spect to what had happened a thousand years ago,
as the adult now is with respect to what happened in the first year of
his life. To attempt to reason upon the manner in which the organs are
connected with sensation would be useless; the nerves and brain have some
immediate relation to these vital functions, but how they act it is
impossible to say. From the rapidity and infinite variety of the
phenomena of perception, it seems extremely probable that there must be
in the brain and nerves matter of a nature far more subtle and refined
than anything discovered in them by observation and experiment, and that
the immediate connection between the sentient principle and the body may
be established by kinds of ethereal matter, which can never be evident to
the senses, and which may bear the same relations to heat, light, and
electricity that these refined forms or modes of existence of matter bear
to the gases. Motion is most easily produced by the lighter species of
matter; and yet imponderable agents, such as electricity, possess force
sufficient to overturn the weightiest structures. Nothing can be farther
from my meaning than to attempt any definition on this subject, nor would
I ever embrace or give authority to that idea of Newton, who supposes
that the immediate cause of sensation may be in undulations of an
ethereal medium. It does not, however, appear improbable to me that some
of the more refined machinery of thought may adhere, even in another
state, to the sentient principle; for, though the organs of gross
sensation--the nerves and brain--are destroyed by death, yet something of
the more ethereal nature, which I have supposed, may be less
destructible. And I sometimes imagine that many of those powers, which
have been called instinctive, belong to the more refined clothing of the
spirit; conscience, indeed, seems to have some undefined source, and may
bear relation to a former state of being.

_Eub_.--All your notions are merely ingenious speculations. Revelation
gives no authority to your ideas of spiritual nature; the Christian
immortality is founded upon the resurrection of the body.

_The Unknown_.--This I will not allow. Even in the Mosaic history of the
creation of man his frame is made in the image of God--that is, capable
of intelligence; and the Creator breathes into it the breath of life, His
own essence. Then our Saviour has said, "of the God of Abraham, of
Isaac, and of Jacob." "He is not th