The great apostle of the Gentiles represents all Nature as sighing for her deliverance from the bondage of death. "Every creature groaneth and travaileth in pain, even now." Some chapters in the Philosophy of life may be considered as one luminous commentary on that text. My limits will permit me to cite but one passage. "That planetary world of sense, and the soul of the earth imprisoned therein, is only apparently dead. Nature only sleeps, and may again be awakened: and sleep is, if not the essence, yet a characteristic mark of Nature. Every thing in Nature hath this quality of sleep; not the animals merely, but the plants also sleep; and in the course of the seasons on the surface of the globe, there is a constant alternation between waking and slumber."... "That soul, he continues, which slumbers under the prodigious tomb-stone of outward nature--a soul, which is not alien, but half akin to us--is divided between the troubled, painful reminiscence of eternal death, in which it originated--and the bright flowers of celestial Hope, which grow on the borders of that dark abyss. For this earthly Nature, as Holy Writ saith, is indeed subjected to nothingness--yet without its will, and without its fault: so it looks forward in expectation of Him who hath so subjected it--it looks forward in the hope that it may one day be free--one day have a share in the general resurrection and consummate revelation of God's glory; and for this last great day of future creation Nature anxiously sighs, and yearns from her inmost soul."[29] I will now wind up this analysis with the following passage, in which the distinctive peculiarities of the different parts of ontology are shortly stated: "The distinctive characteristic of nature is sleep, or the struggle between life and death; the distinctive characteristic of man is imagination (for reason is a more negative faculty); the distinctive characteristic of the intelligences superior to man is restless, eternal activity, implanted in the very constitution of their being; and the distinctive characteristic of the Deity, in relation to his creatures, is infinite condescension." Such is a brief summary of some of the principal observations in the psychological and ontological parts of the Philosophy of Life. And in this summary it has been my intention not so much to give an analysis of those parts, as to convey to the reader a clue for the better understanding of many passages in the work I have translated. The remaining parts of the "Philosophy of Life" are devoted to a variety of ethical, political, and æsthetic reflections, which it is unnecessary to enter into here.