42 
MEMOIR OF LAMARCK. 
arc made to emanate from a certain relation of parts 
and organs, — a particular conformation of material 
substances, just as a desired result is obtained by 
arranging in a certain order the parts of a piece of 
mechanism. 
“ But who can believe that such a faculty, so 
divine, so godlike and spiritual, can be the mere 
result of organization? That any juxta-position of 
material molecules, of whatsoever nature, from 
whatever source derived, in whatever order and 
forms arranged, and wherever placed, could generate 
thought, and reflection, and reasoning powers, could 
acquire and store up ideas and notions, as well con- 
cerning metaphysical as physical essences, may as 
safely be pronounced impossible, as that matter and 
spirit should be homogeneous. Though the intel- 
lectual part acts by the brain and nerves, yet the 
brain and nerves, however ample, however de- 
veloped, are not the intellect, nor an intellectual 
substance, but only its instrument, fitted for the 
passage of the prime messenger of the soul, its 
nervous fluid or power to every motive organ. It 
is a substance calculated to convey instantaneously 
that subtile agent, by which spirit can act upon 
body, wherever the soul bids it to go and enables it 
to act. When death separates the intellectual and 
the spiritual from the material part, the introduction 
of a fluid, homogeneous with the nervous, or related 
to it by a galvanic battery, can put the nerves in 
action, lift the eyelids, move the limbs ; but though 
the action of the intellectual part may thus be 
