ound being. Yet, why
thus degrade matter, the plastic and prolific creature of the Deity,
beyond what we are authorized to do? Why may it not perceive, why not
think, why not become conscious? What eternal and necessary impediment
prevents? or what self-contradiction and absurdity is hereby implied?
Let us examine Nature as she presents herself to us in her most simple
and inorganized forms; let us trace her through her gradual and
ascending stages of power and perfection. In its simplest form, matter
evinces the desire of reciprocal union, or, as it is commonly called,
the attraction of gravitation. Increase its mass, arrange it in other
modifications, and it immediately evinces other powers or attractions;
and these will be perpetually, and almost infinitely, varied, in
proportion as we vary its combinations. If arranged, therefore, in one
mode, it discloses the power of magnetism; in another, that of
electricity or galvanism; in a third, that of chemical affinities; in a
fourth, that of mineral assimilations. Pursue its modifications into
classes of a more complex, or rather, perhaps, of a more gaseous or
attenuate nature, and it will evince the power of vegetable or fibrous
irritability: ascend through the classes of vegetables, and you will at
length reach the strong stimulative perfection, the palpable vitality of
the _mimosa pudica_, or the _hedysarum gyrans,_ the former of which
shrinks from the touch with the most bashful coyness, while the latter
perpetually dances beneath the jocund rays of the sun. And when we have
thus attained the summit of vegetable powers and vegetable life, it will
require, I think, no great stretch of the imagination to conceive that
the fibrous irritability of animals, as well as vegetables, is the mere
result of a peculiar arrangement of simple and unirritable material
atoms."--"Hence, then, animal sensation, and hence, necessarily and
consequently, ideas, and a material soul or spirit, rude and confined,
indeed, in its first and simplest mode of existence, but, like every
other production of Nature, beautifully and progressively advancing from
power to power, from faculty to faculty, from excellence to excellence,
till at length it terminate in the perfection of the human mind."[151]

According to this theory, the mind is supposed to have a real existence,
as a substance distinct from the grosser forms of matter, and capable
even of surviving its separation from them. It is supposed