But there is an objection to the Linnæan classification infinitely more important than this misconception in regard to species. He places his one human species (Caucasian) in the class mammalia, and therefore assumes that the human creation has a closer connection with a class of animals, than these animals themselves have with some other forms of animal life. For example: men (and white men, too) approximate more closely to dogs and cats than the latter do to owls and eagles! It does not help the matter to say that this is only in their animal structures, for there is an invariable and imperishable unity between the material organization and the external manifestations or faculties, which is fixed forever, and the conclusion or inference from the Linnæan assumption is unavoidable—if men approximate more closely to a class of animals than these animals do to some other class, then it is absurd to suppose the purposes assigned them by the Almighty are so widely different as our reason and instinct alike impel us to believe. To hope for or to believe in immortality, or in a destiny so transcendent, while beings that closely resembled us perished with this life, in common with those still farther separated from themselves, was such a contradiction to reason, that men involuntarily shrunk from it, and the result has been to repel vast numbers of people from the study and investigation of this most essential element of all knowledge. The Materialists promptly accepted it, and wielded it with tremendous effect in advancing their gloomy and forbidding philosophy, while those impelled by that innate and indescribable consciousness of the soul itself, which, in its Godlike knowledge, rises high beyond the realms of reason and mere human will, and assures them of a life immortal and everlasting, shrunk from all study or investigation of the laws of physical life, as if it involved consequences fatal to that higher life of the soul. The former said, and said truly, if men have a closer union with the quadrumana than the latter have with birds, etc., then it is all nonsense to suppose that they have an eternity of life, while those separated by a still wider interval are limited to the present. And the only reply to their reasoning has been the refusal to investigate the subject or to study the laws of God, and to admit, inferentially at least, that there was a contradiction between the word and the works of the Almighty.