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as theirs, become permanent; so that it only partially retracts them when the use for them has ceased. In the lowest creatures we find organs wholly made at a moment's notice, by the rapid flow of vital matter into the part that is used in the higher we find the same influx of vital substance extending the organs that have been made by previous efforts to use them. The tentacula of the Hydra fusca are described by Carpenter as wart-like excrescences, lying around the orifice of its internal cavity, which are extended to the length of six or seven inches, when the cavity is empty, and needs replenishing. This extension, or- let me use a word that, if less descriptive, is more suggestive - this erection of the organs needed to supply the necessities of the body, if thought of in connection with the erection of the papillæ of the skin, &c.; and, at the same time, with the flow of blood to the organ whose activity is set in motion in higher animals, looks as if a disquietude or impulse which the conscious being finds moving it, and learns to call desire, was the prime mover of all organisms.

reasoning from analogy that carries us
all along with irresistible force to attrib-
ute to them motives like ours, with this
sole difference, that we cannot imagine
that they notice or remember their own
acts. If I see a dog vehemently devour-
ing food, I cannot help attributing to it a
feeling of hunger like ours; I find this
same hunger in the sucking child; in the
young cormorant gaping for food, in the
whale swimming or the night-jar flying
with open mouth on the chance of catch-
ing the food it craves. I cannot stop at
creatures of lower organization, at the
hydra, for instance, whose rapacity Car-
penter describes. In plants we lose sight
of the process through the slowness of
their movements, and the invisibility of
their food; but we can trace it in the
most structureless living substances,
whose movements are rapid enough to be
visible, and whose food is sucked out of
visible matter. Lionel Beale notices the
movement of the structureless germinal
matter of the end of a placental tuft, bur-
rowing, as it appears to him, into the nu-
trient pabulum, not pushed from behind,
but moving forward, as he describes it, of
its own accord; thence he passes on to
the more rapid and unmistakable move-is
ments of the amœba.

The account which Carpenter gives of the amoeba, though written twenty years ago, still remains profoundly interesting. The amoeba is simply a viscous drop, or enfilmed jelly speck. Though structureless, without a ciliated surface, internal currents move rapidly in it, and even propel it. By its motion the chances are increased of its coming in contact with nutriment: when it does so it spreads itself around the nutritive matter, and envelopes it. "It is interesting," Carpenter says, "to see a creature thus manifesting the peculiar nisus of animal development, making as it were a stomach for itself, by wrapping itself round its food." Next in advance we find the Rhizopods throwing out processes from their mass which seem to be erected through craving for food, and seem quickened by the touch of it into temporary vivacity, so that they hold it and drag it into the substance of their body. Next we come to the Hydra, a creature with some beginnings of organization, but with so little vital unity, that it may be cut up like the sea anemone into many bits without being destroyed. This creature seems to show the next progressive stage to that seen in the Rhizopods, in that its extended processes, put forth apparently for the same purpose

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The power that moves life everywhere the power of need.* By our needs we are impelled to action; and, to some extent also, we compel others to help us. And, on the other hand, the needs of others, whether uttered in words or in deeds, or in dumb show, claim our aid with a force which we cannot resist. Want is everywhere a power. Weakness has its claims, suffering, that is conscious want, has its undoubted claims, and its appeals cannot be resisted; but we have seen, in the case of the embryo in the womb, or in the egg, that unuttered, or as we label it to the best of our knowl edge, unconscious need has also its claims, and is also a power.

The child's cry is, at first, perhaps as unconscious as the sighing of the wind in the casement, or the moan of a door that goes heavily on its hinges; yet it is a prayer for sympathy and help, though the child does not know it. Presently it comes to itself, and finds itself crying for help and sympathy. Its cries are irresistible to the parent, or, failing the parent, to others that hear them. The innumerable life centres that make up our living substance cannot feed or renovate themselves; but their dumb prayers impel us to eat, and drink, and breathe, and do all that they need for their renovation. If

*Or, as William Law would say, hunger or desire.

any member of the body is hurt, or crip- | pled in its work, either from being wounded or overtaxed, it has the power to lay the whole frame under contribution. Swedenborg says: "Whatever the members of the body desire or demand from the universal mass of the blood is accorded to them even if it has to come from the extreme boundaries of the kingdom." Life is desire: it utters itself in efforts and prayers for help.

