tion and to fall back (as a wave falls to the level of the sea) into total identity with the "oversoul," the Greater Providence itself; a supposition, which would necessarily involve the logical and inevitable destruction and utter extinction of the special soul, as such; and it would vanish into silence and oblivion. True, this might happen, or it might not, at the will of the Creator: if the ocean covered the globe, a wave might roll eternally on a given circle. Says Jean Paul Richter, "I believe in a harmonious, an eternal ascent, but in no created culmination." 1

§ 4. THE LESSER PROVIDence.

Returning to the question of the origin and nature of the Lesser Providence, it is to be considered that the soul, so constituted, must exist as an object and a fact of the divine consciousness, in like manner as the body. The power given and specialized in that particular way in the creation of the soul in the universal distribution of variety in the totality of the universe, under that consciousness, must depend, always, for the amount of power, on the divine power in its freedom as self-acting and self-directing cause in the whole providential order and plan of the divine thought; and so, the capability of any soul to think-to perceive, conceive, see, understand, judge, know, and do, must depend at bottom upon the amount of power so given; and just so, from the lowest self-conscious animal up to the highest human intelligence. But nothing but the power and the specialization of it are given from that direction and on that side. Identity with the divine Existence extends no further than to this fundamental essence of the soul as a finite power of thought. By virtue of that identity it is power in fact of the nature of the power of thought, in a state of activity, and that "sparkle of our creation light whereby men acknowledge a Deity burneth still within," and, as such, self-acting, self-directing cause so far. Dif

1 Kampaner Thal, Werke, XIII. 44.

ference from the universal soul consists in the special constitution of the finite thinking sphere, so far as the specialization goes; and it embraces the whole specialization and no more, the limitations being, on one side, the physical organization and the outward world, and on the other, the given amount of power and the necessary laws of thought; and between the two sides or halves of the sphere (as it were) is, in fact, not a hollow sphere, nor a blank-sheet sensorium, but only that invisible sheet-plane which is yet neither a substance, nor a space, but a mere region of possibility of thinking, action, and sense-perception, and that same All Possibility in which God himself exists and creates the universe as His thought. In this unbounded possibility, in which lies the whole outer world and field of sensible experience, however undiscoverable its limits to us, as well as our own inner world of intellectual conception, there is no end to the creations of God and man: art and science have no bounds in this direction, being limited, in this respect, in man, or animal, only in the exhaustion of his power to act, to discover, and to create, but being, in God, as boundless as all the worlds of his creation, that are, or have been, and as inexhaustible as the eternal continuity of his existence and power to think and create.

But it is in the special constitution and by virtue of the specialization, only, that special thinking and a particular consciousness arise. The whole individual identity of the soul as a thinking personality depends upon the specialties, and it must cease if and when they cease. The soul so specialized, and bounded like a wave out of the whole ocean of soul, stands as a created object and a thought in the divine consciousness, in the same manner as a tree, or a microscopic cell of a tree; but while it is such object in the divine mind, it is also a special subject for itself. But a tree, or a cell, is not, any more than is a body without a soul. The inner powers active in a cell are in motion under the divine consciousness alone, like all the powers of phys

ical nature, to which we give no higher name than mechanical, chemical, electrical, or, in general, physical forces. But when we come to a self-acting, self-directing, self-conscious power, a new name is necessary in all science and in all languages to designate this new fact and peculiar phenomenon; and it is called a mind or a soul. As Plato says, and it cannot well be better said, "the beginning of motion is that which moves itself; and this can neither perish, nor be created, or all heaven and all creation must collapse and come to a standstill, and never again have any means whereby it might be moved and created"; and again, he says, "every body which is moved from without is soulless, but that which is moved from within, of itself, possesses a soul, since this is the very nature of soul."1 And so, says Bacon, "all spirits and souls of men came forth out of one divine limbus":

"Porter. I have some of 'em in Limbo Patrum, and there they are like to dance these three days." — Hen. VIII., Act V. Sc. 3.

