ox THE NON-IMMORTALITY OF ANIMALS. 
519 
before we arrive at the winning-post: we become distanced, and 
are placed nowhere. There is but one way—but that way is 
straight, open, and sure—and that is to believe, with the poet, that 
“ All the wild inhabitants of woods, 
Children of air, and tenants of the floods; 
All, all are equal, independent, free ; 
And aU are heirs of immortality.” 
I contend that the body of an animal—whether man or sheep, lion 
or tiger, cat or mouse—never had life in any other sense than that 
it was possessed, used, actuated, by the living vital (immaterial) 
principle. That this principle, not being compounded, was not 
liable to dissolution;—that this unchanging principle, whether few 
or many in union with the same soul, are sufficient to denominate 
W. Youatt the infant, and W. Youattthe aged, the same person; 
and, when it shall please Him to withdraw these immaterial parti¬ 
cles, and to clothe it with a new body, it will be sufficient to deno¬ 
minate W. Youatt dying and W. Youatt living again, the same 
person both soul and body. 
The immaterial principle being withdrawn, the function of 
organization is at once fairly at an end. This function is con¬ 
nected with, or rather displays itself in, the substance of the being; 
but, so far from being inseparable from that substance, and a pri¬ 
mary quality of it, it is, in many instances, easily separated, and, 
once separated, it never in any case returns to the same union. 
All our chemistry, all our science—by what name soever we may 
be pleased to call it—fails us here. Let us analyze and decompose 
as we may, we can obtain no knowledge; and the combined skill 
of all the chemists in the world cannot so distil these bodies, as to 
fetch us in a phial the component ingredient that causes a wolf to 
eat a sheep, or a sheep to eat turnips. 
With regard to the latter part of your argument, if the question 
means whether the same body will be raised, whether the same 
atoms which have composed the living animal in the present 
world will constitute the body raised in the next, both reason and 
revelation answer it in the negative. 
Nor, Sir, need you be alarmed as to where those monstrous 
animals of old are to stand, or how are they to move. One of 
Sharon Turner’s ‘‘conjectural possibilities” is, “that our earth may 
be a nursery of the immaterial principle; that it is here brought into 
its first state of being in animal forms with a profusion that seems 
to us unexplainably lavish; that it may be elsewhere used in 
some advanced or ulterior condition, and in other modes of material 
existence. There is a very large part of our globe which has no 
relation to its human population; the supposition, therefore, seems 