It may be long before prayers become addressed to an unseen Father. Not that the rudest people are incapable of being taught to pray to a heavenly Father just in the same spirit that we do. The rudest are prepared for receiving the idea by the vision they have of parental love in their infancy, which vision, by the law of vital progress, as it remains in the memory, becomes gradually purified from all those limitations which mar and obscure the reality; but as it issues at first in leading men to dream, each one of their own parents, as beings that need to be propitiated, it is only by a long and tortuous process that men come to worship in common one unseen parent. A man's prayers, however, to whomsoever addressed, indicate his destiny. The impulse that is making man into something better makes him strive and pray for that "better;" and prayer would be a great source of strength if it was only for its efficacy in purifying and intensifying, and defining a man's aim, and revealing to him his real wants. An inventor will tell you that there is nothing like defining to yourself precisely the result you wish to accomplish; that when you have clearly defined your aim, you are often half-way to its accomplishment. But prayers are also the definition of our desires under correction; they bring out the question, are my desires pure? Do the things I cry out for under my present passion satisfy that permanent will which I feel in the hour of passion's lull to be my own true will? Prayer keeps alive the salutary thought that our real needs, and, consequently, what our Creator desires for us, is deeper than any conscious want.

But it may be asked, "Suppose a man's wants indicate his destiny, will he always want what he wants now: in other words, will what seems good to him now seem good to him æons hence?" A most important question.

THE IMMUTABILITY OF GOODNESS.

What is goodness? what do men mean when they call a thing "good?" It is

simply a term of praise. And what do men praise or prize? what do they count dear to them? That which they feel that they possess in deficiency. And so it has been said there is nothing that can be called immutably good. What men call good to-day because it is in demand, will be a drug in the market to-morrow, and will be called bad. (See Emerson's poem of “Uriel.") Unless, says the objector, you can show me something which the creature must always possess in painful deficiency, you cannot show me anything that can be called the creature's immutable good. For what is good, "that which all things aim at; "* in other words, that which all things lack.

Is there anything which the Creature must, as long as it continues a Creature, possess in deficiency? There is. Is there any deficiency in which as long as it continues a Creature, it cannot acquiesce? There is. It is sympathy. The good which the Creature craves; the good whose attractive power must always stimulate the Creature's activity, till life loses all that makes it to be life is sympathy.

No living man can acquiesce in the feeling that justice is not done him. He wants justice done not only to his acts, but to his powers, his intentions, his good-will, just allowance made for his trials, his difficulties. He wants justice done to his abilities; just consideration for his sorrows: and such justice must remain imperfect as long as sympathy is imperfect. Imperfect sympathy means imperfect justice; imperfect mercy, imperfect consideration of one's case in all its bearings, im- ` perfect education, imperfect co-operation. It is an imperfection in which man can never acquiesce. Thus we find the disquietude that is the vital impulse of all living nature, and that seems to have made all living forms, at work in man, making him something better than man; and we find that this disquietude is the attractive power of an unseen magnet, that will not let the creature rest in its isolation, but impels it ever to seek a wider communion.

If life is an irrepressible movement towards sympathy, co-operation, and communion, one thing is clear, it must start from an unendurable isolation. The state of life that is ours, and still more the state of life out of which we have risen, must present itself to us as unendurably isolated, and it must seem unbearable to us to feel that we are shut out from the

Aristotle's "Ethics."

THE UNITY OF GOODNESS.

living sentient centre of all life, feeling all the things of life in absolutely true proportions. Two beings that attained to this omnipresent-omniscience you will find could no longer be spoken of as two. Their duality would cease to have a meaning; they would be one the one central mind. Perfect sympathy involves mental unity.

sympathy we crave, and we cannot but, seeking a wider sympathy. And if a condemn ourselves when we feel that we man is hard enough, or enough habituare a part of nature, and that the limita- ated to the world to have no sentitions of sympathy which excite our indig- mental feeling about the bloodshed and nation in others are our own limitations. oppression that he sees around him, yet What we hate, and call diabolical in na- he will not endure hardness or oppression ture, witnesses to the truth that a spirit towards himself or those he loves. His of love is working in us. And what is indignation is aroused, and ever will be till love? It is an impulse to fresh commun- he and those he loves are treated with ion; it is a rebellion against the limita- perfect mercy and consideration. That is tions that close us in. It would not be till he meets with perfect sympathy. love unless it was an impulse that rebelled against the limitations that imprisoned it; it would not be life unless it Perfect sympathy! Think what that was a movement that sought to find or involves! To understand and feel the make itself new associated substance, or sorrows and joys of all others absolutely new external associations. Thus we see, as you do your own. Why, if you did this, in every living thing, a desire transcend you would be equally present to every liv ing its limited power of continence, strain- ing man. As men's pains and sufferings ing to grasp new life, and in its vehement are of a mere animal nature, many of them, effort to clasp the new, letting go of that to feel these would involve sympathyalready held. Here is the twofold in- equipresence to all things that live and terior motion of composition and decom- suffer. Here we arrive at the idea of one position so much talked of as constituting life; but, in reality, constituting death as much as it constitutes life. For life, properly speaking, belongs only to the impulse to associate; the dismissal of that already held belongs to its limitation. Owing to this limitation we find the twofold aspect of life. That love which in the central mind we view as all-embracing, becomes, in a limited being, twofold in its aspect-at once life-giving, and deadly, lovely, and hateful. The hungry mollusc, in its craving after food, becomes a deadly and horrible gulf of death to all it lays hold of. The love of the parent eagle makes it tear its prey to pieces to feed its little ones. The very passion of love assumes the aspect of passionate hostility to all that stands in its way, or of pitiless cruelty to all that can be made to Perfect sympathy does not exclude but minister to the comfort of its little ones. involves purity. In attaining wider symThe love is there and growing. It is in-pathy with the wants of humanity, we atternally that motion that is drawing the tain a proportionately clearer insight into creature to communion with other living our own. Under this light those past things. The gentlest and most confiding conceptions of our wants, on which our animal, when she becomes a mother, be- present habits are formed, appear alloyed comes surely fierce and suspicious to all with error, that is, impure. Dyaus is who hover round its little ones. Her love Agni: Light is the purifier. It purges that is on the concave side the signature us by convicting us of impurity. A man of the parental love of God, is on its out- feels that he is not pure; the passions side dark. That which is (in respect of that hold temporary sway over him slink what it embraces) the chosen type of all that is merciful, is (in respect of what it repels) the chosen type of that is terrible. That these limitations of sympathy present themselves to us at once as negations of God and as unendurable, are in reality a token that an impulse works in us which will not let us rest but in

