This love of the vegetable world has a mysterious root in our hearts. May we not recognize in so natural a sentiment, a sort of vague remembrance of our original country, a secret and involuntary evocation of the scene in which the germ of our soul was first loosed to the light of the sun, the powerful promoter of life? Besides the undecided and dim remembrance of pictures which seem to belong to our anterior existences upon the globe, we sometimes feel keen aspirations towards a kinder and calmer destiny than that which is allotted to us here below. No doubt coarse beings, entirely attached to material appetites and interests, do not feel these secret longings for an unknown and happier destiny, but poetical and tender souls, those who suffer from the wretched conditions of which human nature is the slave and the martyr, take a vague pleasure in such melancholy aspirations. In the radiant infinite they foresee celestial dwellings, where they shall one day reside, and they are impatient to break the ties which bind them to earth. Read the episode in Goethe's _Mignon_, in which Mignon, wandering and exiled, pours out her young soul in aspirations to heaven, in sublime longings for an unknown and blessed future, which she feels drawing her towards itself, and ask yourself whether the beautiful verses of the great poet, who was also a great naturalist, do not interpret a truth of nature, _i.e._, the new life which awaits us in the plains of ether. Why do all men, among all peoples, raise their eyes to heaven in solemn moments, in the impulses of passion, and the anguish of grief or pain? Does any one, under such circumstances, contemplate the earth on which he stands? Our eyes and our hearts turn towards the skies. The dying raise their fallen orbs to heaven, and we look towards the celestial spaces in those vague reveries which we have been describing. It is permitted to us to believe that this universal tendency is an intuition of that which awaits us after our terrestrial life, a natural revelation of the domain which shall be ours one day, and which extends over the celestial empyrean, to the bosom of ethereal space. [Illustration] [Illustration] CHAPTER THE SEVENTEENTH. A SUMMARY OF THE SYSTEM OF THE PLURALITY OF LIVES. WE propose now to collect, within a few summary propositions, the principal features of the system of nature which we have defined. 1. The sun is the primary agent of life and organization.