can be increased or exalted does not prove that it can be annihilated.  If there be, which I think cannot be doubted, a consciousness of good and evil constantly belonging to the sentient principle in man, then rewards and punishments naturally belong to acts of this consciousness, to obedience, or disobedience; and the indestructibility of the sentient being is necessary to the decrees of eternal justice.  On your view, even in this life, just punishments for crimes would be almost impossible; for the materials of which human beings are composed change rapidly, and in a few years probably not an atom of the primitive structure remains yet even the materialist is obliged in old age to do penance for the sins of his youth, and does not complain of the injustice of his decrepit body, entirely changed and made stiff by time, suffering for the intemperance of his youthful flexible frame.  On my idea, conscience is the frame of the mind, fitted for its probation in mortality.  And this is in exact accordance with the foundations of our religion, the Divine origin of which is marked no less by its history than its harmony with the principles of our nature.  Obedience to its precepts not only prepares for a better state of existence in another world, but is likewise calculated to make us happy here.  We are constantly taught to renounce sensual pleasure and selfish gratifications, to forget our body and sensible organs, to associate our pleasures with mind, to fix our affections upon the great ideal generalisation of intelligence in the one Supreme Being.  And that we are capable of forming to ourselves an imperfect idea even of the infinite mind is, I think, a strong presumption of our own immortality, and of the distinct relation which our finite knowledge bears to eternal wisdom.

Phil.—­I am pleased with your views; they coincide with those I had formed at the time my imagination was employed upon the vision of the Colosaeum, which I repeated to you, and are not in opposition with the opinions that the cool judgment and sound and humble faith of Ambrosio have led me since to embrace.  The doctrine of the materialists was always, even in my youth, a cold, heavy, dull, and insupportable doctrine to me, and necessarily tending to Atheism.  When I had heard, with disgust, in the dissecting-rooms the plan of the physiologist of the gradual accretion of matter, and its becoming endowed with irritability, ripening into sensibility and acquiring such organs as were necessary, by its own inherent forces, and at last rising into intellectual existence, a walk into the green fields or woods by the banks of rivers brought back my feelings from nature to God; I saw in all the powers of matter the instruments of the Deity; the sunbeams, the breath of the zephyr, awakened animation in forms prepared by Divine intelligence to receive it; the insensate seed, the slumbering egg, which were to be vivified, appeared like the new-born animal, works of a Divine