Neither molecularists nor Darwinians, then, are able to level out the difference between organic and inorganic, or between genera and genera or species and species. The differences persist despite of both; the distributed identity remains unaccounted for. Nor, consequently, is Mr. Darwin’s theory competent to explain the objective idea by any reference to time and conditions. Living beings do exist in a mighty chain from the moss to the man; but that chain, far from founding, is founded in the idea, and is not the result of any mere natural _growth_ of this into that. That chain is itself the most brilliant stamp, the sign-manual, of design. On every ledge of nature, from the lowest to the highest, there is a life that is _its_,—a creature to represent it, reflect it—so to speak, pasture on it. The last, highest, brightest link of this chain is man; the incarnation of thought itself, which is the summation of this universe; man, that includes in himself all other links and their single secret—the personified universe, the subject of the world. Mr. Huxley makes but small reference to thought; he only tucks it in, as it were, as a mere appendicle of course. It may be objected, indeed—to reach the last stage in this discussion—that, if Mr. Huxley has not disproved the conception of thought and life “as a something which works through matter, but is independent of it,” neither have we proved it. But it is easy for us to reply that, if “_independent of_” means here “_unconnected with_,” we have had no such object. We have had no object whatever, in fact, but to resist, now the extravagant assertion that all organized tissue, from the lichen to Leibnitz, is alike in faculty, and again the equally extravagant assertion that life and thought are but ordinary products of molecular chemistry. As regards the latter assertion, we have endeavored to show that the processes of vital organization (as self-production, etc.) belong to another sphere, higher than, and very different from, those of mechanical juxtaposition or chemical neutralization; that life, then, is no mere product of matter as matter; that if no life can be pointed to independent of matter, neither is there any life-stuff independent of life; and that life, consequently, adds a new and higher force to chemistry, as chemistry a new and higher force to mechanics, etc. As for thought, the endeavor was to show that it was as independent on the one side as matter on the other, that it controlled, used, summed, and was the reason of matter. Thought, then, is not to be reached by any bridge from matter, that is a hybrid of both, and explains the connection. The relation of matter to mind is not to be explained as a transition, but as a _contrecoup_. In this relation, however, it is not the material, but the mental side, which the whole universe declares to be the dominant one.