ht in by the severed
nerves to the points where, by inveterate custom, it has hitherto
learned to trace their origination. The report being the same, it
is naturally attributed to the same source.

But those skeptics who have mercilessly exposed these fallacious
arguments from analogy have themselves reasoned in the same way as
fallaciously and as often. When individual life leaves the
physical man, say they, cosmical life immediately enters the
corpse and restores it to the general stock of nature; so when
personal consciousness deserts the psychical man, the universal
spirit resumes the dissolving soul. When certain conditions meet,
a human soul is formed, a gyrating current of thought, or a vortex
of force: soon some accident or a spent impulse breaks the eddy,
and the individual subsides like a whirl in the air or a water
spout in the sea. When the spirit fuel of life is exhausted, man
goes out as an extinguished candle. He ceases like a tone from a
broken harp string. All these analogies are vitiated by radical
unlikeness between the things compared. As arguments they are
perfectly worthless, being spoiled by essential differences in the
cases. Wherein there is a similarity it falls short of the vital
point. There is no justice in the conception of man as a momentary
gyre of individual consciousness drawn from the universal sea by a
sun burst of the Spirit. He is a self ruling intelligence, using a
dependent organism for his own ends, comprehending his own
destiny, successively developing its conditions and acquiring the
materials for occupying and improving them, with a prevision of
eternity. A flower may just as well perish as live, a musical
sound cease as continue, a lamp be put out as burn on: they know
not the difference. Not so with the soul of man. We here overpass
a discrete degree and enter upon a subject

12 Crawford, On the Phadon of Plato.

13 Heber's Life and Works of Jeremy Taylor, vol. i. p. 69.

14 Dee Guays, True System of Religious Philosophy, Letter V.

within another circle of categories. Let the rash reasoner who
madly tries conclusions on a matter of such infinite pith and
moment, with data so inapt and poor, pause in sacred horror
before, having first "Put out the light, he then puts out
THE LIGHT!"

There are peculiarities in the soul removing it out of the range
of physical combinations and making a distinct destiny fairly
predicable of it. When we reflect on the nature of a sel