e desire to
live in the remembrance of his fellows: mere love, or the yearning of
kind towards kind, could not have produced it. The dog or horse perishes
in the field, or in the stall, by the side of his companions, and is
incapable of anticipating the sorrow with which his surrounding
associates shall bemoan his death, or pine for his loss; he cannot
pre-conceive this regret, he can form no thought of it; and therefore
cannot possibly have a desire to leave such regret or remembrance behind
him. Add to the principle of love which exists in the inferior animals,
the faculty of reason which exists in Man alone; will the conjunction of
these account for the desire? Doubtless it is a necessary consequence of
this conjunction; yet not I think as a direct result, but only to be
come at through an intermediate thought, viz. that of an intimation or
assurance within us, that some part of our nature is imperishable. At
least the precedence, in order of birth, of one feeling to the other, is
unquestionable. If we look back upon the days of childhood, we shall
find that the time is not in remembrance when, with respect to our own
individual Being, the mind was without this assurance; whereas, the wish
to be remembered by our friends or kindred after death, or even in
absence, is, as we shall discover, a sensation that does not form itself
till the _social_ feelings have been developed, and the Reason has
connected itself with a wide range of objects. Forlorn, and cut off from
communication with the best part of his nature, must that man be, who
should derive the sense of immortality, as it exists in the mind of a
child, from the same unthinking gaiety or liveliness of animal spirits
with which the lamb in the meadow, or any other irrational creature is
endowed; who should ascribe it, in short, to blank ignorance in the
child; to an inability arising from the imperfect state of his faculties
to come, in any point of his being, into contact with a notion of death;
or to an unreflecting acquiescence in what had been instilled into him!
Has such an unfolder of the mysteries of nature, though he may have
forgotten his former self, ever noticed the early, obstinate, and
unappeasable inquisitiveness of children upon the subject of
origination? This single fact proves outwardly the monstrousness of
those suppositions: for, if we had no direct external testimony that the
minds of very young children meditate feelingly upon death and
immor