pendent
upon the body for a healthful home in this world, and so far limited by
the conditions of mortality, it yet seems to have in itself no absolute
limitation bounding its prospective and possible attainments, save as
the finite never can fully attain to the infinite. Granting it a
congenial home, a fitting position, with full opportunity for progress,
and there is scarcely a height this side infinity which in the ascent of
ages it seems not capable of reaching. All creatures are finite, and as
such, limited; but the horizon around the soul is so amazingly
expansive, and the capacities of the mind for progress so immense, that
to us, in our present state, it is almost as if there were no
limitations at all.

The power of the intellect to acquire facts and relations, and from them
to ascend to the laws which control; its power to advance in a daily
ascending path into the region of intuition, where masses of things,
once isolated or chaotic, range themselves into harmony, and move in
numbers most musical; its power thus to rise into an enlarging vision
of truths now latent, and behold directly laws, relations and facts
which once evaded the sight, or were only seen dimly and after great
toil, it is utterly beyond our sphere to limit. We know that what to us
in childhood was a mystery, is now simple; that some of the grandest
laws of the material world which a few years back were reached only
after stupendous labor, are now become intuitive truths; and we can see
no reason why the human mind is not capacitated for just such advances
eternally; at every ascent sweeping its vision over a broader range of
truth, and rising ever nearer that Omniscient Intellect to which all
things open. The instinct and imperfect reason of the noblest brutes,
are here in marked contrast to the mind of man. They reach the limit of
knowledge with the ripening of their physical frame; a limit which no
training, however protracted and ingenious, can overpass; which never
varies, except as a cord drawn round a center may vary, by being
enlarged on the one side and contracted on the other; and which prepares
them without the acquisition of a particle of superfluous intelligence
for their brute life as the servitors of man. While his mind, never
wholly stationary for a long period, has capacities for development that
seem to spurn a merely sensual life, and lift the spirit to a
companionship with angels; which, instead of resting satisfied with