seem to some of us a very wild crotchet, yet,
at least, is not a mischievous one; and it may furnish matter for no
unpleasing reflection to think that within the abysses of earth, never
lit by a ray from the material heavens, there should have penetrated so
luminous a conviction of the ineffable goodness of the Creator--so
fixed an idea that the general laws by which He acts cannot admit of any
partial injustice or evil, and therefore cannot be comprehended without
reference to their action over all space and throughout all time. And
since, as I shall have occasion to observe later, the intellectual
conditions and social systems of this subterranean race comprise and
harmonise great, and apparently antagonistic, varieties in philosophical
doctrine and speculation which have from time to time been started,
discussed, dismissed, and have re-appeared amongst thinkers or dreamers
in the upper world,--so I may perhaps appropriately conclude this
reference to the belief of the Vril-ya, that self-conscious or sentient
life once given is indestructible among inferior creatures as well as
in man, by an eloquent passage from the work of that eminent zoologist,
Louis Agassiz, which I have only just met with, many years after I had
committed to paper these recollections of the life of the Vril-ya which
I now reduce into something like arrangement and form: "The relations
which individual animals bear to one another are of such a character
that they ought long ago to have been considered as sufficient proof
that no organised being could ever have been called into existence by
other agency than by the direct intervention of a reflective mind.
This argues strongly in favour of the existence in every animal of
an immaterial principle similar to that which by its excellence and
superior endowments places man so much above the animals; yet the
principle unquestionably exists, and whether it be called sense, reason,
or instinct, it presents in the whole range of organised beings a series
of phenomena closely linked together, and upon it are based not only
the higher manifestations of the mind, but the very permanence of the
specific differences which characterise every organism. Most of the
arguments in favour of the immortality of man apply equally to the
permanency of this principle in other living beings. May I not add that
a future life in which man would be deprived of that great source of
enjoyment and intellectual and moral improveme