be the paralysis of any study, and the last
worst calamity that could befall Man, as he is at present
constituted, would be that full and final possession of speculative
truth which he now vainly anticipates as the consummation of his
intellectual happiness.'(7)

"Well, then, in all those capacities for the reception of impressions
from external Nature which are given to Man and not to the brutes, I see
the evidence of Man's Soul. I can understand why the inferior animal
has no capacity to receive the idea of a Deity and of Worship--simply
because the inferior animal, even if graciously admitted to a future
life, may not therein preserve the sense of its identity. I can
understand even why that sympathy with each other which we men possess
and which constitutes the great virtue we emphatically call Humanity,
is not possessed by the lesser animals (or, at least, in a very rare and
exceptional degree) even where they live in communities, like beavers,
or bees, or ants; because men are destined to meet, to know, and to love
each other in the life to come, and the bond between the brute ceases
here.

"Now the more, then, we examine the inherent capacities bestowed
distinctly and solely on Man, the more they seem to distinguish him from
the other races by their comprehension of objects beyond his life upon
this earth.

"'Man alone,' says Muller, 'can conceive abstract notions; and it is in
abstract notions--such as time, space, matter, spirit, light, form,
quantity, essence--that man grounds, not only all philosophy, all
science, but all that practically improves one generation for the
benefit of the next.'

"And why? Because all these abstract notions unconsciously lead the mind
away from the material into the immaterial,--from the present into the
future. But if Man ceases to exist when he disappears in the grave, you
must be compelled to affirm that he is the only creature in existence
whom Nature or Providence has condescended to deceive and cheat by
capacities for which there are no available objects. How nobly and how
truly has Chalmers said:--

"'What inference shall we draw from this remarkable law in Nature that
there is nothing waste and nothing meaningless in the feelings and
faculties wherewith living creatures are endowed? For each desire
there is a counterpart object; for each faculty there is room and
opportunity for exercise either in t