must have the priority in existence. And, when the body of an ani- 
mal is scattered to all the winds of heaven, and dissipated through 
* Thompson on Animal Restoration. 
