Hence, the only difference there can be, in respect of pure reason, between one created soul and another, whatever the place of either in the scale of existence, is a difference in the extent and measure in which each finite soul may be able to share, partake, use, employ, and exercise these laws and this reason in perceiving, conceiving, thinking, and knowing; for these operations of the mind, as far as they go, must necessarily be, and always are, carried on in exact accordance with these laws, whether the special thinker himself be aware of it or not. This measure may be large or small in the given instance, and the use made of it may be in some degree more or less, much or little, good or bad, logical or illogical, wise or unwise. The soul in itself is active choosing cause and thinking power, the "sparkle of our creation light," the "lamp of God” shining within us, and the light of the understanding whereby the mind intellectually and spiritually sees, knows, perceives, conceives, understands, comprehends, and is self-conscious, and the power whereby it acts, wills, and creates; and its existence as such is an ultimate and final fact. Any man may deny the fact, not see it, and disbelieve it; yet the fact still exists and remains so. Such being the nature of it, it is plain that neither soul, nor thinking, can be the result or effect of the physical organization, nor a simple product of the working of the physiological machine, though a finite soul may never exist at all without an organic body; that brain and mind, speaking of the finite creature, do not stand in the relation to one another of cause and effect; that mind and brain, speaking of the divine mind, and the created brain, do stand in the relation to one another of cause and effect; but that the true relation of the finite mind, or soul, to the brain and general structure of the body, is one of correspondence and adaptation only, as Swedenborg said. And the specialization of the soul is made to correspond with the special organic body: the larger and better the receiving basin,

the more powerful will be the swell of ocean that streams into it; and the more soul, the nearer to God.

As a special subject, the activity of any given soul, and its power as thinking cause, is as primary, original, fundamental, and immortal, as the Divine Soul itself, the totality of all power and cause: it is only in so far as it is a specialty, that a finite soul is secondary and a creation. But the thought and consciousness of God must necessarily be in the unity and totality of his being, as such, wherein is the Divine Personality. The personality of the special thinker, in like manner, must be only in the unity and totality of the special soul, as such. Consciousness is the fact of being and knowing; and it can by no possibility be more extensive than the thinking personality. And the finite soul being thus bounded off, as it were, into a separate and distinct sphere of consciousness of its own, there can be no possibility of its being or becoming directly conscious, that is, knowing, of the thought, knowledge, purposes, or foreordination. of God, nor any conceivable possibility of an intermediate flow of thoughts, ideas, conceptions, or revelations, out of the one mind into the other, whether that of a Moses, an Isaiah, a Jesus, or a Pope. A man may become conscious, indirectly, of some part of the divine thought and providence, by discovering and seeing it in the fore-front view of the universe, an infinite phantasmagoria, as it were, capable of being reflected in the mirror of his mind's eye, which is always able to find therein as much revelation as it can discover, see, or in any way receive and comprehend, or have need to know; but never any more. There can be no back-door passage from the one consciousness into the other, and it is of no use to look in the back of the mirror: it can be conceived only in the heated fancies of uncritical thinkers and mystical dreamers. The open passages are all in front: we stand face to face with our God. It should be left to spiritual-rapping doctors only, to believe that knowledge, foreknowledge, revelation, divination, prophe

cies, auguries, gifts of healing, helps, and diversities of tongues, are, or can be, poured into the human soul, as it were, through an imaginary hole in the back of the head.

