to spirit, intelligent
spirits to divinity. In every grain of dust sleep an army of
future generations. As every thing below man gropes upward towards
his conscious estate, "the trees being imperfect men, that seem to
bemoan their imprisonment, rooted in the ground," so man himself
shall climb the illimitable ascent of creation, every step a star.
The animal organism is a higher kind of vegetable, whose
development begins with those substances with the production of
which the life of an ordinary vegetable ends.13 The fact, too,
that embryonic man passes through ascending stages
undistinguishable from those of lower creatures, is full of
meaning. Does it not betoken a preserved epitome of the long
history of slowly rising existence? What unplummeted abysses of
time and distance intervene from the primary rock to the Victoria
Regia! and again from the first crawling spine to the fetterless
mind of a Schelling! But, snail pace by snail pace, those
immeasurable separations have been bridged over; and so every
thing that now lies at the dark basis of dust shall finally reach
the transplendent apex of intellect. The objection of theological
prejudice to this developing succession of ascents that it is
degrading is an unhealthy mistake. Whether we have risen or fallen
to our present rank, the actual rank itself is not altered. And in
one respect it is better for man to be an advanced oyster than a
degraded god; for in the former case the path is upwards, in the
latter it is downwards. "We wake," observes a profound thinker,
"and find ourselves on a stair: there are other stairs below us,
which we seem to have ascended; there are stairs above us, many a
one, which go upward and out of sight." Such was plainly the trust
of the author of the following exhortation:

"Be worthy of death; and so learn to live That every incarnation
of thy soul In other realms, and worlds, and firmaments Shall be
more pure and high."

11 Bertram, Prufung der Meinung von der Praexistenz der
menechlichen Seele.

12 Nurnberger, Still Leben, oder uber die Unsterblichkeit der
Seele.

13 Liebig, Animal Chemistry, ch. ix.

Bulwer likewise has said, "Eternity may be but an endless series
of those emigrations which men call deaths, abandonments of home
after home, ever to fairer scenes and loftier heights. Age after
age, the spirit that glorious nomad may shift its tent, fated not
to rest in the dull Elysium of the heathen, but carrying with it
e