by chemical solvents. Still it exists, as the
same quantity of matter, with unchanged qualities as to its
essence, and will exist when Nature has manipulated it in all her
laboratories for a billion ages. Now, as a solitary exception to
this, are minds absolutely destroyed? are will, conscience,
thought, and love annihilated? Personal intelligence, affection,
identity, are inseparable components of the idea of a soul. And
what method is there of crushing or evaporating these out of
being? What force is there to compel them into nothing? Death is
not a substantive cause working effects. It is itself merely an
effect. It is simply a change in the mode of existence. That this
change puts an end to existence is an assertion against analogy,
and wholly unsupported.

Thirdly, following the analogy of science and the visible order of
being, we are led to the conception of an ascending series of
existences rising in regular gradation from coarse to fine, from
brutal to mental, from earthly composite to simply spiritual, and
thus pointing up the rounds of life's ladder, through all nature,
to the angelic ranks of heaven. Then, feeling his kinship and
common vocation with supernal beings, man is assured of a loftier
condition of

3 Sir Humphry Davy, Proteus or Immortality.

4 Bakewell, Natural Evidence of a Future State.

5 Butler, Analogy, part i. ch. 1.

of existence reserved for him. There are no such immense, vacantly
yawning chasms, as that would be, between our fleshly estate and
the Godhead. Nature takes no such enormous jumps. Her scaling
advance is by staid and normal steps.

"There's lifeless matter.
Add the power of shaping,
And you've the crystal: add again the organs
Wherewith to subdue sustenance to the form
And manner of one's self, and you've the plant:
Add power of motion, senses, and so forth,
And you've all kinds of beasts: suppose a pig.
To pig add reason, foresight, and such stuff,
Then you have man.
What shall, we add to man
To bring him higher?"

Freedom from the load of clay, emancipation of the spirit into the
full range and masterdom of a spirit's powers!

Fourthly, many strong similarities between our entrance into this
world and our departure out of it would make us believe that death
is but another and higher birth.6 Any one acquainted with the
state of an unborn infant deriving its sole nutriment, its very
existence, from its vascular connection with its mother could
hardly imagine