impressions upon our senses. Berzelius declares that most of the elements may be made to assume conditions in which their properties are entirely altered. All chemists agree that two or more substances consisting of the same elements in the same ratio, may exhibit chemical properties entirely distinct. Draper has made chlorine pass from a state of high activity into one of complete torpor wherein all its properties were lost. Gay Lussac and others caused chlorine to displace hydrogen, atom for atom, in an organic compound, the former gas taking on the functions of the latter, although its habits and general properties are so very dissimilar. Dumas concludes that these facts indicate that all chemical phenomena originate from the same cause and in due time may be generalized under one common expression. For many similar facts confirmatory of our position, see an interesting article on the Present State of Chemical Philosoophy, in the British and Foreign Medico-Chirurgical Review, for April, 1848.

Therefore a difference of properties is due to a difference of atomic arrangement. But all arrangement involves the idea of an arranging force. Inertia prohibits the supposition that such force is intrinsic. It is therefore extrinsic. Consequently nothing but inertia, the synonym of death, can be predicated of matter. Natural substance was produced from spiritual substance not by continuity, but by a discrete degree. We will illustrate the mode of its creation as distinctly as possible by a quotation from the New Church Quarterly Review, No. 3, 1847. "The spiritual atmospheres are discrete substances or most minute forces, radiating from the spiritual sun. If now we suppose the act of creation to be impossible in any lower degree, without the production of a minimal substance deprived of life, there is no difficulty in conceiving any given point of the supposed ray to have its interior activity withdrawn: in this case there could be a play of life around it only, and its superficies being compressed and fixed, its motion could describe natural spaces or times; that is to say, it would become the first finited ens of the natural world." A number of such finites constitutes the primordial substance. We conceive the result of this withdrawal of interior activity to be analogically represented by the condensation of an aeriform substance to the liquid and solid or less active conditions by the abstraction of its heat, as the Chemist would say.

Before the spiritual activities acted upon this primordial substance the earth was truly " without form and void." A particular arrangement of atoms was the material result of these spiritual activities. Different activities produced different arrangements, and consequently different substances and different forms. The primordial substance does not come within the cognizance of our senses: spiritual forces have modified it before it enters the range of our perceptive faculties. But this does not controvert the ultimate fact, that the globe, the earth, the crystal of a salt, the leaf of a plant, the brain of an animal, are different atomic arrangements of one substance, and as far as their own inherent properties are concerned, equally dead and inert. The human form itself is only recipient of life.

2d Prop. Philosophers speak of Heat, Light, Electricity, Magnetism, &c. as the causes of the visible phenomena around us. The provisional assumption of the material or corpuscular theories, for facility of illustration, has fostered this misapprehension. From the high vantage-ground of our spiritual hypothesis we are prepared to assert, that the imponderable agents of modern philosophy have positively no individuality: that they are mere names given to motions in different media, to the causes of which motions natural science can never penetrate, because they lie beyond the sensual ken in the spiritual All things originate in motion, and manifest themselves by motion. The primary motion we may suppose to be an arrangement or relative disposition of atoms. According to the degree of condensation which the arrangement evolves, we have different auras or media. We readily understand the meaning of the terms, solid medium, liquid medium, gaseous medium, etherial medium. Now to the motions of the atoms occurring in these media philosophers have given names, which many minds are content to receive as the causes of observed phenomena. We are not without the sanction of distinguished authorities for our position. Any recent and full work on Physics will show that the vibratory is fast superseding the old molecular theories. Arnott says, " Many philosophers hold that Heat is merely an affection or state of an ethereal fluid, which occupies all space, as sound is an affection or motion of air, and that the sun may produce the phenomena of light and heat without waste of its temperature or substance, as a bell may, without waste, continue to produce sound." Light is an analogous undulation in a medium, the length of the wave determining the color, and its velocity determining the brilliancy of objects. Professor Draper, of whom America is so justly proud, remarks: "The cause of Light is an undulatory motion taking place in an etherial medium. That such a medium exists throughout all space, seems to be proved by a number of astronomical facts. In this elastic medium undulatory movements are propagated in the same manner as waves of sound in the air. It is to be clearly understood that the ether and light are distinct things: the latter is merely the effect of movements in the former." Again, in speaking of the chemical power of the solar ray, he says, "Everything seems to indicate that sooner or later all these principles will be reduced to one of a more general nature, or that they are all modifications of movements taking place in the ether." The electric "fluid" would appear to be most refractory to our annihilating process. But a distinguished votary of science, Dr. Hare, of Philadelphia, says, "I find it necessary to abandon the idea that there is any transfer of imponderable matter during electrical discharges." He attributes the phenomena to a successive change in the state of polarization of the atoms which make up the conducting matter. In his article on galvanic ignition, we find the following sentence; "The phenomena under consideration, though irreconcilable either with the theory of one or that of two fluids, agrees with the idea of waves of polarization moving from the centre of the generating battery to the extremities." We dismiss the subject of magnetism with the statement that the solution of the electric and magnetic problems is analogous.

