Looking to the highest types of the animal and the lowest types of men, we will observe that they approach very near to each other. Naturalists have been divided in opinion as to whether or not man was an animal projected on a little higher plane, and whether or not the difference is not merely one of degree. I say that when man is developed, we find him developing or individualizing a higher principle. Individuality was first started in the vegetable; the principle of vitality in the animal. The second degree of individuality was where the animal became individualized on a higher plane of life, on a plane of consciousness belonging to what we call the nerve-medium. Man individualizes upon the second degree of consciousness and the third degree of life, completing an individuality. He becomes to us the highest type of form and life in the finite; and a large class of philosophers and theologians conceive man as formed in the divine image, and suppose the expression that God made man in his own image, to refer to an external as well as internal likeness. Man as an individual occupies the highest plane; he has attained to the third degree of life as a Spiritual being, consequently he becomes immortal. If the third degree of life brings man into communion with the self-living and divine, he becomes immortal; if not, then he is not immortal; for that only is immortal which receives into itself that which is self-living, self-sufficient, and self-existent, that which can not be dissolved or disorganized. If man has not attained to that plane which joins upon that which is self-existent, he is not immortal. The simple fact that man can think, will, and act, proves nothing for his immortality. The dog can act, and think, and will, but that does not make the animal immortal. Those who base immortality upon that, do not perceive its real basis. Man becomes immortal by his _relation_ to that which is self-existent and self-sufficient, and has that self-sufficient condition brought into him by induction. He receives it by a sort of divine induction. I have brought in a chart to illustrate the principle of induction or the law of progression. You observe that man stands at the head of form and life, though not at the head of consciousness. He is as a finite being produced only to the second degree of consciousness. That is the last step man took. Man has advanced to the second degree of consciousness, which looks to the relational and finite, hence man as a moral being, as a finite being; and that which he investigates in virtue of his faculties as a moral being must be finite. He can therefore only investigate in the sphere of the finite. The moment he attempts to embrace the infinite, and translate that into the finite, that moment he is pushing his investigations beyond his development.