The foundations of our faith, resting upon the imagined interest of God in our race, an interest easily supposable when man believed himself the only intelligent created being, and therefore eminently worthy the especial care and watchful anxiety of a God who had only this earth to look after, and its house-keeping alone to superintend, and who was content to create, in all the infinite Universe, only one single being, possessing a soul, and not a mere animal, are rudely shaken as the Universe broadens and expands for us; and the darkness of doubt and distrust settles heavy upon the Soul. The modes in which it is ordinarily endeavored to satisfy our doubts, only increase them. To _demonstrate_ the necessity for a cause of the creation, is equally to demonstrate the necessity of a cause for that cause. The argument from plan and design only removes the difficulty a step further off. We rest the world on the elephant, and the elephant on the tortoise, and the tortoise on--nothing. To tell us that the animals possess instinct only and that Reason belongs to us alone, in no way tends to satisfy us of the radical difference between us and them. For if the mental phenomena exhibited by animals that think, dream, remember, argue from cause to effect, plan, devise, combine, and communicate their thoughts to each other, so as to act rationally in concert,--if their love, hate, and revenge, can be conceived of as results of the organization of matter, like color and perfume, the resort to the hypothesis of an immaterial Soul to explain phenomena of the same kind, only more perfect, manifested by the _human_ being, is supremely absurd. That organized matter can think or even _feel_ at all, is the great insoluble mystery. "Instinct" is but a word without a meaning, or else it means inspiration. It is either the animal itself, or God _in_ the animal, that thinks, remembers, and reasons; and instinct, according to the common acceptation of the term, would be the greatest and most wonderful of mysteries,--no less a thing than the direct, immediate, and continual promptings of the Deity,--for the animals are not machines, or automata moved by springs, and the ape is but a dumb Australian. Must we _always_ remain in this darkness of uncertainty, of doubt? Is there _no_ mode of escaping from the labyrinth except by means of a blind faith, which explains nothing, and in many creeds, ancient and modern, sets Reason at defiance, and leads to the belief either in a God without a Universe, a Universe without a God, or a Universe which is itself a God?