Thus, by the process of exclusion, we have logically limited the materialist to an indefinite mass of inert matter, and to a series of vibrations perceptible, but to him inexplicable. He must deny the connection between cause and effect-yea, the very existence of a causative principle, or he must admit a formative force, prior, superior, and beyond the natural world. To the New Churchman these undulatory motions are possessed of beautiful significancy. They are the material correspondences of spiritual forces, flowing through the spiritual sun, from the Divine Being. They are ever present mirrors which reflect to his eye the Love, the Wisdom, the Unity, the Infinity of his Creator. Spiritual forces produce spiritual media, spiritual vibrations, spiritual forms, and by influx into inert matter, correspondent natural media, natural vibrations, natural forms. The science of Correspondences flows as an obvious deduction from this fundamental truth. We perceive how allusions to natural objects in the Holy Word have internal and spiritual meanings. We see that the material universe is the basis or continent of the spiritual universe, perpetual in duration, ever changing in form. We get a clearer insight into the union of the soul and body, and into the holy mystery of the Incarnation. We become convinced that the particles of our material body, having fulfilled the purpose of their aggregation, can never be translated from this natural sphere but must enter successively into new combinations, mineral, vegetable, or animal, for ever and ever. We are immutably grounded in a belief in the Immor

tality of the Human Soul.

3d Prop. Swedenborg says that the sun is the seat of pure fire. By this we understand him to mean that there the action of spiritual forces upon inert matter began, and is perpetually at its point of greatest intensity. Accordingly from the sun, as a centre, radiate undulations which modify the primordial matter. Sir John Herschel in his Astronomy, page 201, refers to the sun's ray as the ultimate source of heat, light, electricity, terrestrial magnetism, chemical compositions and decompositions, vegetable vivification, geological changes, and even volcanic activity. But it may possibly be objected, are there not terrestrial sources of each of these phenomena ?

The German language has appropriately given the feminine gender to the word, sun; for truly it is the mother of all things, having created them of her substance, borne them in her bosom, and invested them with her properties. The nebular hypothesis, ascribed to La Place, but really due to Swedenborg, irresistibly maintains that each planet was stricken off from the sun by a centrifugal force at a period when the solar mass extended to the present orbit of that planet. Our globe is a miniature sun, as a seed is a miniature plant, and a fœtus a miniature man. Not that our earth will grow or develop into a sun, but it retains the potentialities which existed in the circumference of the sun's disk, when that circumference was ruptured, conglomerated into a minor sphere, and commenced an independent motion. Accordingly it has thrown off its own satellite, and a miniature earth revolves around it, and illumines its night. Accordingly its central heat is so great that our metals are liquid at the depth of

five miles, only 1-800th of the distance to its centre. By virtue of these sun-brought potentialities we are enabled to develop what we call artificial Heat, Light, &c., but the sun immediately or mediately is the origin of all. But how insignificant are these to the stupendous direct influences of the great luminary! Even when they are produced, they are always propagated from a centre, thus betraying their origin by imitation or repetition of their archetype. The centrifugal tendency of natural vibrations harmonizes accordingly with the centrifugal outflow of the Operative Energy of the Divine Nature.

