se citations to
infinity, and they prove that in the first centuries of our era the
materiality of the soul was an opinion not only permitted, but
dominant.' Dr. Moriarty, and the synod which he recently addressed,
obviously forget their own antecedents. Their boasted succession from
the early Church renders them the direct offspring of a 'materialism'
more 'brutal' than any ever enunciated by me.]

I have glanced at inorganic nature--at the sea, and the sun, and the
vapour, and the snow-flake, and at organic nature as represented by
the fern and the oak. That same sun which warmed the water and
liberated the vapour, exerts a subtler power on the nutriment of the
tree. It takes hold of matter wholly unfit for the purposes of
nutrition, separates its nutritive from its non-nutritive portions,
gives, the former to the vegetable, and carries the others away.
Planted in the earth, bathed by the air, and tended by the sun, the
tree is traversed by its sap, the cells are formed, the woody fibre is
spun, and the whole is woven to a texture wonderful even to the naked
eye, but a million-fold more so to microscopic vision. Does
consciousness mix in any way with these processes? No man can tell.
Our only ground for a negative conclusion is the absence of those
outward manifestations from which feeling is usually inferred. But
even these are not entirely absent. In the greenhouses of Kew we may
see that a leaf can close, in response to a proper stimulus, as
promptly as the human fingers themselves; and while there Dr. Hooker
will tell us of the wondrous fly-catching and fly-devouring power of
the Dionaea. No man can say that the feelings of the animal are not
represented by a drowsier consciousness in the vegetable world. At
all events, no line has ever been drawn between the conscious and the
unconscious; for the vegetable shades into the animal by such fine
gradations, that is impossible to say where the one ends and the other
begins.

In all such enquiries we are necessarily limited by our own powers: we
observe what our senses, armed with the aids furnished by Science,
enable us to observe; nothing more. The evidences as to consciousness
in the vegetable world depend wholly upon our capacity to observe and
weigh them. Alter the capacity, and the evidence would alter too.
Would that which to us is a total absence of any manifestation of
consciousness be the same to a being with our capacities indefinitely
multiplie