IX.

BREADTH OF THE WORLD OF MIND.

245. THE one expression already employed (240) as distinctive of the community of Mind is sufficiently precise to serve our immediate purpose. This com

monwealth includes, we say, all those orders of beings that are endowed with sensibilities and with powers fitting them to be put in trust, individually, of their own well-being.

246. So much as this can not be affirmed of any species usually included in the vegetable kingdom. The individual plant is, indeed, well cared for in the constitution of the world around it; but if, in any instance, its well-being comes to be out of accordance with that constitution, it perishes without help; if light, warmth, moisture, or certain elements in the soil fail it where it stands, the plant dies.

247. The animal finds itself existing from hour to hour, as we might say, precariously; for it lives always on that border where its welfare is every moment tending to get out of accordance with the constitution of the outer world, and where it will speedily perish unless rescued by an exercise of its faculties. By its own efforts it must bring itself again into due relationship therewith; if it should fail to care for itself (in so far as its structure implies that it should do so), the elements will not care for it; nor will its own, nor other species, care for it. Death is the penalty of

the remissness or of the helplessness of the individual animal.

248. This condition of trusteeship for the individual life implies, by necessity, the possession of faculties of perception toward the outer world, and a consciousness of organic pain and pleasure, and the power and the means of locomotion; and with these, a prehensile mechanical structure. These conditions again imply sensorial centralization, or a ONE CONSCIOUSNESS more or less reflective. This one consciousness is MIND; or we may prefer to speak of it as the product of Mind.

249. When, in terms so comprehensive as these, we open a way into the great theatre of life-conscious life-we enter what must be to us a scene infinitely extended. How vast are the dimensions of this stage of intelligence—this consciousness of enjoyment and of suffering!

250. But it is likely that, upon the very threshold of this theatre, exception may be taken, and some may even resent the invitation to enter precincts within which the dignity and high prerogatives of human nature seem to be compromised or to be brought into jeopardy. A feeling of this sort will, however, give way, after a little reflection, to feelings quite of an opposite kind.

251. An undefined repugnance to consort ourselves with the countless animal orders around us, and to think of them as our fellows, and to regard the herbivora and the carnivora-the mammals, and the mollusks, and the infusoria, as tenants in common of the planet, leaves us liable to be scandalized at every turn by palpable instances of the fact of this fellowship.

But if we bring ourselves to look well to the grounds of the alleged agreement, and then acquaint ourselves with the reasons of the difference, and if we understand the boundless extent of that difference, we shall exempt ourselves ever afterward from all disagreeable revulsions of feeling such as we now suppose.

252. In fact, much of that which is to invite attention in this elementary book will consist of an exhibition, first, of what is common to all orders of living beings, and then a setting forth of what is peculiar to the human mind, and which is the ground of its immeasurable superiority.

253. Our modern science, with its explorative instruments, brings us into position for looking around us through space and time in a manner which was not possible to our predecessors. We know more of the world of life than was known or than was at all surmised by philosophers only three centuries ago-more in the proportion of many millions to one. This farextended prospect can not but affect the feelings with which we regard the constitution of the animated world; and it must bear also upon the conclusions, moral and theological, which may warrantably be drawn from the fields of natural history.

254. The philosophic and the contemplative minds of former times might almost be envied some of the prerogatives of their ignorance as to the relative position of man on earth. Man-his energies, his destinies, the range of his reason, and the intensity of his tastes—his relish of the beautiful—these things were, to such minds, the world-the universe. As to the orders around them, "the fishes of the sea," they were

the servants of man-some of them; they were his aliment-some of them; or they were the decorations of his world; they were the things that are moving or at rest upon the foreground of lordly human existence, or they were the objects that fill the spaces in its background. Man was the only being of whom much account should be taken.

255. But it is no longer possible to us at this present time, or it is a possibility confined to the sentimental and the poetical, to look around, in any such mood as this, upon the great world of life. Upon the broad platform of conscious existence the aristocracy of mind is overborne by the democracy: in the ecclesia of all that live, man finds himself outvoted millions to one.

256. It is after a recollection of himself-it is upon the ground of a new estimate of his powers, that man regains his position, and that he challenges anew a supremacy which shall never again be called in question. The ancient belief of the dignity of man as master of the world was not wrong in substance, but it had been formed in ignorance of the facts. The facts, as they are brought before us in our modern science, have this meaning-they confirm this estimate in its substance, and they give it also a vastness of meaning that is incalculably extended.

257. Modern science has brought us into acquaintance with the animated world in two modes that are independent of each other: the first of these is that afforded by the revelations of the microscope. We should keep far within the limits of truth in affirming that this instrument gives us the knowledge of living

creatures- -a million for every one that may be known to the naked eye, and that was actually known to the naturalists of antiquity. The conjecture might be hazarded that the animals of all orders known to the fathers of ancient philosophy as the tenants of earth,' air, and water, may be outnumbered by those which the microscope shows to be enjoying existence in a gill of water from a stagnant pond.

258. Very many of the species that are comprehended in this modern revelation are found to be possessed of a high organization, and there are but a few concerning which we should be in doubt as to their right to claim a place among those that are "put in trust of their individual welfare." Sensation, perception, a central consciousness, and, pre-eminently, the powers of locomotion, are seen to belong to beings of whom as many as there were men in the army of Xerxes might be marshaled in open order upon a sixpence !

259. The vastness of that theatre of conscious life which the microscope opens to our view might be symbolized in various ways, as thus: We take the Earth, with its inhabitants, as known to antiquity-the beasts of the field, the fowls of heaven, the creeping things, and the fishes innumerable; a multitude, indeed, beyond computation! But now we transport ourselves to the Sun, and we wander over those resplendent plains upon which no shadow falls. These fields of light, like the dim surface of the earth, we may suppose to be thickly peopled with the living-land, and water, and air are all tenanted; but the proportion of the area of the sun to that of the earth does not exag