stow a
power of thinking on matter." But with the highest veneration for this
great reasoner, the founder of modern philosophical logic, I think there
is little of his usual strength of mind in this doubt. It appears to me
that he might as well have asked whether it might not have pleased God to
make a house its own tenant.

_Eub_.--I am not a professed materialist; but I think you treat rather
too lightly the modest doubts of Locke on this subject. And without
considering me as a partisan, you will, I hope, allow me to state some of
the reasons which I have heard good physiologists advance in favour of
that opinion to which you are so hostile. In the first accretion of the
parts of animated beings they appear almost like the crystallised matter,
with the simplest kind of life, scarcely sensitive. The gradual
operations by which they acquire new organs and new powers, corresponding
to these organs, till they arrive at full maturity, forcibly strikes the
mind with the idea that the powers of life reside in the arrangement by
which the organs are produced. Then, as there is a gradual increase of
power corresponding to the increase of perfection of the organisation, so
there is a gradual diminution of it connected with the decay of the body.
As the imbecility of infancy corresponds to the weakness of organisation,
so the energy of youth and the power of manhood are marked by its
strength; and the feebleness and dotage of old age are in the direct
ratio of the decline of the perfection of the organisation, and the
mental powers in extreme old age seem destroyed at the same time with the
corporeal ones, till the ultimate dissolution of the frame, when the
elements are again restored to that dead nature from which they were
originally derived. Then, there was a period when the greatest
philosopher, statesman, or hero, that ever existed was a mere living
atom, an organised form with the sole power of perception; and the
combinations that a Newton formed before birth or immediately after
cannot be imagined to have possessed the slightest intellectual
character. If a peculiar principle be supposed necessary to
intelligence, it must exist throughout animated nature. The elephant
approaches nearer to man in intellectual power than the oyster does to
the elephant; and a link of sensitive nature may be traced from the
polypus to the philosopher. Now, in the polypus the sentient principle
is divisible, and from one polypus