Reader, in view of the teaching of this new and widely heralded sage, how many "superfluities" must you and I strip off from our "conception" of life! And with what bitter disappointment and deep sadness should we take up our lamentation for man, and say: How art thou fallen, oh man! thou noblest denizen of earth; yea, how art thou cast down to the ground. But a little ago we believed thee a spiritual being; that thou hadst a nature too noble to rot with the beasts among the clods; that thou wast made fit to live with angels and thy Creator, God. But a little ago we believed thee possessed of a psychical life--a soul; that thou wouldst live forever beyond the stars; and that this soul's life was wholly occupied in the consideration of "heavenly and divine things." A little ago we believed in holiness, and that thou, consecrating thyself to pure and loving employments, shouldst become purer and more beautiful, nobler and more lovely, until perfect love should cast out all fear, and thou shouldst then see God face to face, and rejoice in the sunlight of his smiling countenance. But all this is changed now. Our belief has been found to be a cheat, a bitter mockery to the soul. We have sat at the feet of the English sage, and learned how dismally different is our destiny. Painful is it, oh reader, to listen; and the words of our teacher sweep like a sirocco over the heart; yet we cannot choose but hear. "The pyschical life"--the life of the soul, "the immortal spark of fire,"--and the physical life "are _equally_ definable as the continuous adjustment of internal relations to external relations." We had supposed that intelligence in its highest forms was wholly occupied with the contemplation of God and his laws, and the great end of being, and all those tremendous questions which we had thought fitted to occupy the activities of a spiritual person. We are undeceived now. We find we have shot towards the pole opposite to the truth. Now "we perceive that this which we call Intelligence shows itself when the external relations to which the internal ones are adjusted begin to be numerous, complex, and remote in time or space; that _every advance in Intelligence essentially consists in the establishment of more varied, more complete, and more involved adjustments; and that even the highest achievements of science_ are resolvable into mental relations of coexistence and sequence, so cooerdinated as _exactly to tally_ with certain relations of coexistence and sequence that occur externally." In such relations consists the life of the "caterpillar." In such relations, _only a little "more complex,"_ consists the life of "the sparrow." Such relations only does "the fowler" observe; such only does "the chemist" know. This is the path by which we are led to the last, the highest "truth" which man can attain. Thus do we learn "that what we call _truth_, guiding us to successful action, and the consequent maintenance of life, is _simply_