Such are the great lines of the new theory as to Man and his Dwelling-Place.  Thus does our author interpret Nature.  I trust and believe that I have not in any way misrepresented or caricatured his opinions.  His Introduction sets out in outline the purport of the entire book.  The remainder of the volume is given to carrying out these opinions into detail, as they are suggested by or as they affect the entire system of things.  It is divided into four Hooks.  Book I. treats Of Science; Book II.  Of Philosophy; Book iii.  Of Religion; Book iv.  Of Ethics; and the volume is closed by four dialogues between the Writer and Reader, in which, in a desultory manner, the principles already set forth are further explained and enforced.

Early in the first chapter of the Book Of Science, the author anticipates the obvious objection to his use of the terms Life and Death.  I do not think he succeeds in justifying the fashion in which he employs them.  But let him speak for himself: 

It may seem unnatural to speak of a conscious existence as a state of death.  But what is affirmed is, that a sensational existence such as ours is not the life of man; that a consciousness of physical life does itself imply a deadness.  The affirmations that we are living men, and that man has not true and absolute life, are not opposed.  Life is a relative term.  Our possession of a conscious life in relation to the things that we feel around us, is itself the evidence of man’s defect of life in a higher and truer sense.

Let a similitude make the thought more clear.  Are not we, as individuals, at rest, steadfast in space; evidently so to our own consciousness, demonstrably so in relation to the objects around us?  But is man at rest in space?  By no means.  We are all partakers of a motion.  Nay, if we were truly at rest, we could not have this relative steadfastness, we should not beat rest to the things around us:  they would fleet and slip away.  Our relative rest, and consciousness of steadfastness, depend upon our being not at rest.  There are moving things, to which he only can be steadfast who is moving too.  Even Buch is the life of which we have consciousness.  We have a life in relation to these physical things, because man wants life.  True life in man would alter his relation to them.  They could not be the realities any more:  he could not have a life in them.  As rest to moving things is not truly rest, but motion; so life to inert things is not truly life, but deadness.

Very ingeniously thought out:  very skilfully put, with probably the only illustration which would go on all fours.  But to me all this is extremely unsatisfactory:  and unsatisfactory in a much farther sense than merely that it is using terms in a non-natural sense.  I know, of course, that to look at Nature through blue spectacles will make Nature blue:  but I cannot see that to look at Nature through dead eyes should make Nature dead.  I see no proof that