I saw therein a moral world, charred and ruined, as, in some fable I have read, the world of the moon is described to be; yet withal it was a brain of magnificent formation. The powers abused to evil had been originally of rare order,--imagination, and scope, the energies that dare, the faculties that discover. But the moral part of the brain had failed to dominate the mental,--defective veneration of what is good or great; cynical disdain of what is right and just; in fine, a great intellect first misguided, then perverted, and now falling with the decay of the body into ghastly but imposing ruins,--such was the world of that brain as it had been three years ago. And still continuing to gaze thereon, I observed three separate emanations of light,--the one of a pale red hue, the second of a pale azure, the third a silvery spark. The red light, which grew paler and paler as I looked, undulated from the brain along the arteries, the veins, the nerves. And I murmured to myself, “Is this the principle of animal life?” The azure light equally permeated the frame, crossing and uniting with the red, but in a separate and distinct ray, exactly as, in the outer world, a ray of light crosses or unites with a ray of heat, though in itself a separate individual agency. And again I murmured to myself, “Is this the principle of intellectual being, directing or influencing that of animal life; with it, yet not of it?” But the silvery spark! What was that? Its centre seemed the brain; but I could fix it to no single organ. Nay, wherever I looked through the system, it reflected itself as a star reflects itself upon water. And I observed that while the red light was growing feebler and feebler, and the azure light was confused, irregular,--now obstructed, now hurrying, now almost lost,--the silvery spark was unaltered, undisturbed. So independent was it of all which agitated and vexed the frame, that I became strangely aware that if the heart stopped in its action, and the red light died out; if the brain were paralyzed, that energetic mind smitten into idiotcy, and the azure light wandering objectless as a meteor wanders over the morass,--still that silver spark would shine the same, indestructible by aught that shattered its tabernacle. And I murmured to myself, “Can that starry spark speak the presence of the soul? Does the silver light shine within creatures to which no life immortal has been promised by Divine Revelation?” Involuntarily I turned my sight towards the dead forms in the motley collection, and lo, in my trance or my vision, life returned to them all!--to the elephant and the serpent; to the tiger, the vulture, the beetle, the moth; to the fish and the polypus, and to yon mockery of man in the giant ape.