Many of the arguments for the immortality of man cannot indeed be used for our dumb relations, the animals. We cannot argue from their universal faith in a future life; nor contend that they need an immortality on moral grounds, to recompense their good conduct and punish their wickedness. We might indeed adduce a reason implied in our Saviour's parable, and believe that the poor creatures who have received their evil things in this life will be comforted in another. Moreover, we might find in many animals qualities fitting them for a higher state. There are animals, as we have seen, who show a fidelity, courage, generosity, often superior to what we see in man. The dogs who have loved their master more than food, and starved to death on his grave, are surely well fitted for a higher existence. Jesse tells a story of a cat which was being stoned by cruel boys. Men went by, and did not interfere; but a dog, that saw it, did. He drove away the boys, and then took the cat to his kennel, licked her all over with his tongue, and his conduct interested people, who brought her milk. The canine nurse took care of her till she was well, and the cat and dog remained fast friends ever after. Such an action in a man would have been called heroic; and we think such a dog would not be out of place in heaven. Yet it is not so much on particular cases of animal superiority that we rely, but on the difficulty of conceiving, in any sense, of the destruction of life. The principle of life, whether we call it soul or body, matter or spirit, escapes all observation of the senses. All that we know of it by observation is that, beside the particles of matter which compose an organized body, there is something else, not cognizable by the senses, which attracts and dismisses them, modifies and coördinates them. The unity of the body is not to be found in its sensible phenomena, but in something which escapes the senses. Into the vortex of that life material molecules are being continually absorbed, and from it they are perpetually discharged. If death means the dissolution of the body, we die many times in the course of our earthly career, for every body is said by human anatomists to be changed in all its particles once in seven years. What then remains, if all the particles go? The principle of organization remains, and this invisible, persistent principle constitutes the identity of every organized body. If I say that I have the _same_ body when I am fifty which I had at twenty, it is because I mean by "body" that which continues unaltered amid the fast-flying particles of matter. This life principle makes and remakes the material frame; that body does not make it. When what we call death intervenes, all that we can assert is that the life principle has done wholly and at once what it has always been doing gradually and in part. What happens to the material particles, we see: they become detached from the organizing principle,