the activity of the spirit, and there would thus soon be an end
of the organism of spiritual life, and therewith of all action of the
soul. To prevent which there must be added to the first system or
organic powers a second one, which shall make good the losses sustained,
and sustain the decay by a chain of new creations ready to take the place
of those that have gone. This is the organism of maintenance.

Still further. After a short period of activity, when the equal balance
of loss and reparation is once removed, man quits the stage of life, and
the law of mortality depopulates the earth. There is not room enough for
the multitude of sentient beings, whom eternal love and wisdom seemed to
have called to a happy existence, to live side by side within the narrow
boundaries of our world, and the life of one generation shuts out the
life of another. Therefore was it necessary that new men should appear,
to take the place of those who had departed, and that life should be kept
up in unbroken succession. But of creation there is no longer any trace;
what now becomes new becomes so only by development. The development of
man must come to pass through man, if it is to bear a proportion to the
original number, if man is to be cultivated into man. On this account a
new system of organic powers was added to the two that had preceded it,
which had for its object to quicken and to develop the seed of humanity.
This is the organism of generation.

These three organisms, brought into the most thorough connection, local
and real, go to form the human body.

S 3.--The Body.

The organic powers of the human body naturally divide themselves into two
principal classes. The first class embraces those which no known laws
and phenomena of the physical world enable us to comprehend; and to these
belong the sensibility of the nerves and the irritability of the muscles.
Inasmuch as it has hitherto been impossible to penetrate the economy of
the invisible, men have sought to interpret this unknown mechanism
through that with which they were already familiar, and have considered
the nerves as a canal conducting an excessively fine, volatile, and
active fluid, which in rapidity of motion and fineness was held to excel
ether and the electric spark. This fluid was held to be the principle
and author of our sensibility and power of motion, and hence received the
name of the spirit of life. Further, the irritability of the muscles was
held