We have thus a series of facts in congruity with each other within the mind. We have also a series of facts in beautiful harmony with each other without the mind. But we have more, there is an accordance between the internal and external facts. We have the perceptions of one sense confirmed by those of another sense. We have instincts impelling to certain operations, and we find ourselves placed in a state of things in which these instincts are gratified, and in being so, perform acts necessary to our welfare and our very existence. We have affections general and special, and we fall in with objects to call them forth, and on which to lavish them. We proceed spontaneously to classify objects according to certain relations of shape, quantity, and proportion, and actually find them distributed into groups according to these very principles. We anticipate that the same cause will ever produce the same effect, and find our expectations realized every waking hour of our existence. We have æsthetic tastes, and everywhere there are harmonious colours, and graceful forms, and lovely scenes to gratify them. As it is not the sound which produces the ear to receive it, as it is not the eye which creates the light that falls upon it, so it cannot be the outward harmonies which create the inward desire to discover them, and the capacity to observe them; nor the internal faculties and feelings which create the outward harmonies. We are obliged, if we would account for the whole phenomena, to account for both classes of facts, and the relation between them. This can only be done by supposing that one Intelligent Being instituted both series of facts and their mutual accordance. The facts round which the German philosophy has been moving, are thus seen to bring us back to the old doctrine of our British Theology. It is only by calling in a God who designs and executes, that we can fully or rationally account for facts, which we cannot deny without denying our intelligence.

It thus appears that the doctrine of Final Cause, so far from being undermined or shaken by these speculations, is as secure as ever,-nay, it stands forth with new illustrations and confirmations. We are brought back to what observant minds had noticed from the first, (though they had not always expressed it correctly,) a concurrence of independent agencies towards the production of a given end. Hegel is laying down an utterly mistaken doctrine when (not in words denying final cause) he speaks of the final cause of a thing being the inward nature of a thing, or a thing following its inward nature; final cause is the co-operation of a number of independent things to accomplish what is evidently an end. In particular, there is need of a correspondence of the external and internal in order to our inward knowledge, and to our experience of the outward world. The phenomenon cannot be explained by an internal order projecting itself upon the external world; for, as Herbart asks, if it be by some necessary form of the understanding that final cause is imposed on

things, how are we to account for the fact that we do not see the final cause in regard to every occurrence? How is it, in particular, that we discover it only in those cases in which we notice a concurrence of agencies acting independently of the laws of thought within ourselves? All this can easily be accounted for on the supposition that it needs objective evidence to lead us to discover final cause; but is inexplicable if the process proceeds from a merely subjective principle. But, without pressing this difficulty, we plant ourselves on ground from which we can never be dislodged, when we maintain that the outward is real and that the inward is real, and that there is proof of plan and intelligence in the correspondence instituted between them.

At the close of this review, we find ourselves shut up into a Pre-Established Harmony. But it is not the fanciful doctrine of Leibnitz. According to him, no one power or monad can operate upon any other, but each fulfils its function independent of all others, and yet in harmony with all others. This seems to us quite inconsistent with what we see everywhere, the action of objects on each other. The Pre-Established Harmony which we advocate, pre-supposes the action of matter on matter, of matter on mind, and mind on matter, and the harmony is manifested in the beneficence of their mutual operation.

This Pre-Established Harmony manifests itself in two forms.

First, Agents mental and material have powers or properties which fit into each other, and enable them to co-operate in producing consistent and bountiful results. So far from supposing that they do not act on each other, we affirm that they do act, but act in harmony.

Secondly, There has been an original collocation of agents, whereby concordant results are produced without any reciprocal action. The lily that grows in one garden, assumes the same forms and colours as the lily which grows in another garden. The fish of the Old Red Sandstone epoch had the same general form as the fish which still swims in our seas. But these correspondences do not arise from any mystic or magnetic influence of the one upon the other, but because causes have been instituted and arrangements made, which produce the one in unison with the other. The comparison of Leibnitz here applies; the two correspond as two timepieces, not because of any mutual influence, but because each has been so constituted, that it moves in harmony with the other.

We cannot comprehend the harmonies of the universe without admitting and calling in both these principles.

CHAPTER III.

