But the exemptions which are recorded in the Bible could not, in his judgement be considered as showing what would have been the common lot if our first parents had preserved their obedience. This he opined would more probably have been euthanasy than translation; death, not preceded by infirmity and decay, but as welcome, and perhaps as voluntary as sleep. Or possibly the transition from a corporeal to a spiritual,—or more accurately in our imperfect language,—from an earthly to a celestial state of being, might have been produced by some developement, some formal mutation as visible, (adverting to a favourite fancy of his own) as that which in the butterfly was made by the ancients their emblem of immortality. Bishop Van Mildert shews us upon scriptural authority that “the degree of perfection at which we may arrive has no definite limits, but is to go on increasing as long as this state of probation continues.” So in the paradisiacal, and possibly in the millennial state, he thought, that with such an intellectual and moral improvement, a corresponding organic evolution might keep pace; and that as the child expands into man, so man might mature into Angel. CHAPTER CCXXXIX. THE DOCTOR DISSENTS FROM A PROPOSITION OF WARBURTON'S AND SHEWS IT TO BE FALLACIOUS.—HUTCHINSON'S REMARKS ON THE POWERS OF BRUTES.—LORD SHAFTESBURY QUOTED.—APOLLONIUS AND THE KING OF BABYLON.—DISTINCTION IN THE TALMUD BETWEEN AN INNOCENT BEAST AND A VICIOUS ONE.—OPINION OF ISAAC LA PEYRESC.—THE QUESTION DE ORIGINE ET NATURA ANIMARUM IN BRUTIS AS BROUGHT BEFORE THE THEOLOGIANS OF SEVEN PROTESTANT ACADEMIES IN THE YEAR 1635 BY DANIEL SENNERTUS. _Toutes veritez ne sont pas bonnes à dire serieusement._ GOMGAM. Warburton has argued that “from the _nature_ of any action morality cannot arise, nor from its effects;—not from the first, because being only reasonable or unreasonable, nothing follows but a fitness in doing one, and an absurdity in doing the other;—not from the second, because did the good or evil produced make the action _moral_, brutes from whose actions proceed both good and evil, would have morality.” But Warburton's proposition is fallacious, and his reasoning is inconclusive; there is an essential difference between right and wrong, upon which the moral law is founded; and in the _reductio ad absurdum_ upon which he relies, there is no absurdity. The language of the people is sometimes true to nature and philosophy when that of the learned departs widely from the one, and is mistaken in the other. When we call a beast vicious, we mean strictly what the word implies; and if we never speak of one as virtuous, it is because man reserves the praise of virtue to his own kind. The word good supplies its place. A horse that has any vice in him is never called good.