SOPHEREUS. In speaking of the human mind and its incapacity to rest satisfied with what science can discover of immediate physical agencies in the production of phenomena, I have not overlooked the fact that the idea of a Creator has been dogmatically inculcated as a matter of belief. But I form my conception of the construction of the human mind from the operations of my own mind. I have not trained myself into any mode of reasoning. I have somehow been so placed in this world that, as I have frequently told you and as I am perfectly conscious, I am uninfluenced by any early teaching, and can judge for myself of the force of evidence. When I say, therefore, that the human intellect is so constituted that it is obliged to regard mind as the source of power, I exclude all teaching but the teaching of experience. There can not be two courses of reasoning that are alike correct. If you uncover a portion of the earth's surface, and find there structures, implements, and various objects which you are convinced that the forces of nature did not produce, you must conclude that they were the productions of mind availing itself of the capabilities of matter to be molded and arranged by the force of an intelligent will. You do not see that mind, you do not see the work in progress, but you are irresistibly led to the conclusion that there was a mind which produced what you have found. You can not reason on the phenomena at all, without having the conviction forced upon you that the ultimate cause was an intelligent being. You can not explain the phenomena without this conclusion. How, then, can you explain the more various and extraordinary phenomena of nature without attributing their production to mind? You have no more direct evidence that the Pyramids of Egypt, or an obelisk which has lain buried in the earth for thousands of years, were made by human hands, than you have for believing that an animal organism, or the solar system, was planned and executed by an intelligent being. In both cases, you have only indirect evidence; but in both cases that evidence addresses itself to your intellect upon the same principles of belief. In the case of the pyramid or the obelisk, you refer the construction to mind, because you see that mind alone could have been the real cause of its existence. In the case of the animal organism, or the mechanism of the heavenly bodies, you are obliged to reason in the same way. Hence I say that our minds are so constituted that there is but one method of correct reasoning, whether the phenomena are those which can be attributed only to human intellect, or are those which must be attributed to superhuman power and intelligence. Hence, too, I speak of a moral purpose as indicated by the phenomena. The pyramid and the obelisk were built with a moral purpose. The animal organism and all that follows from it, the structure of the solar system and all that follows from it, were made to be what they are with a moral purpose.