Did the uninstructed and stammering childhood of our race, separate, in thought, the _Supernatural_ from surrounding nature? Can we absolutely say either yes or no to this inquiry? The "Heaven-Father" of pre-historic[ah] day would seem if fully considered to make the separation clear. The type-idea, thus outlined, is drawn, not from symbolizing and personified Nature, but from an actual, living, fatherly, Man. And the tendency of primitive Man might rather be to raise natural objects into living beings, than to lower persons into things. It is so, we are sure, with our children's apprehension of the _Natural_. They know a world of persons and things antagonistic to their own wills and efforts, but they begin by making the things into _persons_. A thwarted baby-boy beats the table, his kitten, and his nurse indifferently. So far as observation has been extended to the religious apprehensions of the very young, they would seem to spiritualize the material universe;--to behold unseen powers in the changing clouds, and hear them in the sighing of the wind. Wordsworth's "Ode on Immortality" is a picture as full of childlike human truth, as it is of unearthly beauty. But, as regards _both_ principles, the human train of thought is nearly similar in its first rise, and grows in definiteness and expansion by a nearly similar process. A true Man sets each principle to work, and from its working gathers its real value and verification. If the world outside him were a phantastic shadow, the practical conclusion fairly inferred would be _quietism_. Bolingbroke said to King Richard-- "The shadow of your sorrow hath destroyed The shadow of your face." But, suppose both face and sorrow were themselves only shadows? What worth in Man's body then,--what worth in his soaring mind? The natural issue would be to drift down the shadowy[167] stream into a darker abyss of Nothingness. Speculation[168] must lay down its arms, as powerless against such a supposition. The evidence of our senses[169] themselves is resolvable into shadows. It was not by speculation that our strong Western will encountered the ideal enigmas of every day life. Act upon externalities, and they will _re_act upon you. As a matter of fact, it is necessary to commence by admitting that the souls of others are as _impenetrable_ to us, as the material things into which we cannot force our way. But, things and persons react upon us _differently_; and we act upon them in widely _different_ ways. By an exertion of our will, we can change or stop a _natural_ tide of inorganic antecedents and consequents and direct it to our own purposes. _Beings_ like ourselves, we must allure, manage, inform, and persuade. Soon we find, by experience, that other human beings are very like ourselves; and the higher animals nearer to us than stocks and stones. We find this through the exercise of our own causal activities upon them.