Nature, in fact, is living and active, though it admittedly looks inert and dead.  And I can discover nothing more than a daring assertion, in the statement that we are dead, and that we project our own deadness upon living nature.  I cannot see how to the purest and most elevated of beings, a tree should look less solid than it does to me.  I cannot discover how greater purity of heart, and more entire faith in Christ, should turn this material world into a world of spirit.  I doubt the doctrine that spirit in itself, as usually understood (apart from its power of originating action) is a higher and holier existence than matter.  It seems to me that very much from a wrong idea that it is, come those vague, unreal, intangible notions as to the Christian Heaven, which do so much to make it a chilly, unattractive thing, to human wishes and hopes.  It is hard enough for us to feel the reality of the things beyond the grave, without having the additional stumbling-block cast in our way, of being told that truly there is nothing real there for us to feel.  As for the following eloquent passage, in which our author subsequently returns to the justification of his great doctrine, no more need be said than that it is rhetoric, not logic:—­

That man has not his true life, must have taken him long to learn.  All our prepossessions, all our natural convictions, are opposed to that belief.  If these activities, these powers, these capacities of enjoyment and suffering, this consciousness of free will, this command of the material world, be not life, what is life?  What more do we want to make us truly man?  This is the feeling that has held men captive, and biased all their thoughts so that they could not perceive what they themselves were saying.

Yet the sad undercurrent has belied the boast.  From all ages and all lands the cry of anguish, the prayer for life unconscious of itself, has gone up to heaven.  In groans and curses, in despair and cruel rage, man pours out his secret to the universe; writing it in blood, and lust, and savage wrong, upon the fair bosom of the earth; he alone not knowing what he does.  If this be the life of man, what is his death?

No doubt this would form a very eloquent and effective paragraph in a popular sermon.  But in a philosophic treatise, where an author is tied to the severely precise use of terms, and where it will not do to call a thing death merely because it is very bad, nor to call a thing life merely because it is vry good, the argument appears to have but little weight.

You must see, intelligent reader, that one thing which we are entitled to require our author to satisfactorily prove, is the fact that Nature is not inert, as it appears to man.  If you can make it certain that Nature is living and active, then, no doubt, some explanation will be needful as to how it comes to look so different to us; though, even then, I do not see that it necessarily follows that the inertness is to be supposed to exist in ourselves.  But unless the author can prove that Nature is not inert, he has no foundation to build on.  He states three arguments, from which he derives the grand principle:—­