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221 their Impressions of thought and manners from the wild creatures of the forest, which are naturally of a lower kind. Then, again, the hopelessness of your scheme strikes me more strongly, when I consider the grounds you give of your pre- ferential worship for Siva. For when you relapse as it were firom trust in the creative or preserving God into adoration of the destroyer and renewer, you seem to fall from a clear con- ception of directing providence into some such sense of the vast revolution of life and death, as the Saugata has explained to us on the part of the Bauddhas. He also believes in a kind of Divine intelligence, but he has not made up his mind whether that intelligence directs the world. Hence the belief in it becomes, except so far as his better conscience may bias his theory, an inoperative opinion. When indeed you refiised to call the soul mere intelligence, I understood you to mean that it was something more Divine than any apprehensive perception, which some might make the result of our bodily organisation. So far I had no objection to go with you ; but when you ex- plained the soul to be a very portion of the Divinity, I rather trembled at your boldness; but when you went farther, and resolved your deity into mere spirit without clear self-conscious- ness or dominant will, I no longer saw in what respect either the soul or the deity is practically better with you, than when the Bauddhas make them mere intelligence. The more now, indeed, that I consider your Saiva doctrine of revolution, as one's thoughts grow with speaking, the more I doubt whether practically, and to any real end, you do put thought under nature ; or at least, whether you are sufficiently careful to believe that the world is working out the design of a Divine thinker. For your Siva does not appear properly an Iswara, or a lord of life and death, so much as a vast circle comprehending meta- physically all revolutions and contingencies that either have been, or may come about, or can be conceived. He seems changeful eternity, rather than the eternal ; and in such a cyclical recurrence it is difficult to say what comes before, and what 222 A GEOLOGICAL PROBABILITY. comes after. It is a perpetually mutual following. You seem then dangerously to re-approach the error of the Bauddhas. "With respect to both you and them, on this point, an argument of some probability might be drawn from the gene- rations of former Uving things, which have left vestiges in the structure of the earth. You arc aware, that our mountains and plains are found not only to contain, but in parts to consist of, the bones of animals long dead, and the changed elements of plants decayed. We do not know how long ago such and such a species of animals lived; but we know whether each came before or after, or at the same time with, another unlike it, since the oldest for the most part lie lowest in the earth. I do not mean that violent convulsions may not often have disturbed the order, but for the most part we trace an order. Now it has been observed, that we find, from the vestiges of himian bones, man must have existed in the more recent stages of the earth's development ; but at a period anterior to man^s existence there were creatures which do not now exist, yet which so far re- sembled him as to have backbones, and other similarities of structure ; whereas in other successions of periods, farther and fiurther back, there were difierent kinds of creatures, until at last you come to a stage, in which there does not appear to us any vestige of animal life at all. In all this succession there is manifest arrangement; since many of the successive races of animals lived in places where the climate was adapted to them, though now it would not be so, for the placing of sea and land and climate appears to have undergone many changes in the course of countless ages. Nor yet do we trace only arrange- ment, but to a considerable degree progress. Higher races of animals for the most part come after lower ones, and last of all man the noblest of all. So far then as this progress is made out, it marks not only design, which would suflSciently appear from arrangement of any kind; but it also marks something opposite to that hopeless revolution of life and death which belongs to the Saiva no less than to the Bauddha doctrine. It CLEABER TRACES OF DESIGN. 223 conveys to us an impression of something which we may compare in a way to a line, as being an onward course in something like a career of the world nnder the guidance of its Divine ruler. Nor here need I stay to refute at length Sad4nanda*8 ingenious attempt to wrest this idea of progress onward into a theory of the blind striving of nature. For that is both negatived clearly by whatever appears of arrangement ; and also by what most of us admit about the necessity of thought underlying nature; as well as by my own argument for the personal consciousness of the first Cause, which although used against the Ch^Lrvdcas, will apply equally to the followers of the Sdnkhya. I do not even build upon this idea of progress as de- ducible from geology, anything more than an argument applica- ble to our present state of knowledge. It is conceivable that here- after life may turn out to have extended deeper below the earth's crust, or farther into the abyss of ages, than we now consider pro- bable ; for even a small part of the Divine doings, if they happen to be disclosed to a greater extent tlian is generally apprehended, might well appear to us endless ; but yet very much larger parts beyond those, and even the entire whole, cannot be without clear end and pervading design, (whether a growing and unfolding design, or a fixed one,) to that eternal Mind which arranges all. But of this I have already spoken in discoursing about Infinity, which I only admit as an expression of an Infinite Mind. "Leaving then that argument from geology, I take refuge rather in the reasonings already urged ; for if it was difficult for me to refute the Ch6,rv^icas, without using thoughts which are equally adverse to this vague and potential Deity of yours, it is clear that you too fall short of satisfying me. The world only becomes intelli- gible when we consider it as coming from the providence of a crea- tive Iswara, and going on under his guidance to frdfil his design. We, my friends, are happy in proportion as we concur in work- ing out that design, for ourselves or others ; but since we cannot do so without the courage which comes of faith, unhappy is the man or the nation, whose Deity has melted away from their 224 SHADOWINESS OF PANTHEISM. gaze into the shadowy abstraction of a spirit, or the dim clouds of scepticism. It would not surprise me, if men, finding themselves in a world thus become orphan, should suffer any strange kind of phantom to assume the likeness of their heavenly Father. If the more speculative class of men, in endeavouring to fill an unnatural void, should become bewildered with throw- ing their inquisitive thoughts into all possible regions of meta- physics, that would be only such a result as I should expect. Nor will you take it ill, I hope, if I say that all the systems which have been explained to us here, have something of so cloudy a character, that we seem transported by them out of the region of realities into dreamland, and not only our sensations and their results are made uncertain, but all our mental per- ceptions become confused, and the laws of our being and think- ing fall into a kind of anarchy. It is no wonder that many sects, and many modes of apprehending the Deity, which differ firom each other so much as to be in effect different religions, should hence arise ; and if they appeal to the same books, they must have very discordant interpretations ; or if each successive line of thought has in its day left the record of its expression in writings deemed sacred, there must result inextricable confusion in the attempt to reduce the whole mass of such writings to one system. Then again, persons who cannot speculate profoundly, but who feel the instinctive necessity of worshipping some Divine Being, will be too apt to seize on the nearest emblem, however unworthy an emblem it may be, of that Ineffable One whom they know not otherwise how to bring near them. On this point, my venerable friend, let me earnestly beg your attention.