‘The ancient philosophers called God the Soul of the World. This, considered as a figurative expression, is destitute neither of beauty nor of truth. What the soul of man is to his body, that God is to the universe, in several respects; but not in all. There are many respects in which the metaphor fails: (1) The human soul did not make its own body, but God made the world; (2) the human soul is ignorant of the nice texture and mechanism of its body, but God knows the whole mechanism of the universe, because He conceived and made it; (3) the human soul receives much of its information by bodily organs: God’s knowledge of all things is immediate and not dependent on bodily organs; (4) our power over our own bodies is limited: the power of God over the universe is unlimited; (5) our bodies are wholly made up of inert and soulless matter: the universe is stored with various orders of living beings and free agents, subject to the Divine Power as their moral governor and capable of paying back the service of rational subjects.’ But the philosophy of the Common Sense, as represented by Reid, did not rise to the conciliation of the natural order of the material with the originative freedom of the spiritual world, in which operating law in outward nature is recognised as immediate divine agency, or a part of a revelation of perfectly reasonable Will in and through a universe of things and persons. CHAPTER IX THE END—1796 In the last winter of his life Reid read an interesting discourse on ‘Muscular Motion,’ in the Literary Society, of which he so long had been a member. After describing articulately the progressive changes in the human muscles which mark the advance of age, and proposing an explanation, he thus concludes his last public discourse:—