It has become as difficult in science to draw the dividing line between the vegetable and animal kingdoms in respect of organization as it has been, in metaphysics, to mark the line of division between instinct and intelligence. There is a large class of animalcular cell-like bodies, with reference to which naturalists of the highest distinction differ in opinion as to whether they belong to the animal or to the vegetable kingdom; and of many species, even an Ehrenberg cannot determine with his microscope whether they are to be classed with animals, or with plants. Science is every day shifting some species from the one kingdom into the other. That they have an apparently voluntary motion, vibratory, or oscillatory, or revolving, is not sufficient to determine the question; for in this they are all alike. And Lankester finally resolves the essential organic difference. between the two kingdoms into a difference of merely

1 Phædrus, Works (Bohn), I. 321.

chemical operations. Nevertheless, it is easy to distinguish a mere excito-motory instinctive motion, whether of a sensitive plant, or a sensitive animal, which is a mechanical or a physiological result of organization and applied forces, from an independent self-moving, self-directing cause and a selfconscious power. The most delicate water-creeper, the most infinitesimal rotifer, starts and stops, goes and comes, as he wills. A loom, be it ever so ingeniously constructed, presents only a certain mechanical practicability of cloth being woven it has not, nor can it have, a self-moving power to weave cloth, as the spider has, to spin and weave his web. Applied power, as of water or steam, may put the instrumental machine in motion; but even then, it weaves nothing, and only runs as an empty mill. The power that actually weaves cloth is only in the soul of the weaver. It is clear, that the fly-catching movement of the leaf of Dionæa, or the vibrating motion of the leaflet of Hydesarum, or the life-like motion of the sensitive Mimosa, is a mere result of organization and of the action of external or internal physical forces or both together, though a Schleiden cannot discover the "causes" with his microscope. Indeed, all nature is, in one sense, alive :

"All things unto our flesh are kind

In their descent and being; to our mind,

In their ascent and cause":— Herbert.

or as another poet sings :

"L'anima di ogni bruto e delle piante

Di complession potenziata tira

Lo raggio e il moto delle luci sante.".

Dante, Par c. vii.

The eye of science has not yet discovered, in all cases, the exact stage in the scale of organized being, whether in the Kingdom, or in the Branch, or in the individual, where this kind of power first distinctly appears in a special form : the exact point of its first appearance in the flow of the physical stream may not be very essential. Nor is it at all

1 Schleiden's Prin. of Botany, p. 554 (London, 1849).

necessary that this fact should be taken as a criterion of distinction between an animal and a plant, or between one Branch, or Class, of the animal kingdom and another, but only, for that matter, between an excito-motory, or merely instinctive function and a self-conscious power or will, between an animal that has, and one that has not, a selfmoving soul, though it be so limited and diminutive in amount of power of thought and action in the particular instance as to be sometimes rather called an instinct than a soul. But it is necessary critically to distinguish between a true soul and that structural, physiological, excito-motory function of motion and even apparent self-activity which is properly called an instinct; that is, between a movement which is due to the Greater Providence and one that is the work of the lesser providence as such.

It was an opinion of Bacon, that even insects had some small amount of mind. "The insecta," he writes, "have voluntary motion, and therefore imagination; and whereas some of the ancients have said that their motion is indeterminate and their imagination indefinite, it is negligently observed; for ants go right forward to their hills; and bees do (admirably) know the way from a flowery heath two or three miles off to their hives. It may be, gnats and flies have their imagination more mutable and giddy, as small birds likewise have. . . . . And though their spirit [soul] be diffused, yet there is a seat of their senses in the head." 1

"1

It is evident that all mental manifestation or exhibition of psychical power in man or animals is immediately connected with, and somehow dependent upon, the brain and nervous structures. At the base of the kingdom, Owen finds the Protozoic Acrita without a nervous system. With the Nematoneura, a mere thread-nerve appears. The next ascending type (Radiata) is characterized by an œsophageal nervous ring; the next (Articulata) has two ganglia in 1 Nat. Hist., § 698.