There is another form in which Mr. Darwin has depreciated the idea of any antagonism between his theory and our religious ideas, but it has the same logical defect as the suggestion which I have just considered, because it involves the same assumption. It is put hypothetically, but it is still an assumption, lacking the very elements of supreme probability that can alone give it force. "Man," he observes, "may be excused for feeling some pride at having risen, not through his own exertions, to the very summit of the organic scale; and the fact of his having so risen, instead of being aboriginally placed there, may give him some hope for a still higher destiny in the distant future." I certainly would not misrepresent, and I earnestly desire to understand, this distinguished writer. It is a little uncertain whether he here refers to the hope of immortality, or of an existence after the connection between our minds and our bodies is dissolved, or whether he refers to the further elevation of man on this earth in the distant future of terrestrial time. If he referred to the hope of an existence after what we call death, then he ought to have shown that his theory is compatible with such a continued existence of the soul of man. It will be one of the points on which I propose to bestow some attention, that the doctrine of evolution is entirely incompatible with the existence of the human soul for one instant after the brain has ceased to act as an organism, and death has wholly supervened; because that doctrine, if I understand it rightly, regards the intellect of man as a high development of what in other animals is called instinct, and instinct as a confirmed and inherited habit of animal organism to act in a certain way. If this is a true philosophical account of the origin and nature of intellect, it can have no possible individual existence after the organ called the brain, which has been in the habit of acting in a certain way, has perished, any more than there can be a digestion of food after the stomach or other assimilating organ has been destroyed. If, on the contrary, the mind of man is a special creation, of a spiritual essence, placed in an intimate union with the body for a temporary period, and made to depend for a time on the organs of that body as its means of manifestation and the exercise of its spiritual faculties, then it is conceivable that this union may be severed and the mind may survive. Not only is this conceivable, but, as I shall endeavor hereafter to show, the proof of it rises very high in the scale of probability--so high that we may accept it as a fact, just as confidently as we accept many things of which we can not have absolute certainty.