Sympathy, the goodness that attracts the Creature can only have its perfection in one central mind. Hence the saying, there is none good but One, that is God. So that life, seen in the light of its highest consciousness, means the attracting power of One who is drawing all creatures into communion with Himself.*

AGNI.

It may be said this central mind-this perfect sympathy-lies beyond the reach of our conception and of medium. And such a medium nature supplies: she our love. True. We need to see it through a human shows us the Parent, and so suggests to us the unseen eternal Parent; the only aspect under which we are capable of loving and worshipping our Creator.

I do not restrict the word pure to its sense of chaste, but use it in its original sense of free from alloy.

*

we shall, by punishment, make him perceive the horror these acts cause us, and that so we shall awake him to a sense of those past relations that make them hateful.

away ashamed at those times when he past relations which we expect to find in feels, in all its force, the divine dissatis- brutes, but which we do not expect to faction which comes from the vision of find in man. We punish a man for these an unattained better. I am thankful to acts; we say he deserves punishment for see that this work of the purifier is no them. Why? because we believe that if providential accident, but a latent proper- he is really the rational being he appears, ty of life. Our mind is formed not only by the reminiscences which it retains, but by the things that it forgets. A thing or person remembered becomes more or less transfigured, so that the ideal world that is in man's mind is by no means a I have not gone so fully as I could looking-glass reflection of what he sees. wish into this question of the existence of So far as he is young and healthy, he re- evil. But if we think of our Creator as tains only that in the past which strength- now creating the world, and creating it ens and cheers his mind, and quickens through us by making us unable to acquihis reforming or creative power. Thus esce in our present state, we shall find he gains and transmits an ideal heritage, evil the name we give to those conditions and thus the best formed children enter that have become intolerable to us. Such life with an ideal world in their mind with evil, so far from being a negation of a which some things in the outward world good God, is the only thing that can rencorrespond and are welcomed like native der a good God visible to us, for He can things, while others fail to correspond, only show Himself good by doing good, and seem strange and unnatural. But that is by destroying evil. The only who, with Wordsworth's great ode on point where Natural Theology clashes their library shelves, can want a descrip- not with Christianity,-no, God forbid; tion of this matutina cognitio. Granted but with orthodoxy, is in this. Orthoper contra that we see reversions to the lower nature from which we are receding, Still we are receding from it- -the old man is growing weaker the new man is slowly, very slowly, with frequent periods of reversion and temporary outbursts of the old wild blood, still advancing. Life is working itself clear.

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EXISTENCE OF EVIL.

doxy views the Creator as rectifying a world that was originally made perfect, but has since gone out of gear. Natural Theology views Him as gradually creating a better world than has been yet seen. Under the first view, I confess, the existence of evil seems to me a negation of Omnipotence. Under the second view evil is the only groundwork on which the antagonistic ideas of omnipoWhat is that evil which we cannot tol- tence, or love, or God, or goodness, or erate, but strive to subdue in the outer righteousness can be rendered palpable world? Are we to debit the Creator with to human vision. If we once take in the it? On the contrary it is non-creation; idea that the world is not made, but that it is chaos that excites our indignation. the Creator is making it through us; Our pain arises from a view of the non-making us dissatisfied with the world realization of that which our Creator im- around us; making us condemn our prespels us to realize. In one sense, then, ent social, mortal, animal state as evil God does not create evil; for evil is that as a state in which it would be shameful unendurable sense of the non-completion to sink down into sensual enjoyment — I of the Creator's work which urges us to will not say that all the difficulties which activity. And in another sense again encompass the question vanish, but I God of his very goodness creates subjec- think we see daylight through them. tive evil. He makes that which was once good become to us evil- that is, something to overcome. Acts that are perfectly blameless and harmless in brutes, become hateful and abominable in man, simply by reason of his crescent humanity. Take for instance, acts of ingratitude and incest. These acts become vicious in man simply because they show an oblivion of

*Between reformation and creation I can make no distinction.

