"But here comes my argument. I care not how ideas are formed,--the
material point is, how are the capacities to receive ideas formed? The
ideas may all come from experience, but the capacity to receive the
ideas must be inherent. I take the word 'capacity' as a good plain
English word, rather than the more technical word 'receptivity,'
employed by Kant. And by capacity I mean the passive power(6) to
receive ideas, whether in man or in any living thing by which ideas
are received. A man and an elephant is each formed with capacities to
receive ideas suited to the several places in the universe held by each.

"The more I look through Nature the more I find that on all varieties
of organized life is carefully bestowed the capacity to receive the
impressions, be they called perceptions or ideas, which are adapted to
the uses each creature is intended to derive from them. I find, then,
that Man alone is endowed with the capacity to receive the ideas of
a God, of Soul, of Worship, of a Hereafter. I see no trace of such a
capacity in the inferior races; nor, however their intelligence may be
refined by culture, is such capacity ever apparent in them.

"But wherever capacities to receive impressions are sufficiently general
in any given species of creature to be called universal to that species,
and yet not given to another species, then, from all analogy throughout
Nature, those capacities are surely designed by Providence for the
distinct use and conservation of the species to which they are given.

"It is no answer to me to say that the inherent capacities thus bestowed
on Man do not suffice in themselves to make him form right notions of
a Deity or a Hereafter; because it is plainly the design of Providence
that Man must learn to correct and improve all his notions by his
own study and observation. He must build a hut before he can build a
Parthenon; he must believe with the savage or the heathen before he
can believe with the philosopher or Christian. In a word, in all his
capacities, Man has only given to him, not the immediate knowledge of
the Perfect, but the means to strive towards the Perfect. And thus one
of the most accomplished of modern reasoners, to whose lectures you must
have listened with delight, in your college days, says well:--

"'Accordingly the sciences always studied with keenest interest are
those in a state of progress and uncertainty; absolute certainty and
absolute completion would