ow with which his surrounding
Associates shall bemoan his death, or pine for his loss; he cannot
pre-conceive this regret, he can form no thought of it; and therefore
cannot possibly have a desire to leave such regret or remembrance
behind him. Add to the principle of love, which exists in the inferior
animals, the faculty of reason which exists in Man alone; will the
conjunction of these account for the desire? Doubtless it is a
necessary consequence of this conjunction; yet not I think as a direct
result, but only to be come at through an intermediate thought, viz.
That of an intimation or assurance within us, that some part of our
nature is imperishable. At least the precedence, in order of birth, of
one feeling to the other, is unquestionable. If we look back upon the
days of childhood, we shall find that the time is not in remembrance
when, with respect to our own individual Being, the mind was without
this assurance; whereas the wish to be remembered by our Friends or
Kindred after Death, or even in Absence, is, as we shall discover, a
sensation that does not form itself till the _social_ feelings have
been developed, and the Reason has connected itself with a wide range
of objects. Forlorn, and cut off from communication with the best part
of his nature, must that Man be, who should derive the sense of
immortality, as it exists in the mind of a Child, from the same
unthinking gaiety or liveliness of animal Spirits with which the Lamb
in the meadow, or any other irrational Creature, is endowed; who
should ascribe it, in short, to blank ignorance in the Child; to an
inability arising from the imperfect state of his faculties to come,
in any point of his being, into contact with a notion of Death; or to
an unreflecting acquiescence in what had been instilled into him! Has
such an unfolder of the mysteries of Nature, though he may have
forgotten his former self, ever noticed the early, obstinate, and
unappeasable inquisitiveness of Children upon the subject of
origination? This single fact proves outwardly the monstrousness of
those suppositions: for, if we had no direct external testimony that
the minds of very young Children meditate feelingly upon Death and
Immortality, these inquiries, which we all know they are perpetually
making concerning the _whence_, do necessarily include correspondent
habits of interrogation concerning the _whither_. Origin and tendency
are notions inseparably co-relative. Never did a Child