ind, and to hold your good resolution
to the last. But you, too, will agree that, except doing your duty, life
is the most important thing you have. The mother, when she sacrifices
her life to save her child, shews thereby how valuable she holds the
child's life to be; so valuable that she will give up even her own to
save it.

But did you never consider, again--and a very solemn and awful thought it
is--that this so important thing called life is the thing, above all
other earthly things, of which we know least--ay, of which we know
nothing?

We do not know what death is. We send a shot through a bird, and it
falls dead--that is, lies still, and after a while decays again into the
dust of the earth, and the gases of the air. But what has happened to
it? How does it die? How does it decay? What is this life which is
gone out of it? No man knows. Men of science, by dissecting and making
experiments, which they do with a skill and patience which deserve not
only our belief, but our admiration, will describe to us the phenomena,
or outward appearances, which accompany death, and follow death. But
death itself--for want of what the animal has died--what has gone out of
it--they cannot tell. No man can tell; for that is invisible, and not to
be discovered by the senses. They are therefore forced to explain death
by theories, which may be true, or false: but which are after all not
death itself, but their own thoughts about death put into their own
words. Death no man can see: but only the phenomena and effects of
death; and still more, life no man can see: but only the phenomena and
effects of life.

For if we cannot tell what death is, still more we cannot tell what life
is. How life begins; how it organizes each living thing according to its
kind; and makes it grow; how it gives it the power of feeding on other
things, and keeping up its own body thereby: of this all experiments tell
us as yet nothing. Experiment gives us, here again, the phenomena--the
visible effects. But the causes it sees not, and cannot see.

This is not a matter to be discussed here. But this I say, that
scientific men, in the last generation or two, have learnt, to their
great honour, and to the great good of mankind--everything, or almost
everything, about it--except the thing itself; and that, below all facts,
below all experiments, below all that the eye or brain of man can
discover, lies always a something nameless, invisibl