And may we not with good reason congratulate ourselves on this result of our investigations? Instead of the vision we were threatened with, of mind losing itself in matter, our eyes are gladdened with that of the converse operation, of the transmutation of matter into mind. And on no account is this metamorphosis to be mistaken for annihilation of matter, whose stolid grossness has vanished, not in order to give place to empty nominalism or to a thin mist of mere mental perceptions existing only in virtue of being perceived, but in order to reappear gloriously etherealised into living energy. By the change that has taken place, corruption has put on incorruption; the natural body has become a quickening spirit; death is swallowed up in victory. Matter reappears converted, not into a perception of percipient mind, but into percipient mind itself; yet although thus presumably percipient of its own existence, it not the less has an existence perfectly independent of perception, either by itself or by any other intelligence. Under what head the mind, or combination of living forces, thus constituting all matter, ought to be classed, is a question, which the imperfection of human faculties may as well be content to leave unanswered, though to its being supposed to emanate directly from the mind of Omnipresent Deity, one insuperable objection may be mentioned, which should be kept steadily in view. There are few of us who will not shrink with horror from a notion, according to which man, whenever doing as he pleases with any material object, applying it, as likely as not, to some base or criminal purpose, is disposing at his pleasure of a portion of the Divine essence: few who will not greatly prefer to believe that the vital principle which manifests itself in the form of a dunghill or of a poisoned dagger, may be, for the time, as completely individualised and separate from all other life or mind, as every human being perceives his own conscious mind or self to be. At all events, we have now reached a point beyond which it would be rash to rush hastily on. For a while we may be well content to rest where we are. That matter is nothing else but a peculiar manifestation, or avatar, of some species of mind, whatever that species be, is a proposition as demonstrably true as its converse is demonstrably false. Unless it be possible for death to give birth to life, it is impossible for living mind to be the offspring of inanimate matter; but so surely as mind is mind, and that living force alone can act either on mind or aught else, so surely must all matter that imparts sensation to mind, be itself a species of living force and consequently a species of mind.