oral. This is so plain, that the wonder
is, how it ever came to be doubted. Nor is it directly denied, except
by those who from habitual disgust reject the guesswork of the various
pretenders to scientific systems; yet even these, no less than others,
do practically admit it in their common intercourse with the world.
And it cannot be otherwise; for what the Creator has joined must have
some affinity, although the palpable signs may elude our cognizance.
And that they do elude it, except perhaps in a very slight degree,
is actually the case, as is well proved by the signal failure of all
attempts to reduce them to a science; for neither diagram nor axiom
has ever yet corrected an instinctive impression. But man does not
live by science; he feels, acts, and judges right in a thousand things
without the consciousness of any rule by which he so feels, acts, or
judges. And, happily for him, he has a surer guide than human science
in that unknown Power within him,--without which he had been without
knowledge. But of this we shall have occasion to speak again in
another part of our discourse.

Though the medium through which the soul acts be, as we have said, elusive
to the senses,--in so far as to be irreducible to any distinct form,--it
is not therefore the less real, as every one may verify by his own
experience; and, though seemingly invisible, it must nevertheless,
constituted as we are, act through the physical, and a physical medium
expressly constructed for its peculiar action; nay, it does this
continually, without our confounding for a moment the soul with its
instrument. Who can look into the human eye, and doubt of an influence not
of the body? The form and color leave but a momentary impression, or, if
we remember them, it is only as we remember the glass through which we
have read the dark problems of the sky. But in this mysterious organ we
see not even the signs of its mystery. We see, in truth, nothing; for what
is there has neither form, nor symbol, nor any thing reducible to a
sensuous distinctness; and yet who can look into it, and not be conscious
of a real though invisible presence? In the eye of a brute, we see only a
part of the animal; it gives us little beyond the palpable outward; at
most, it is but the focal point of its fierce, or gentle, affectionate, or
timorous character,--the character of the species, But in man, neither
gentleness nor fierceness can be more than as relative conditions,--the
o