Page:Jardine Naturalist's Library Foreign Butterflies.djvu/44

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42
MEMOIR OF LAMARCK.

are made to emanate from a certain relation of parts and organs,—a particular conformation of material substances, just as a desired result is obtained by arranging in a certain order the parts of a piece of mechanism.

"But who can believe that such a faculty, so divine, so godlike and spiritual, can be the mere result of organization? That any juxta-position of material molecules, of whatsoever nature, from whatever source derived, in whatever order and forms arranged, and wherever placed, could generate thought, and reflection, and reasoning powers, could acquire and store up ideas and notions, as well concerning metaphysical as physical essences, may as safely be pronounced impossible, as that matter and spirit should be homogeneous. Though the intellectual part acts by the brain and nerves, yet the brain and nerves, however ample, however developed, are not the intellect, nor an intellectual substance, but only its instrument, fitted for the passage of the prime messenger of the soul, its nervous fluid or power to every motive organ. It is a substance calculated to convey instantaneously that subtile agent, by which spirit can act upon body, wherever the soul bids it to go and enables it to act. When death separates the intellectual and the spiritual from the material part, the introduction of a fluid, homogeneous with the nervous, or related to it by a galvanic battery, can put the nerves in action, lift the eyelids, move the limbs; but though the action of the intellectual part may thus be