GEORGE DOYLY SNOW.

From Blackwood's Magazine.

THE PARISIANS.

BY LORD LYTTON.
CHAPTER V.

CONFORMABLY with his engagement to

meet M. Louvier, Alain found himself on

the day and at the hour named in M. Gandrin's salon. On this occasion Madame Gandrin did not appear. Her husband was accustomed to give diners d'hommes. The great man had not yet arrived. "I think, Marquis," said M. Gandrin, "that you will not regret having followed my advice: my representations have disposed Louvier to regard you with much favour, and he is certainly flattered by being permitted to make your personal acquaintance."

would have contented an American. And how radiant became Louvier's face, when amongst the entrées he came upon laitances de carpes! "The best thing in the world," he cried, "and one gets it so seldom since the old Rocher de Cancale has lost its renown. At private houses, what does one get now?-blanc de pouletflavourless trash. After all, Gandrin, when we lose the love-letters, it is some consolation that laitances de carpes and sautés de foie gras are still left to fill up the void in our hearts. Marquis, heed my counsel; cultivate betimes the taste for the table; that and whist are the sole resources of declining years. You never met my old friend Talleyrand — ah, no! he was long before your time. He cultivated both, but he made two mistakes. No man's intellect is perfect on all sides. He confined himself to one meal a-day, and he never learned to play well at whist. Avoid his errors, my young friend avoid them. Gandrin, I guess this pine-apple is English-it is superb."

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"You are righta present from the Marquis of H-." "Ah! instead of a fee, I wager. The Marquis gives nothing for nothing, dear man! Droll people the English. You have never visited England, I presume, cher Rochebriant ?"

The affable financier had already made vast progress in familiarity with his silent fellow-guest.

The avoué had scarcely finished this little speech, when M. Louvier was announced. He entered with a beaming smile, which did not detract from his imposing presence. His flatterers had told him that he had a look of Louis Philippe; therefore he had sought to imitate the dress and the bonhomie of that monarch of the middle class. He wore a wig, elaborately piled up, and shaped his whiskers in royal harmony with the royal wig. Above all, he studied that social frankness of manner with which the able sovereign dispelled awe of his presence or dread of his astuteness. Decidedly he was a man very pleasant to converse and to deal with so long as there seemed to him something to gain and nothing to lose by being pleasant. He returned Alain's bow by a cordial offer of both expansive hands, into the grasp of which the hands of the aristocrat utterly disappeared. "Charmed to make your acquaintance, Marquis still more charmed if you will let me be useful during your When the dinner was over and the séjour at Paris. Ma foi, excuse my blunt- three men had re-entered the salon for ness, but you are a fort beau garçon. coffee and liqueurs, Gandrin left Louvier Monsieur, your father was a handsome and Alain alone, saying he was going to man, but you beat him hollow. Gandrin, his cabinet for cigars which he could my friend, would not you and I give half our fortunes for one year of this fine fellow's youth spent at Paris? Peste! what love-letters we should have, with no need to buy them by billets de banque!" Thus he ran on, much to Alain's confusion, till dinner was announced. Then there was something grandiose in the frank bourgeois style wherewith he expanded his napkin and twisted one end into his waistcoatit was so manly a renunciation of the fashions which a man so répandu in all circles might be supposed to follow; as if he were both too great and too much in earnest for such frivolities. He was evidently a sincere bon vivant, and M. Gandrin had no less evidently taken all requisite pains to gratify his taste. The Montrachet served with the oysters was of precious vintage. That vin de madère which accompanied the potage à la bisque VOL. II. 61

LIVING AGE.

recommend. Then Louvier, lightly pat-
ting the Marquis on the shoulder, said
with what the French call effusion," My
dear Rochebriant, your father and I did
not quite understand each other. He
took a tone of grand seigneur that some-
times wounded me; and I in turn was
perhaps too rude in asserting my rights
as creditor, shall I say?-
no, as fel-
low-citizen; and Frenchmen are so vain,
so over-susceptible-fire up at a word -
take offence when none is meant. We
two, my dear boy, should be superior to
such national foibles. Bref-I have a
mortgage on your lands. Why should
that thought mar our friendship? At my
age, though I am not yet old, one is flat-
tered if the young like us pleased if we
can oblige them, and remove from their
career any little obstacle in its way.
Gandrin tells me you wish to consolidate

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