"Well, then, in all those capacities for the reception of impressions from external Nature which are given to Man and not to the brutes, I see the evidence of Man's Soul. I can understand why the inferior animal has no capacity to receive the idea of a Deity and of Worship--simply because the inferior animal, even if graciously admitted to a future life, may not therein preserve the sense of its identity. I can understand even why that sympathy with each other which we men possess and which constitutes the great virtue we emphatically call Humanity, is not possessed by the lesser animals (or, at least, in a very rare and exceptional degree) even where they live in communities, like beavers, or bees, or ants; because men are destined to meet, to know, and to love each other in the life to come, and the bond between the brute ceases here. "Now the more, then, we examine the inherent capacities bestowed distinctly and solely on Man, the more they seem to distinguish him from the other races by their comprehension of objects beyond his life upon this earth. "'Man alone,' says Muller, 'can conceive abstract notions; and it is in abstract notions--such as time, space, matter, spirit, light, form, quantity, essence--that man grounds, not only all philosophy, all science, but all that practically improves one generation for the benefit of the next.' "And why? Because all these abstract notions unconsciously lead the mind away from the material into the immaterial,--from the present into the future. But if Man ceases to exist when he disappears in the grave, you must be compelled to affirm that he is the only creature in existence whom Nature or Providence has condescended to deceive and cheat by capacities for which there are no available objects. How nobly and how truly has Chalmers said:-- "'What inference shall we draw from this remarkable law in Nature that there is nothing waste and nothing meaningless in the feelings and faculties wherewith living creatures are endowed? For each desire there is a counterpart object; for each faculty there is room and opportunity for exercise either in the present or the coming futurity. Now, but for the doctrine of immortality, Man would be an exception to this law,-he would stand forth as an anomaly in Nature, with aspirations in his heart for which the universe had no antitype to offer, with capacities of understanding and thought that never were to be followed by objects of corresponding greatness through the whole history of his being! . . . . . . . . . . . .