which we know as gravitation, cohesion, chemical force, radiant force,
and electricity, without which the material universe could not exist for
a moment in its present form, and perhaps not at all, since without
these forces, and perhaps others which may be termed atomic, it is
doubtful whether matter itself could have any existence. And still more
surely can we refer to it those progressive manifestations of Life in
the vegetable, the animal, and man--which we may classify as
unconscious, conscious, and intellectual life,--and which probably
depend upon different degrees of spiritual influx. I have already shown
that this involves no necessary infraction of the law of continuity in
physical or mental evolution; whence it follows that any difficulty we
may find in discriminating the inorganic from the organic, the lower
vegetable from the lower animal organisms, or the higher animals from
the lowest types of man, has no bearing at all upon the question. This
is to be decided by showing that a change in essential nature (due,
probably, to causes of a higher order than those of the material
universe) took place at the several stages of progress which I have
indicated; a change which may be none the less real because absolutely
imperceptible at its point of origin, as is the change that takes place
in the curve in which a body is moving when the application of some new
force causes the curve to be slightly altered.

_Concluding Remarks._

Those who admit my interpretation of the evidence now adduced--strictly
scientific evidence in its appeal to facts which are clearly what ought
_not_ to be on the materialistic theory--will be able to accept the
spiritual nature of man, as not in any way inconsistent with the theory
of evolution, but as dependent on those fundamental laws and causes
which furnish the very materials for evolution to work with. They will
also be relieved from the crushing mental burthen imposed upon those
who--maintaining that we, in common with the rest of nature, are but
products of the blind eternal forces of the universe, and believing also
that the time must come when the sun will lose his heat and all life on
the earth necessarily cease--have to contemplate a not very distant
future in which all this glorious earth--which for untold millions of
years has been slowly developing forms of life and beauty to culminate
at last in man--shall be as if it had never existed; who are compelled
to suppose t