Upon these conclusions we cannot directly base an argument sustaining man's immortality, but we certainly remove the only serious objection that has ever been alleged against it. We leave the field clear for those general considerations of philosophic analogy and moral probability which are all the guides upon which we can call for help in this arduous inquiry. But it may be suggested at this point that perhaps our argument has acquired a wider scope than was at first contemplated. Consciousness is not peculiar to man, but is possessed in some degree by the greater portion of the animal kingdom. Among the higher birds and mammals the amount of conscious life is very considerable, and here too it must be argued that consciousness is not a product of molecular motion in the nervous system but its concomitant. The same argument which removes the objection to immortality for man removes it also for an indefinite number of animal species. What, then, is to be said of the reasonableness of supposing a future life for sundry lower animals? and if we were to reach a negative conclusion in their case, while reaching a positive conclusion in the case of man, on what principle are we to draw the line? Sometimes we hear this question propounded as a difficulty in the Darwinian theory of man's origin. How could immortal man have been produced through heredity from an ephemeral brute? The difficulty is one of the sort which we are apt to encounter when we try to designate absolute beginnings and to mark off hard and fast lines, for in Nature there are no such things. Voltaire asked the same kind of question more than a hundred years before Darwinism had been heard of. When does the immortal soul of the human individual come into existence? Is it at the moment of conception, or when the new-born babe begins to breathe, or at some moment between, or even perhaps at some era of early childhood when moral responsibility can be said to have begun? Some of the answers to these questions would transform an ephemeral creature into an immortal one in the same person. The most proper answer is a frank confession of ignorance. Whether it be in the individual or in the race, we cannot tell just where the soul comes in. A due heed to Nature's analogies, however, is helpful in this connection. The maxim that Nature makes no leaps is far from true. Nature's habit is to make prodigious leaps, but only after long preparation. Slowly rises the water in the tank, inch by inch through many a weary hour, until at length it over-flows and straightway vast systems of machinery are awakened into rumbling life. Slowly grows the eccentricity of the ellipse as you shift its position in the cone, and still the nature of the curve is not essentially varied, when suddenly, presto! one more little shift, and the finite ellipse becomes an infinite hyperbola mocking our feeble powers of conception as it speeds away on its everlasting career. Perhaps in our ignorance such analogies