examine Mr. Coleridge's first principles more in detail;
and I can but briefly notice their application to the successive stages of
ascent, from the first rudiments of individualised Life, in the lowest
classes of the mineral, vegetable, and animal creation, to its crown and
consummation in the human body. Beginning with magnetism, by which, in its
widest sense, he means what he improperly calls the first and simplest
differential act of _Nature_ (he should rather have said the first and
simplest conception that we can form of a differential act of God, in the
work of creation), he supposes the pre-existence of chaos, not, indeed, in
the Miltonic sense--

"For hot, cold, moist, and dry, four champions fierce,
Strive _there_ for mast'ry, and to battle bring
Their embryon atoms,--"

but rather as one vast homogeneous fluid, and even _that_ he suggests not
as a historical fact, but as the appropriate symbol of a great fundamental
truth. The first effort of magnetic power, the first step from
indifference to difference, from formless homogeneity to independent
existence, is seen in the tranquil deposition of crystals; and an
increasing tendency to difference is observable in the increasing
multitude of strata, till we come to organic life; of which the vegetable
and animal worlds may be regarded as opposite poles; carbon prevailing in
the former and azote in the latter; and vegetation being characterised by
the predominance of magnetism in its highest power, as reproduction;
whilst the animal tribes evince the power of electricity, as shown in
irritability and sensibility. Passing over the forms of vegetation, we
come to the polypi, corallines, &c., in which individuality appears in its
first dawn; for a multitude of animals form, as it were, a common animal,
and different genera pass into each other, almost indistinguishably. The
tubipora of the corals connects with the serpula of the conchylia. In the
_mollusca_ the separation of organs becomes more observable; in the higher
species there are rudiments of nerves, and an exponent, though scarcely
distinguishable, of sensibility. In the snail, and muscle, the separation
of the fluid from the solid is more marked, yet the prevalence of the
carbonic principle connects these and the preceding classes, in a certain
degree, with the vegetable creation. "But the _insect_ world, taken at
large (says Mr. Coleridge) appears as an intense _Life_, that has
struggled itself loose, an