that any animal can thus adopt an abstract idea as his purpose in life, and pursue it. This power gives man his immense superiority over all other creatures, and makes him capable of high moral and intellectual development.

§ 10. The Evolution of the Soul, as an improvement on the doctrine of Darwin.

That man has come up to his present state of development by passing through lower forms is the popular doctrine of science to-day. What is called evolution teaches that we have reached our present state by a very long and gradual ascent from the lowest animal organizations. It is true that the Darwinian theory takes no notice of the evolution of the soul, but only of the body. But it appears to me that a combination of the two views would remove many difficulties which still attach to the theory of natural selection and the survival of the fittest. If we are to believe in evolution, let us have the assistance of the soul itself in this development of new species.

"For of the soul the body form doth take:

For soul is form, and doth the body make."

Thus science and philosophy will coöperate, nor will poetry hesitate to lend her aid. For have not two great poets in our time intimated their belief in some such law of preexistence and transmigration? Wordsworth long ago declared that—

"Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting;

The soul that rises with us, our life's star,
Has had elsewhere its setting,

And cometh from afar."

And Tennyson also suggests,

"For how should I for certain hold,
Because my memory is so cold,
That I first was in human mould ?

It would be curious if we should find science and philosophy taking up again this old theory of metempsychosis, remodeling it to suit our present

modes of religious and scientific thought, and launching it again on the wide ocean of human belief. But stranger things have happened in the history of human opinion.

CHAPTER VII.

THE ORIGIN OF THE WORLD; IN ALL RELIGIONS. EVOLUTION, EMANATION, AND CREATION.

§ 1. Different theories concerning the origin of the Cosmos. All races of men believe it had a beginning, and has not existed always. The primeval chaos. § 2. Doctrine of Evolution. Its antiquity. The World-egg. Orphic poets. Laws of Manu. Aristophanes. Hesiod. Ovid. American Indians. Eddas. The Polynesian theology. § 3. Doctrine of Emanation. Source of this view. The Vedas. The Gnostics. Their problem. § 4. Doctrine of Creation. Different forms of this doctrine. The Hebrew Bible, the Zend-Avesta, the Assyrian tablets, the philosophers. Objection to the doctrine of Creation by modern thinkers. § 5. Darwin and Natural Selection. §. 6. Theory of Creation by beings above man, but below God. This theory would harmonize the doctrines of Evolution, Emanation, and Creation.

§ 1. Different theories concerning the origin of the Cosmos. All races of men believe it had a beginning, and has not existed always. The primeval chaos.

WE

E all recollect the old gentleman in the "Vicar of Wakefield," who astonished Dr. Primrose by his profound learning in regard to the origin of the universe. "The cosmogony, or creation of the world," said he, " has puzzled philoso

phers of all ages. Sanconiathon, Manetho, Berosus, and Ocellus Lucanus have all attempted it in vain." This venerable man, with his jargon about cosmogony, turned out in the end to be a venerable humbug. But notwithstanding this warning, we are obliged to follow his steps and show how largely the origin of the world has occupied the human mind.

All possible theories about the origin of the universe may be reduced to these :

1. It had no origin, but has always existed as it is now, a Cosmos of order.

2. It came by a process of evolution.

3. It came by a process of emanation.

4. It was created by some intelligent Being. The first of these theories, that the world has always been as it is now, has never been the belief of mankind. All races of men, in all times, have agreed in a remarkable way in assuming a beginning of the universe, and a gradual process of development or of creation. We may add that these different theories commonly suppose the world at first to have been in a chaotic state. Chaos was

first in almost every system.

One is much struck by this fact, which reappears continually in the most opposite quarters. We recollect how the account of the creation begins in the Book of Genesis: "The earth was without form, and void, and darkness was on the