that science that magnifies the lights of heaven (created to rule day and night) into habitable worlds, weaken the influence of faith in holy writ?

May we not fear that, like the Promethean Preadamites of Shelley, the Cain of Byron, the fabled beings of Ovid, and the mythology of Milton, will be the vaunted discoveries of the geologist, in controversion of the Mosaic records, of the creation, and the deluge; proving the wisdom of Bacon, that to associate natural philosophy with sacred cosmogony will lead to heretical opinions? Indeed, I remember in the Zendavesta of Zoroaster, the chronicle of the Magian religion (supposed to be a piracy from the book of Genesis), the sun is created before light.

Ev. Fear not this, fair Ida. Rather believe, with Bouget, that philosophy and natural theology mutually confirm each other. The latter teaches us that which it is our duty to believe; the former, to believe more firmly. And Lord Bacon himself, in his "Cogitata et Visa," deems natural philosophy "the surest antidote of superstition, and the food of religious faith.”

The belief in existence of a preadamite world presumes not to controvert the Mosaic record of the development of the globe, the creation of Adam, or the fall of man. Modern geology has peopled this preadamite world with saurians, or lizards, a race of beings not concerned in the punishment of that delinquency. Of the existence of these creatures there is no doubt; the discovery of their fossil remains, without a vestige of the human skeleton, marks the period of their destruction, and that the crust of the globe enveloping these relics might have been reduced to that chaos when "the earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep," and from which our beautiful world was fashioned by a fiat.

The truth of holy Scripture is too clear even to be disturbed by a sophist. You may recollect that Julian the apostate contemplated the reconstruction of the Temple of Jerusalem, in order to confute the prophecies; but Julian failed, and misfortune was the lot of all who were leagued in the impiety.

As to natural laws, think me not so profane as to cite such as the superstitious alchymist, Paracelsus, in proof of their use in the working of a miracle; who says that "devils and witches raise storms by throwing up alum and saltpetre into the air, which comes down as rain-drops !"

And it were reversing this solemn argument were I to confess the doctrines of the Illuminaten, who, taught by Jacob Boehmen, and the mysticisms of his "Theosophia Revelata," explained all nature's laws by warping texts of Scripture to their purpose. Yet it is clear that even the miracles of the prophets may have been sometimes influenced by established laws. Elisha raised the Shunamite's son by placing mouth to mouth, as if by inhalation.

Believe not, then, fair Ida, that philosophy is set in array against religion when the student of nature endeavours to explain her phenomena by physical laws, for those laws the great Creator himself hath made

NATURE OF SOUL AND MIND.

"And for my soul, what can it do for that,
Being a thing immortal?"-Hamlet.

CAST. We have risen with the lark to salute you, Astrophel. And you have really slept in Tintern Abbey? Yet not alone; "I see Queen Mab hath been with you," and brushed you with her wing as you lay asleep.

ASTR. Throughout the livelong night, sweet Castaly, I have revelled in a world of dreams. My couch and pillow were the green grass turf. No wonder that tales of the times of old should crowd on my memory, that elfin lips should whisper in my ear

CAST. "The soft, exquisite music of a dream." IDA. Talk not of dreams so lightly, dear Castaly; the visions of sleep are among the most divine mysteries of our nature: these transient flights of the spirit in a dream, unfettered as they seem by the will, are, to my own mind, among the most exalted proofs of its immortality. Is it not so, Evelyn?

Ev. The mystery which you have glanced at, Ida, is the most sublime subject in metaphysics. Yet, in our analysis of the phenomena of intellect, it is our duty to discard, with reverential awe, many of the notions of the pseudo psychologists in allusion to that self-evident truth, that requires not the support of such arguments.

In tracing the mystery of a dream to its association with our immortal essence, reason will at length be involved in a maze of conjecture. True philosophy will never presume to explain the mystical union of spirit and of flesh; she would be bewildered even in their definitions, and would incur some peril of forming unhallowed conclusions. Even the nature of the rational soul will involve him in endless conjecture, whether it be fire, as Zeno believed; or number, according to Xenocrates; or harmony, according to Aristoxenus; or the lucid fire-the Creator of all things of the Chaldean astrologers.

He who aspires to a solution of the mystery may wear out his brain in the struggle, as Philetas worked himself to death in a vain attempt to solve the celebrated "Pseudomenos," the paradox of the

Stoics; or, like the gloomy students of the German school, he might conclude his researches with a question like this rhapsody--unanswerable.

But thou, my spirit, thou that knowest this, that speakest to thyself, what art thou? what wast thou ere this clay coat was cut for thee? and what wilt thou be when this rain-coat, this sleeping-frock, fall off thee like a garment torn to pieces? Whence comest thou? where goest thou? Ah! where from and to, where darkness is before and behind thee? Oh ye unclothed, ye naked spirits, hear this soliloquy, this soul-speech. Know ye that ye be? Know ye that ye were, that ye are as we are or otherwise, in eternity? Do ye work within us when a holy thrilling darts through us like lightning, where not the skin trembles, but the soul within us? Tell us, oh tell us, what, then, is death?"

Now, if we reflect on the psychology of the Greeks, can we discern their distinctions of vovs, πνευμα, ψυχη, σωμα, of soul or spirit of spiritual body, or of idol and of earthly body; or of vuos, vxn, and vove, yvxn, and so forth?

This fine distinction may be reduced to one simple proposition: that soul and mind are the same, under different combinations: mind is soul evinced through the medium of the brain; soul is mind emancipated from matter. This principle, if established, might associate the anomalies of many sophists; the existence of two minds, the sensitive and intellectual, taught by the Alexandrian philosophers, or the tenets of Bishop Horsley, in his sermon before the Humane Society, the separation of the life of intellect from animal life; and itht reconcile the abstract reasoning of medical ophy with the pure but misdirected argum the theological critic.

and immortality; and it signifies not whether our words are those of Stahl, that it presided over the animal body; or those of Galen and Aristotle, that it directed the function of life. It is enough that we recognise the von Swns, or that breath of life which the Creator breathed into none but man; and the ɛɩкv Оɛov, the image of God, in which he was created. In this one proposition all the points of this awful question are comprehended. And it is on this combined nature that we must reason ere we discourse on sleep and dreams.

CAST. I Condole with you, Astrophel; you must forget the splendour of your dreams, and listen to their dull philosophy.

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ASTR. We may, indeed, sympathize with each other, Castaly; we are threatened with another abstruse exposition of the mind, although we are already sated with the contrasted hypotheses of our deepest philosophers: the cogitation or self-reasoning of Descartes (the essence of whose "Principia" was Cogito, ergo sum;" and it is an adoption of Milton's Adam, "That I am, I know, because 1 think; forgetting that the very ego which thinks is a proof of prior existence) and of Malebranche, who believed they existed because they thought; the abstract spiritualism of Berkley, who believed he existed merely because others thought of him; the consciousness of Locke; the idealism of Hume; the material psychology of Paley; the mental corporeality of Priestley; and the absolute nonentity of Pyrrho.

Ev. I leave these hypotheses to speak for themselves, Astrophel; my own discourse will be wearying enough without them.

Over the intricate philosophy of mind Creative Wisdom has thrown a veil, which we can never hope to draw aside. True, the beautiful mecha