To oppose this blending of mind and matter, Lord Brougham (in his Natural Theology) likens the marble statue hewn into beauty, to the perfect arrangement of organization in a being. While I admire the idea, I may observe that he forgets this truth,—that the maker of the one was a mere _statuary_, without even the fabulous power of Prometheus, or Pygmalion, or Frankenstein; the other, the _Creator_ of all things, who _breathed a breath of life into the shape he had made fitted to receive it_. My lord thus halts at the threshold of discovery: mind is not the _product_ of organization, but it works _by_ and _through_ it; and therefore, for its _earthly_ uses, cannot be independent of the qualities of matter. We may as well agree with Plato, in endowing the soul with “a plastic power, to fashion a body for itself, to enter a shape and make it a body living.” I remember Plutarch (in his Quæst. Platon.) makes him say, that the soul is older than the body, and the source of its existence, and that the intellect is in this soul. But where is the sacred evidence of this? for, even in our _antenatal_ state, we live, and yet there is probably no consciousness; there is vitality, at least, without the _consciousness_ of an intellect. ASTR. As the creation of light was _before_ that of the sun, its reservoir, so the creation of the soul might be before the brain, in which the Creator _subsequently_ placed it. EV. For this there _is_ sacred evidence, Astrophel. There _was_ light, ere the sun was created as its reservoir; but the soul was breathed into the body, which was already then created. ASTR. This is a specimen of your special pleading, Evelyn, allied to that perilous error of Priestley, that supposed function and structure to be identical, because they are influenced by the same disease, and seem to live and die, flourish and decay, _together_. Democritus also has written his belief that, “as the smell of a rose exists in the bloom, and fades as that dies, so the soul of an animal is born with its birth, and dies with its death.” You have conceded to me (and we must all be conscious of) the great difficulty of conceiving the _nature_ of _spirit_; but, if we are required to prove its existence, we may answer, by analogy, that we cannot always palpably prove the existence of _matter_, although we _know it_ to exist. The _electric fluid_ may remain for an indefinite period invisible, nay, may never meet the sight,—it may even traverse a space without any evidence but that of its wonderful influence, and at length be collected in a jar.