and have proclaimed Almighty Nature to be sole and self-sufficing. Democritus and Epicurus, Locke and Helvetius, Gall and Comte, have all inculcated methods of investigation which unavoidably involve this awfully partial theory of the mystery of existence. Fanatics, who generally unite the high aspirations of the Idealist with the low conceptions of the Materialist, have learned in every church of every age to hate their bodies, curse Nature, and die unannealed.

Could the sacred theme be illustrated by the uncertain play of glowing figures, a poet might declare that Nature is not the prison-house of the soul, but the nursery of his young endowments. Yet it is never left behind and forgotten, for it changes and unfolds its inexhaustible capabilities along with the growth of the angelic child. It is his garden of sunny sports, where he waves his joyous limbs, and blossoms a flower among flowers. It is the school at which he learns to know and to name himself aright; and then the university of faculties where all his energies are every day provoked into nobler strength. It is his odorous bower, under the many-coloured shade of which he reclines at ease in blessed contemplation of the Supernal Beauty. It is his marriage-bed, his home, his place of work, his sphere of duty, his native land, his everything he can fulfil, until he reach that strain of holiness that turns all the objects of all the senses into the harmonious proportions of one resounding temple, himself at once the anointed king, and the self-abnegating priest of the sacred fane. Nay, there are times when all that is private and particular about a man is suffered so to ebb, that what is public and Divine overflows and fills creation. He stands on the crested pinnacle of some high Benledi. The purple morning salutes him from the ocean beyond the sea.

Misty hills of birch and fir are at his feet; and beclouded mountains stretch and tumultuate before him far beyond the western horizon, like the distracted billows of some traditionary world of waters which were spellbound by a word. The sun flashes over the tops and surfaces of the opening scene. The village begins to smoke beside the river that thrids the neighbouring dale like a silver vein. The thick dews steal off the hillsides, gather themselves up into weird, tall shapes, and stalk away up a hundred glens. Beamy lakes awake on every side, the changeful eyes of the fruitful earth, the mighty parent of his body; and from the deep full heart that kindles within, they motherly return his kindred gaze. A thin and timid south wind springs awhile into the air, and murmurs among his tangled locks. Then do wooded hills and rugged mountains, river and dale, runnels and glens, sea and lakes, ocean, sun, and sky, all glow, dilate, and melt around him on his cairn; and he lifts his front into the heavens. It is then that nature, in the flush of his exultation, is indeed the body, and himself the soul of all.

This conscious shedding of the soul through a man over the whole domain of nature is only a rare occurrence. It is not the purpose of God that it should be otherwise, else the present business of the world would be at a stand. A man is an animal in nature. In each human figure the soul is brought into that communication with nature, which is called life. It is for the most part a union of contact rather than one of diffusion; so that a fresh character, full of exuding sympathies like the young Davy, is said, even by a refiner so subtle as Coleridge,' to touch nature at every point.' One is isolated from the surrounding world of matter by sensation. His sensations cut him out both from and within the rest of nature, and

he walks abroad an individual shape, 'the paragon of animals,' to suffer and to do. Yet his organs of sensation, his whole body, which is just one composite organ of sensation, are themselves objects of sensation to him as much as the men and women, houses and streets of the city.

Now, all that is individual, and not universal, in human thought and emotion is complicated with sensation actual or remembered; and in this sense the body is the organ of emotion and thought. The multiplied observations of organology have discovered a somewhat definite relation between different parts of the body-for the nervous system is the real body of an animal-and the different composite manifestations of human nature. The individual life of a man proceeds from the combination, or rather the confluence of the infinite spiritual force within, and the finite sensitive force without. The soul perceives nature through peculiarly organised parts of nature, different properties of nature through differently organised parts of nature (in this instance through the cerebrospinal axis of man in its parts); and this perception of nature by the soul through cerebral matter is an ultimate fact in the natural history of the world. All the parts of the brain are organs of sensation, each of its own kind; for there are as many sensitivities in man as there are qualities and combinations of qualities in nature. Every reaction of the soul on the perception (direct or remembered) of a quality in nature, is the manifestation of a faculty, sentiment, or propensity; each manifestation being the resultant, as the geometer would say, of the concurrent impulses. Gall and his followers, however, have recklessly omitted to reflect on the significant circumstance that, according to the strictest experimental

method of the positive sciences, the discovery that one thing or set of things is essential to the production of a given phenomenon, is not by any means the would-be far greater discovery that it is all that is essential to the phenomenon in question. The body and the soul are both essential to the manifestation of human life and character. As the body comes into shape, grows, decays, and decreases, so do they ; and in proportion as any organ of the brain grows and decays, so does the composite manifestation with which it corresponds: for the body with its parts is essential. If the soul were not immortal and indivisible and unchangeable, its mutations would affect the exhibition of human character on an inconceivably more awful scale than do the changes of the body.

The soul is everywhere. The physiologist may talk of sensations darting like light from the eye, or from the finger to the brain, and say that the volition to raise the hand or open the mouth in speech, electrically thrills through the voluntative nerves from the brain to the muscles of these organs, but nobody will believe him. The will is the fashioning lip and uplifting arm. The landscape is in the eye. The soul is in direct communion with nature at every point of the body. That intercourse differs in degree at different points, and that so much as to look different in kind; yet there is no greater difference than there is between the outward appearance of one nerve and another, the anatomist knows how little. At all events there is neither subordination nor insubordination among the parts. There is only combination. The organs of the body, from the consecrated brain-to the eye of man no fitter an organ for the soul than the heartout to the little finger, are so linked together in respon

sive harmony, that a false note struck on one, jars on the strings of all. The brain, the spinal marrow, and those leashes and knots of glistening nerves that run all through the body that soft, though fibrous nervous system is, indeed, the most intimate under-clothing of the soul, under the immediate cling of which it moves and glows. Next come the covering textures of the specific conservative senses in the lungs, in the heart, in the bowels, and elsewhere; mucous membranes softer than purple velvet. Then the thick and thewy coat of muscle. Above these are the four specific senses, with their curious ornamental workmanship. Over all is the panoply of that universal sense which introverts a man, renders him the object of his own sensations, and fences him round from every other person and appearance. Yet where does the man end and the rest of nature begin? What are the bones, the teeth, the nails, the cuticle, and the hair? Where is the line of demarcation? Is not the whole of nature, stars and all, the body of the soul?

Whatever be the last reply to this quaint inquiry, it is evident that the nervous system, or cerebro-spinal axis, is the true body of the soul; yet no part of that system is so inferior to another as not to be close upon the indwelling spirit. The soul looks out upon nature through every transparent particle of it alike. It is said that the brain is the sovereign part, as if all the others were mere accessories and conductors to it. A limb may be removed, but the brain must not be touched, else the whole body will cease to be any more translucent to the soul than a statue of marble. The head cut off, the rest of the body dies.' Yet it seems that the truth is in the fact that, of the whole nervous system, the extent of the part that is injured is the only thing concerned in the