5. But with sense and consciousness the history of living things only begins. They have instincts, affections, passions, will. How entirely lost and bewildered do we find ourselves when we endeavour to conceive these faculties communicated by means of general laws! Yet they are so communicated from God, and of such laws he is the lawgiver. At what an immeasurable interval is he thus placed above every thing which the creation of the inanimate world alone would imply; and how far must he transcend all ideas founded on such laws as we find there! 6. But we have still to go further and far higher. The world of reason and of morality is a part of the same creation, as the world of matter and of sense. The will of man is swayed by rational motives; its workings are inevitably compared with a rule of action; he has a conscience which speaks of right and wrong. These are laws of man’s nature no less than the laws of his material existence, or his animal impulses. Yet what entirely new conceptions do they involve? How incapable of being resolved into, or assimilated to, the results of mere matter, or mere sense! Moral good and evil, merit and demerit, virtue and depravity, if ever they are the subjects of strict science, must belong to a science which views these things, not with reference to time or space, or mechanical causation, not with reference to fluid or ether, nervous irritability or corporeal feeling, but to their own proper modes of conception; with reference to the relations with which it is possible that these notions may be connected, and not to relations suggested by other subjects of a completely extraneous and heterogeneous nature. And according to such relations must the laws of the moral world be apprehended, by any intelligence which contemplates them at all.