776 
AN ESSAY ON THE FUTURE EXISTENCE 
the Deity had expended his machinery — that there was a void in 
the Divine mind. 
In looking throughout the whole of our globe (which, in compa- 
rison with the myriads of attendant planets, might be aptly com- 
pared to a grain of sand in the great sandy desert), we find a 
regular gradation from inanimate matter and vegetative life through 
all the varieties of animal existence, till we arrive at man ; but 
we have no reason to believe that the ascending scale terminates 
here, at the point of the human faculties, unless we suppose that 
the soul of man is the most perfect intelligence next to the Divinity. 
If the scale of being rises by such a regular process to man, by a 
parity of reason we may suppose that it still proceeds gradually 
through those beings that are endowed with superior faculties ; 
since there is an immensely greater space between man and the 
Deity than between man and the lowest reptile on the face of our 
globe. 
Some philosophers have supposed that we might have had a * 
prior existence in another planet, although not conscious of the cir- 
cumstance. We may have begun our being in Uranus, as the pla- 
net which we deem most remote from the sun ; or in one still 
more distant, if such there be — and may thence have migrated 
into other planetary bodies, till we passed into the human form on 
the earth. 
This is all fanciful conjecture, and visionary speculation ; but if 
it should be true, it would then be probable, that, after death, the 
mind would take its departure to the next planet between us and 
the sun, but with no more consciousness of our prior existence on 
this planet than we have here of any previous existence in Jupiter 
or Uranus. The mind, or spirit, or whatever makes the real in- 
destructible entity of a creature, might, according to the above 
hypothesis, lastly wing its way, after a temporary abode in the 
intermediate planet, into the sun. In that great luminary, which 
is calculated to be one million of times larger than the earth, the 
Infinite Spirit may, for the first time, infuse into it, according to its 
capacity, a consciousness of its prior existence, and of the pre- 
vious states through which it has passed, with the whole chain of 
acts and events that formed the substance of its antecedent history. 
It appears to be quite accordant with all that we know of the 
perfection and operations of the Deity, to conclude that a progres- 
sion of intellectual beings exist throughout the universe ; and, if it 
should please him to make men angels, to fix them after a period in 
a planet where death never comes, why, by the same reasoning, 
may he not elevate the brute, by giving him the same power and 
faculties which men now possess, and thus bring destinies to pass 
from one state of corporeal organization to another, in a long series 
