ON THE NON-IMMOKTALITV OF ANIMALS. 377 
they adapted. They have no perception for the sublime and beau¬ 
tiful—no idea of right and Avrong*.' Denied all exercise of reli¬ 
gious feeling, they experience no veneration for an unseen being— 
no aspiration after a future state. 
Though not altogether incapacitated for certain improvements, 
yet these improvements are limited by narrow bounds, beyond 
which they cannot pass. The individual may be improved, but 
the advancement of the race is confined. While man is endowed 
with a mind and an intellect capable, on the one hand, of storing 
up the wonders of the past, and diving, on the other, into the mys¬ 
teries of the future—a mind, the limits of whose conception no 
one can confine, an intellect whose advance no one can stav. 
Here, then, do we perceive the great distinction between the 
human being and the brute; the one is confined to the same limited 
space, beyond which he has neither the power nor the inclination to 
advance; the other, however high may be his pursuits on earth, or 
however dignified his station, still feels, from time to time, 
“ A pleasing hope—a fond desire— 
A longing after immortality; 
A secret dread and inward horror 
Of falling into nought.” 
[It is Avith no ordinary degree of pleasure and exultation that we 
place this paper at the commencement of our Journal for the pre¬ 
sent month. It presents us Avith a scientific and rational, and 
Ave think, in the main, unansAverable vieAV of the question in 
dispute betAveen the author and Mr. Karkeek. The Scriptures 
certainly make no mention of the future state of the brute. There 
is nothing about him Avhich, as Mr. Spooner justly remarks, can 
be considered as a claim to immortality. He has lived—gene¬ 
rally speaking, he has lived happily—and he has gone to sleep. 
Yet Ave cannot persuade ourselves that Mr. Spooner has quite 
done him justice; and at some future period Ave may, perhaps, 
take up the cudgels in his behalf.—Y.] 
* Animals may be taught to do or not to do things by education—by dis¬ 
cipline to refrain from stealing or soiling a room ; but they have no innate 
feeling of right and wrong; no conscience — a faculty which, though wonder¬ 
fully influenced by education, habits, and association, is yet innate in all men, 
and forms, indeed, one of the strongest lines of demarcation between the hu¬ 
man being and the brute. 
