“Because a man has skill and ability, is he therefore immortal? We, in our ignorance and imperfection, would exalt the intellectual above the moral. The former has greater attractions for imperfect man than the latter. Had we the peopling of paradise, we should fill it with the world’s heroes in literature, science, and the arts. The skillful are the world’s saints, and the proper candidates for Heaven’s ‘many mansions.’ This argument, dispassionately considered apart from the imposing parade of human achievements, is just this: Man is _clever_, therefore he is _immortal_. Here is neither logic nor religion. The cleverness of man is surely no title to immortality, much less is it the proof of its possession. It is a silly logic which asserts human immortality from such strange premises as balloons and pyramids, electro-telegraphs and railways.” But all men cannot engineer the construction of a pyramid, nor construct a balloon, nor build an engine, much less accomplish the greater feat involved in their first invention. All men are not learned and skillful, and of such eminent capabilities. Is it not, in fact, almost an infinitely small proportion of the human race that has manifested those great powers on which this argument is based! And can the capacities of a few leading minds determine the destiny of the great mass of men who possess no such powers? And if an argument may be based on the capacities of some, may not an equal and opposite argument be based on the incapacity of others? and in this case on which side would the weight of evidence lie? And as there is almost every conceivable gradation of intelligence, who will tell us whereabouts in this scale the infinite endowment of immortality is first perceptible? Looking at the human race, and the races immediately below, we behold a point where they seem to blend indistinguishably into each other. Will an utter lack of capacity be affirmed of the higher orders of the brute creation? And descending in the scale, where shall we stop? Where is the transition from immortality to mortality?