understanding will extend the same conviction to the phenomena in every department of nature. In many instances our knowledge may be so imperfect that we are incapable of pointing out the chain of connection between a disease and its organic cause; but he is no philosopher who doubts the reality of the connection.

One reason of the obscurity that prevails on this subject in the minds of persons not medically educated is ignorance of the structure and functions of the body; and another is that diseases appear under two very distinct forms-structural and functional-only the first of which is understood, by common observers, to constitute a proper organic malady. If an arrow is shot into the eye, derangement of the structure is evident, and the most determined opponent of the natural laws will at once admit the connection between the blindness which ensues and the lesion of the organ. But if a watchmaker or an optical instrument maker, by long-continued and excessive exertion of the eye, becomes blind, the disease is called functional; the function, from its organ being overwrought, cannot be successfully executed, but frequently no alteration of structure can be perceived. The philosophic physiologist, however, doubts not that there is a change of structure corresponding to the functional derangement, although human observation cannot detect it. He never says that it is nonsense to assert that the patient has become blind in consequence of infringement of the organic laws. It is one of these laws that the eyes shall be exercised moderately, and it is a breach of that law to strain them

to excess.

The same principle applies to a large number of diseases occurring under the organic laws. Imperfections in the tone, structure, or proportions of certain organs may exist at birth, so hidden by their situation, or so slight, as not to be readily perceptible, but which are not on that account the less real and important; or deviations may be made gradually and imperceptibly from the proper exercise of the functions; and from one or other cause disease may invade the constitution.

Religious persons term disease arising from such hidden causes dispensations of God's providence; the careless name them unaccountable events; but the enlightened physician views them as the results of imperfect or excessive action of the organs, and proceeds on the conviction that they have been caused by deviations from the laws which

regulate the animal economy. The objection that the doctrine of the organic laws is unsound because diseases come and go without uneducated persons being able to trace their causes, has not a shadow of reason to support it. I may err in my exposition of these laws, but I hope that I do not err in stating that neither disease nor death, in early and middle life, can take place under the ordinary administration of Providence, except when the organic laws have been infringed.

The pains of premature death, then, are the pre-ordained consequences of infringement of these laws; and the object of submitting us to them probably is to inculcate on us the necessity of obeying the laws that we may live, and to prevent our abusing that capacity of remedial action which is inherent to a certain extent in our constitution.

Let us now view death as an institution appointed to Man. If the constitution of Man, when sound in its elements, and preserved in accordance with the organic laws, is calculated to endure in health from infancy to old age, and if death, when it occurs during the early or middle periods of life, is the consequence of departure from these laws, it follows that even in premature death a benevolent principle is discernible. Although the capacity of remedial action allows animals to recover from moderate injuries, yet the very nature of the organic laws must place a limit to it. If after the brain had been blown to atoms by a bombshell, life could be preserved, and health be restored as effectually as a broken leg and a cut finger can be healed, this would be an abrogation of the organic laws, and of all the curbs which they impose on the lower propensities; every incident which they afford to the activity of the higher sentiments and the intellect would be lost. The extent of the remedial capacity of Nature, however, in youth and middle life is much greater than is generally believed. The inherent tendency of the organism at these ages is towards restoration.

There is then a persistency in the processes of life which is truly wonderful; so great, indeed, that few patients who enjoy mental fortitude, sound sense, self-control, and the advice of an enlightened physician, need despair. Still there is a limit to it; and the limit is this-that any disobedience, from the effects of which restoration is permitted, must not be excessive in extent, and must not involve to too great a degree any organ essential to life, such as the

brain, the lungs, the stomach, or the intestines. The maintenance of the law, with all its advantages, requires that restoration from grievous derangements of these organs should not be permitted. When we reflect on the hereditary transmission of qualities to children, we perceive benevolence to the race in the institution which cuts short the life of an individual in whose person disease of essential organs has exceeded the limits of the remedial process; it prevents the extension of the injurious consequences of his errors over an innumerable posterity.

In premature death, then, we see two objects accomplished. First, the individual sufferer is withdrawn from agonies which could serve no beneficial end to himself, for, the limits of recovery having been transgressed, continued life would be protracted misery; and, secondly, the race is guaranteed against the transmission of his disease to posterity.

ness;

The disciple of Mr. Owen formerly alluded to,* who had grievously transgressed the organic law, and suffered_consequent pain, observed: Philosophers have urged the institution of death as an argument against Divine goodbut not one of them could have experienced for five minutes the pain which I now endure without looking on it as a merciful dispensation. I have departed from the natural laws and suffered the punishment; and I see in death only the Creator's benevolent hand stretched out to terminate my agonies when they cease to serve any beneficial end." On this principle, the death of a feeble and sickly child is an event of mercy to it. It withdraws a being in whose person the organic laws have been violated from useless suffering, and also from the possibility of transmitting its imperfections to others.

