4. But suppose this flight performed;--we are yet but at the outset of the progress which must carry us towards Him. We have yet to begin to learn all that we are to know concerning the ultimate laws of organized bodies. What is the principle of _life_? What is the rule of that action of which assimilation, secretion, developement, are manifestations? and which appears to be farther removed from mere chemistry than chemistry is from mechanics. And what again is the new principle, as it seems to be, which is exhibited in the _irritability_ of an animal nerve? the existence of a sense? How different is this from all the preceding notions! No efforts can avoid or conceal the vast but inscrutable chasm. Those theorists, who have maintained most strenuously the possibility of tracing the phenomena of animal life to the influence of physical agents, have constantly been obliged to suppose a mode of agency altogether different from any yet known in physics. Thus Lamarck, one of the most noted of such speculators, in describing the course of his researches, says, “I was soon persuaded that the _internal sentiment_ constituted a power which it was necessary to take into account.” And Bichat, another writer on the same subject, while he declares his dissent from Stahl, and the earlier speculators, who had referred every thing in the economy of life to a single principle, which they called the _anima_, the _vital principle_, and so forth, himself introduces several principles, or laws, all utterly foreign to the region of physics; namely, _organic sensibility_, _organic contractility_, _animal sensibility_, _animal contractility_, and the like. Supposing such principles really to exist, how far enlarged and changed must our views be before we can conceive these properties, including the faculty of perception, which they imply, to be produced by the will and power of one supreme Being, acting by fixed laws. Yet without conceiving this, we cannot conceive the agency of that Deity, who is incessantly thus acting, in countless millions of forms and modes. How strongly then does science represent God to us as incomprehensible! his attributes as unfathomable! His power, his wisdom, his goodness, appear in each of the provinces of nature which are thus brought before us; and in each, the more we study them, the more impressive, the more admirable do they appear. When then we find these qualities manifested in each of so many successive ways, and each manifestation rising above the preceding by unknown degrees, and through a progression of unknown extent, what other language can we use concerning such attributes than that they are _infinite_? What mode of expression can the most cautious philosophy suggest, other than that He, to whom we thus endeavour to approach, is infinitely wise, powerful, and good?