t stays him from the native land
Where first he walked when wrapped in clay?'

But we are quite as far from having asserted the existence of such
preternatural phenomena, and we shall surely not attempt to establish
facts of which we have no experience whatever. All that we have done has
been merely to question the validity of that curt and summary argument,
which assumes that matter and spirit are incapable of acting upon each
other, and in this way cuts off all investigation.

We were somewhat disappointed and discouraged as we followed our
contributor into that passage in which he seems to think that after
death, the soul of man is removed beyond all knowledge of material
things, and becomes incapable of ever perceiving their existence. It is
true, this is but the logical deduction from his premises; and yet we
felt some emotions of terror--some shrinking from that great and
impassable gulf which he represents as then to be fixed between us and
the objects of our life-long acquaintance--'the gulf which separates
time from eternity.' But we were soon relieved; for in the conclusion of
his article he waxes eloquent upon the higher faculties with which the
soul will doubtless be endowed in its new state of existence, and with
apparent unconsciousness of all inconsistency, assumes the very opposite
of the whole preceding part of his argument. 'But,' he exclaims, 'when
we shall stand in all the nakedness of _pure, unfettered spirit_,' 'and
gaze with all the clearness of unveiled spiritual vision _upon the
wonderful mechanism of the universe_,' etc. We might inquire of our
author how, upon his principles, with merely spiritual vision, we can
expect to behold anything so gross and material as the mechanism of the
universe; but we overlook and forgive the apparent inconsistency--we are
willing ourselves to be vanquished in the argument--for the sake of the
noble idea that we may hereafter 'pass from blindness to far-stretching,
unimpeded sight,' and 'be able at a glance _to count the very stars_,
and to see the network of laws which binds them to their places, and
controls, not only their motions, but the minutest particulars of their
internal organism.' We are thankful, at all events, that, though matter
and spirit may be so far apart in this our mortal state of existence, in
the spiritual world, at least, we shall not lose all memory and
knowledge of the grand material creation, of which we have learned so
little here,