Pain and disease, then, as appointed consequences of transgressing the organic laws, are founded in benevolence and wisdom; and if death, in the early and middle periods of life, is an arrangement for withdrawing the transgressor from further suffering when return to obedience is impossible, and for protecting the race from the consequences of his errors, it also is a wise and benevolent institution.

This leaves only death in old age as a natural, and, to Man, an unavoidable institution of the Creator. It will not be denied that if old persons, when their powers of

* See page 96,

enjoyment are exhausted and their cup of pleasure is full, could be removed from this world, as we have supposed the lower animals to be, in an instant, and without pain or consciousness, to make way for a fresh and vigorous offspring, fitted to run the career which the old have terminated, there would be in the arrangement no lack of benevolence to the race. At present, while we live in ignorance and habitual neglect of the organic laws, death probably comes upon us with more pain and suffering, even in advanced life, than would be its legitimate accompaniment if we placed ourselves in accordance with them; so that we are not now in a condition to ascertain the natural amount of pain necessarily attendant on death. Judging from such facts as have been observed, we may infer that the close of a long life, founded at first upon, and afterwards spent in accordance with, the Creator's laws, would not be accompanied with great organic suffering, but that an insensible decay would steal upon the frame.

Be this, however, as it may, I observe, in the next place, that, as the Creator has bestowed on Man animal qualities which fear death, and reason which carries home to him the conviction that he must die, it is an interesting inquiry whether He has provided any natural means of relief from this combination of terrors. "And what thinkest thou," said Socrates to Aristodemus, "of this continual love of life, this dread of dissolution, which takes possession of us from the moment that we are conscious of existence?" "I think of it," answered he, "as the means employed by the same great and wise Artist deliberately determined to preserve what He has made." Lord Byron strongly expressed the same opinion, and was struck with the energetic efforts which he instinctively made, in a moment of danger, to preserve his life, although in his hours of calm reflection he felt so unhappy that he wished to die.

I have ascertained from numerous confidential communications, as well as by observation, that even when external circumstances are equally prosperous, there are great differences in the desire of life in different minds. Some persons have assured me that death, viewed even as the extinction of being, and without reference to a future state, did not appear to them in the least appalling, or calculated, when contemplated as their certain fate, to impair the enjoyment of life; and these were not profligate men, whose vices might make them desire annihilation

as preferable to future punishment, but persons of pure lives and pious dispositions.

These ideas, however, are thrown out only as probabilities, suggested by the facts before described. Whatever degree of truth they may have, it is certain that the Creator has bestowed moral sentiments on Man, and arranged the theatre of his existence on the principle of their supremacy; and these, when duly cultivated and enlightened, are calculated to save him from the moral terrors of death.

Let us inquire, then, how the moral sentiments are affected by death in old age as a natural institution.

The true view of death, as a natural institution, is that it is an essential part of the system of organisation; that birth, growth, and arrival at maturity as completely imply decay and death in old age as morning and noon imply evening and night, as spring and summer imply harvest, or as the source of a river implies its termination. Besides, organised beings are constituted by the Creator to be the food of other organised beings, so that some must die that others may live.

Man, for instance, cannot live on stones, on earth, or on water, which are not organised, but must feed on vegetable and animal substances; so that death is as much and as essentially an inherent attribute of organisation as life itself. If the same animals and men had been destined for a permanent occupation of the earth, we may presume, from analogy, that God-instead of creating a primitive pair of each, and endowing them with extensive powers of reproduction, with a view to their ushering young beings into existence-would have furnished the world with a definite complement of living creatures, perfect at first in all their parts and functions, and that these would have remained without diminution and without increase.

To prevent, however, all chance of being misapprehended, I repeat that I do not at all refer to the state of the soul or mind after death, but merely to the dissolution of organised bodies that, according to the soundest view which I am able to obtain of the natural law, pain and death during youth and middle age, in the human species, are consequences of departure from the Creator's law, while death in old age, by insensible decay, is an essential part of the system of organic existence as now constituted that this arrangement admits of a succession of individuals, substituting