ged from; you never
ask the question as to them, but for yourself you are anxious. If you
had not been, would creation have been any less creation?--if you cease,
will it not still be as great? Truly, though, your mistake is one of too
little, not of too much. You assume that the animals become nothing;
but, truly, nothing dies. The very crystals into which all the so-called
primitive substances are formed, and which are the first forms of
organization, have a spirit in them; for they obey something which
inhabits and organizes them. If you could decompose the crystal, would
you annihilate the soul which organized it? The plant absorbs the
crystal, and it becomes a part of a higher organization, which could no
more exist without its soul; and if the plant is cut down and cast into
the oven, is the organic impulse food for the flames? You, the animal,
do but exist through the absorption of these vegetable substances, and
why should you not obey the analogical law of absorption and
aggregation? You killed a deer to-day;--the flesh you will appropriate
to supply the wants of your own material organization; but the life, the
spirit which made that flesh a deer, in obedience to which that shell of
external appearance is moulded,--you missed that. You can trace the body
in its metamorphoses; but for this impalpable, active, and only real
part of the being,--it were folly to suppose it more perishable, more
evanescent, than the matter of which it was master. And why should not
you, as well as the deer, go back into the great Life from which you
came? As to a purpose in creation, why should there be any other than
that which existence always shows,--that of existing?"

I now began to notice that all the leading ideas which the daemon offered
were put in the form of questions, as if from a cautious
non-committalism, or as if it dared not in so many words say that they
were the absolute truth. I felt that there was another side to the
matter, and was confident that I should detect the sophistry of the
daemon; but then I did not feel able to carry the conversation farther,
and was sensible of a readiness on the part of my interlocutor to cease.
I wondered at this, and if it implied weariness on its part, when it was
replied,--"We answer to your own mind; of course, when that ceases to
act, there ceases to be reaction." I cried out in my own mind, in utter
bewilderment,--"Objective or subjective?" and ceased my questionings.

The