Since the invention of the electric telegraph, certain visionary dreamers, possessing souls only half awake, have abandoned the theory of influxions, and imagined that disembodied souls or spirits could send communications from the spirit-world by some sort of telegraphic rapping. That a departed soul may live in a spiritual form may be very possible, if not highly probable, or indeed quite certain. Some persons have believed that they walked the upper air, like the spectral ghosts that poets, superstitious persons, and diseased minds have created in their wandering fancies; but since it has become scientifically demonstrable, that no such vision of a ghost could possibly be visible to any human eye, telegraphic rappings from imaginary invisible spirits have been substituted in the place of the visible spectres. As a living power of thought, a soul can act, directly, in its own inner sphere of self only; and indirectly, upon the world external to itself and upon human senses, only by means of organic physical instruments, and through the agency of material means. A human soul, as we see, has power to move an arm of flesh and bone, and so to produce great effects on solid bodies. But here, we have the necessary gradation of organized material structures and instruments, rising by degrees of solidity and strength from the most ethereal invisible particles, microscopic cells, finest conceivable fibres and gossamer tissues of the brain, through the infinite ascending complication of ganglionic, nervous, vascular, muscular, and bony structures up to that completed complex and substantial instrument, the arm, with its terminal, ingeniously constructed hand, capable of great power. And so, too, we may imagine a spirit soul to have a spiritual body, with a corresponding and similar structure of brain, nerve, muscle, bone, arm and hand, made of forms of spiritual substance

(as indeed all substance is spiritual); but whatever power or force such an organization of body might be able to exercise upon other spiritual bodies of like nature and constitution, it is clear that if it be so thin and ethereal as to be invisible to the microscope, and wholly imperceptible to the most delicate scientific tests of the presence of matter or force, it would be utterly absurd to imagine it could, by any conceivable possibility, so rap a table at the will of a spirit soul as to produce a vibration in solid wood, or in so dense a fluid as the air, which is the only medium of sound to the ear, any more than could the imaginary hand of an impossibly visible ghost. Both our eyes and our ears are forever closed to any such agency, and our souls and our senses alike are happily inaccessible to all such communications: so says Hamlet:

"And for my soul, what can it do to that,
Being a thing immortal as itself?"

Honest ghosts have scarcely been suspected of such impossibilities: : even the ghost of Hamlet's father, that " perturbed spirit," old truepenny, "the fellow i' the cellarage," that was "hic et ubique," and could "work i̇' the earth" like a mole, knew better than to undertake to rap anything. He only ventured to speak aloud; and even that voice was never heard by mortal ear until uttered by some living medium under the stage. Even when poetically visible, face to face with Hamlet, he cut a long story short with this sensible speech:

"But that I am forbid

To tell the secrets of my prison-house,

I could a tale unfold, whose lightest word

Would harrow up thy soul, freeze thy young blood,
Make thy two eyes, like stars, start from their spheres,

Thy knotted and combined locks to part,

And each particular hair to stand on end,
Like quills upon the fretful porpentine:
But this eternal blazon must not be

To ears of flesh and blood.".

Act I. Sc. 5.

And all spiritual rappers will know better, when they

have learned more, than to undertake any such performance that work belongs only to poets. In the mean time, all may rest assured, that in literal truth this "eternal blazon must not be, and, in the order of Divine Providence in the known world, cannot be, to "ears of flesh and blood." The universe is neither made nor governed so, nor are men to be instructed here in that way; and the sooner all rappers find this out, the better it may be for them, both here and hereafter. There should be established for their use "houses of deceits of the senses, all manner of feats of juggling, false apparitions, impostures, and illusions, and their fallacies;" and they should beware of the fate and the curse of Macbeth.

§ 5. REVERENCE AND DEGree.

That sprightly antithesis of Pope, straining a truth to point his wit,

"The wisest, brightest, meanest of mankind,"

like much other wit and many old saws, contains more point than truth; and as is usual, when vulgar satire flings its envenomed shafts at what is nobler than itself, the slander is apt to stick better than the truth. Bacon was not the meanest of mankind. He was not mean at all, unless by some mean standard of meanness, but one of the loftiest and noblest of his time, as well as one of the wisest and brightest of all time. That he partook in some measure of the abuses of the time, and shared the faults of good men in all times, need not be denied. He was not a martyr, nor a hero, in any ordinary sense; but in a very extraordinary sense, he might be found to have been both. He did not attempt impracticabilities, nor absurd impossibilities; but he was certainly one of those "clearest burning lamps," 1 and

"clearest gods, who make them honors Of men's impossibilities ";

1 Bacon.