TYPICAL SYSTEMS OF NATURE AND REVELATION.

SECT. I.-THE OLD TESTAMENT TYPES.

In looking at any one department of contemporaneous nature, we discover that all objects and events are conformed to a plan. Organisms differing from each other in their constituent elements have the same relations of parts, and differing from each other in use, are cast in the same general mould. Again, looking at certain departments of successive nature, we find that objects in one epoch are an anticipation or prediction of objects to appear at a later epoch. The science of embryology shows that there are systematic stages of progression in the formation of the young of all animals. In the Psalm which celebrates the omniscience of God, this remarkable language is employed:-"I WILL PRAISE THEE; FOR I AM

FEARFULLY AND WONDERFULLY MADE: MARVELLOUS ARE THY WORKS; AND THAT MY SOUL KNOWETH RIGHT WELL. MY SUBSTANCE WAS NOT HID FROM THEE, WHEN I WAS MADE IN SECRET, AND CURIOUSLY WROUGHT IN THE LOWEST PARTS OF THE EARTH. THINE EYES DID SEE MY SUBSTANCE, YET BEING UNPERFECT; AND IN THY BOOK ALL MY MEMBERS WERE WRITTEN, WHICH IN CONTINUANCE WERE FASHIONED, WHEN AS YET THERE WAS NONE OF THEM." These two great truths are seen in beautiful combination in geology,

which reveals a typical system, that is, all things formed after a type, in every age, and also a grand system of prophecy, in which the past ever points to the future, and the future appears as the accomplishment of the presentiments of the past. Lower animals appear as a prognostication of higher, and the higher come as the fulfilment of the prediction set forth in the lower, and this not by any physical emanation of the one from the other, but according to the eternal plan of Him who hath therein showed the immutability of His counsel. There is an order in successive, even as there is an order in contemporaneous nature; but as the one plant does not produce the other plant, which in the same type may be growing alongside of it, so neither does a species of animal in one age produce the homologous species in a succeeding age. In this divinely-predetermined progression man stands as the end or consummation of a process which had been going on since the dawn of creation.

Views like these have been floating before the minds of deep thinkers and large-minded observers for the last two or three ages, and were expressed by some who did not discover their true meaning. We find Herder writing, at the end of last century, "See how the different classes of creation run into each other! How do the organizations ascend and struggle upward from all points on all sides! And then, again, what a close resemblance between them! Precisely as if, on all our earth, the form-abounding mother had proposed to herself but one type, one proto-plasma, according to which, and for which, she formed them all. Know thou what this form is. It is the identical one which man also wears. It is more evident internally than it is externally. Even in insects an analogon of the human anatomy has been discovered, though, compared with ours, enveloped and seemingly

disproportionate. The different members, and consequently also the powers which work in them, are yet undeveloped, not organized to our fulness of life. It seems to me that throughout creation this finger-mark of nature is the Ariadne thread that conducts through the labyrinth of animal forms, ascending and descending."1 A similar passage, very probably suggested by that quoted from Herder, (but without any acknowledgment to this effect,) is found in Coleridge's Aids to Reflection. "The metal at its height seems a mute prophecy of the coming vegetation, into a mimic resemblance of which it crystallizes. The blossom and flower, the acme of vegetable life, divides into component organs with reciprocal functions, and by instinctive motions and approximations seems impatient of that figure by which it is differenced in kind from the flower-shaped Psyche that flutters with free wing above it. And wonderfully in the insect realm doth the irritability, the proper seat of instinct, while yet the nascent sensibility is subordinate thereto-most wonderfully, I say, doth the muscular life in the insect, and the musculo-arterial in the bird, imitate and typically rehearse the adaptive understanding, yea, and the moral affections and charities of man. Let us carry ourselves back in spirit to the mysterious week, the teeming work-days of the Creator, as they rose in vision before the eye of the inspired historian of the operations of the heavens and of the earth, in the day that the Lord God made the earth and the heavens. And who that watched their ways with an understanding heart could, as the vision evolved still advanced towards him, contemplate the filial and loyal bee, the home-building, wedded and divorceless swallow, and above all the manifoldly intelligent ant tribes, with their commonwealths and con

1 Metempsychosis.

2 Aph. xxxvi.