It may be a startling proposition to announce to you that the quality which gives you the power of abstract thought is possessed in a lower degree by, for instance, the stones which lie beneath your feet; yet such is the case, for we have demonstrated beyond a doubt that the chemical forces and affinities are nothing else but low, restricted, and insensible forms of intelligent action. The fact is best shown by the building up of organic bodies in their multiplication of cells. Each cell arranges itself in place, and makes way to its successor, under an inherited impulse of action from which it is unable to depart. What are known among you as natural forces, are merely forms of unconscious and restricted intelligences, which have only the power to act in limited directions. They both build up matter and tear it down for us. They shape the crystal with mathematical uniformity, and mark out the form of the plant with unerring precision. The character of the agency bears no proportion to the magnitude of its work. These low, unconscious forms of intelligence, which inspire the plant cell to build up its fanciful elevations, and the infinitesimal atom to seek after and embrace its affinity, are precisely the same as that which directs the sea of worlds upon their swift and unvarying paths. And yet with all their exactitude and infinity of scope, they are as much below that independent, self-conscious intelligence which guides our thoughts and actions, as the protoplasm is beneath the most highly organized and perfect form. Your theology has degraded you with the belief that you are mendicants, enjoying the favors of life as mere concessions from an all-powerful and exacting master; and that your position in the cosmos bears a close relation to the insignificance of your material bodies, and your feeble power in the stupendous energies which surround you. Your science will elevate you with the knowledge that you are peers in the great universe, and that your stature has no comparative measure for its proportions in the height and breadth of your material world. It will teach you that by slow degrees, and through millions of ages, you have become that elimination of the spiritual out of the vast number of divided intelligences which have built up and governed your natural world; that you are the harvest and the fruition of the innumerable lower intelligences, which were sown broadcast in the beginning to do their potent work.