4th Prop. Geological researches have scouted from the domain of reason the puerile idea that the solar system was created in six days. Of the period of time which separated the appearance of the first primordial atom from the birth of our planet at the circumference of the nebular mass, the mind possessed of no data can form no conception. It is equally bewildered in its attempt to grasp the course of centuries which elapsed during the condensation of the globe, and its elaboration into a habitable form. The mineral kingdom existed in its manifold complications for ages before the production of the first vegetable germ. It bears on its imperishable front the daguerreotype impressions of plants, the mastodons of Botany, which flourished in their mephitic atmosphere and died long before the evolution of the first animal form. Subsequently, gigantic reptiles and more gigantic quadrupeds, the common-place beings of pre-Adamite eras, prepared the way for animal races more subservient to the necessities of man. Age after age, in beautiful succession, these animated forms arose, each more perfect than its predecessor, because more nearly approximated to the archetype form of the Universe. At length the central object of all the multiplied cares of nature appears upon the stage so admirably fitted for his reception. Thousands of years have passed away, and hundreds of millions of his progenycover the face of the globe. We are struck with the wonderful order in which this extended development proceeded. The amorphous material of the mineral kingdom gradually divided into the three palpable forms of nature, solid, liquid, and gaseous, bearing in its bosom the constituent particles of every form which has ever appeared. Three of its elements, oxygen, carbon, and hydrogen seem possessed of a range of affinities almost infinite. These, by their diversified combinations, constitute the vegetable kingdom, which was the intermediate agent to break down and decompose the inorganic masses, and to elaborate the materials requisite for the construction of animal tissue. Vegetables metamorphose the mineral elements presented to them into albumen and fibrin, ready by their combinations to compose an animal body. Philosophers have been greatly bewildered in searching for the starting point and moving principle of organization. Considered simply as a question for solution, the arrangement of a crystal is as wonderful as the petals of a flower, or the mechanism of an eye. We do not believe that lower forms develop continuously into higher. Still less do we believe that the hairy, grinning, speechless ape, living on fruits, and fleeing in terror from the beasts of the forest, was ever transmuted into erect, rational, de

vout, progressive, creative Man-who has laden the ocean with his vessels, and dotted the continents with his cities. But to refute this theory we are bound to account for the remarkable anatomical resemblance of the inferior animals to the Human Form.

The spiritual world is a world of uses; spiritual forces therefore which produce natural forms, produce them as forms of uses. We maintain that when a spiritual force acts upon matter, it eliminates from that matter a form of being or use, such as its state of preparation (dependent upon many collateral circumstances, all however regulated by spiritual laws) enables it to assume. Now all spiritual forms have a reference to the highest spiritual form, viz.: the spiritual body of man. All material forms must evince a corresponding tendency to present the human form. At any given era of the world, the causative principle will develop a form more or less approximating to the human form according to the degree of capacity in the material for taking on the human form. Thus at one time an oyster, at another a fish, at a third a quadruped was produced! The appearance of the ourang-outang only indicated that the time for the creation of man was drawing near. No being can possibly be created until all the collateral forms of uses necessary to the full performance of its own use, have been created before it. Man crowns the pyramid of animated nature; for his use, therefore, direct or indirect, all things were created. The three kingdoms contribute to the formation of his body; the auras of the world vibrate for the instruction of his mind. He rends the bosom of the mountains and marches on the surface of the sea. He gathers around him the animals he chooses, in mute dependence, to lighten his labors or enhance his pleasures. He brings down the chamois from the cliff, and the eagle from his eyrie. He hunts the wild beast for his sport, and pursues the huge whale for his profit. He measures the courses of the comet, and marks the path for the obedient electricity. Yea, the very poisons which might destroy him immediately, are made to assuage his pains and to cure his diseases.

These views are strikingly supported by a study of the growth of the human embryo. It passes through many transition-stages, each of which Natural History can recognise as a permanent one in some order of inferior animals. So that the animal kingdom from lowest to highest is a living tableau of the different transient stages of human development. Truly when the ancients declared that man was a microcosm, or miniature of the universe, they gave us a broken ray of that sun-like philosophy which illuminated the pure ages of the world.

The mineral, vegetable, and animal kingdoms, therefore, may be represented by three circles, one within another, all of whose radii converge to a common centre, which is occupied by the natural human form.

5th Prop. To understand correctly our fifth proposition, a distinction must be drawn between growth and development. Inanimate objects grow by accretion, but can present no traces of development -that is, of a definite arrangement of organs, subservient to certain