all this is little more than a description of the whole idea which I have allowed myself, merely with a view of employing it as a passage to the point which is at present in question. That purpose was, on the supposition of the existence of such superior beings, accurately to indicate which of man’s powers, or faculties of mind and soul, may rightly be attributed to them. Now, to my mind, the distinction is very strikingly suggested in the well-known sentiment of one of our famous poets. Thus he addresses man—“Thy knowledge thou sharest with superior beings;” superior, for in the clearness of their eternal science they undoubtedly stand far higher than men: and then he continues, “But art thou hast alone.”[11] But, now, what else is art than fancy become visible, and assuming a bodily shape, or word, or sound? It is, therefore, this nimble-footed, many-shaped, ever-inventive fancy, which forms the dangerous prerogative of man, and can not be ascribed to these pure spiritual beings. And as little justifiable would it be to ascribe to them that human reason, with its employment of means, and its slow processes of deduction and comparison. Instead of this, they possess the intuitive understanding, in which to see and to understand are simultaneous and identical. If, then, in an accurate sense of the terms, neither fancy nor reason belongs to them, it would further be wrong to attribute them a soul as distinct from the mind or spirit, and as being rather a passive faculty of inward productiveness, and change, and internal growth. Briefly to recapitulate what has been said: The existence of the brutes is simple, because in them the soul is completely mixed up and merged in the organic body, and is one with it; on the destruction of the latter it reverts to the elements, or is absorbed in the general soul of nature. Twofold, however, is the nature of created spirits, who besides this ethereal body of light are nothing but mind or spirit; but threefold is the nature of man, as consisting of spirit, soul, and body.[12] And this triple constitution and property, this threefold life of man, is, indeed, not in itself that pre-eminence, although it is closely connected with that superior excellence which ennobles and distinguishes man from all other created beings. I allude to that prerogative by which he alone of all created beings is invested with the Divine image and likeness. This threefold principle is the simple basis of all philosophy; and the philosophical system which is constructed on such a foundation is the philosophy of life, which therefore has even “words of life.” It is no idle speculation, and no unintelligible hypothesis. It is not more difficult, and needs not to be more obscure, than any other discourse on spiritual subjects; but it can and may be as easy and as clear as the reading of a writing, the observation of nature, and the study of history. For it is, in truth, nothing else than a simple theory of spiritual life, drawn from life itself, and the simple understanding thereof. If, however, it becomes abstract and unintelligible, this is invariably a consequence, and, for the most part, an infallible proof of its having fallen into error. When in thought we place before us the whole composite human individual, then, after spirit and soul, the organic body is the third constituent, or the third element out of which, in combination with the other two, the whole man consists and is compounded. But the structure of the organic body, its powers and laws, must be left to physical science to investigate. Philosophy is the science of consciousness alone. It has, therefore, primarily to occupy itself with soul and spirit, or mind, and must carefully guard against transgressing its limits in any respect. But the third constituent beside mind and soul, in which these two jointly carry on their operations, needs not always, as indeed the above instance proves, to be an organic body. In other relations of life, this third, in which both are united, or which they in unison produce, may be the word, the deed, life itself, or the divine order on which both are dependent. These, then, are the subjects which I have proposed for consideration. But in order to complete this scale of life, I will further observe—triple is the nature of man, but fourfold is the human consciousness. For the spirit or mind, like the soul, divides and falls asunder; or, rather, is split and divided into two powers, or halves—the mind, namely, into understanding and will, the soul into reason and fancy. These are the four extreme points, or, if the expression be preferred, the four quarters of the inner world of consciousness. All other faculties of the soul, or powers of mind, are merely subordinate ramifications of the four principal branches; but the living center of the whole is the thinking soul.

LECTURE II.

OF THE LOVING SOUL AS THE CENTER OF THE MORAL LIFE; AND OF MARRIAGE.

THE development of the human consciousness, according to the triple principle of its existence, or of its nature as compounded of spirit or mind, soul, and animated body, must begin with the soul, and not with the spirit, even though the latter be the most important and supreme. For the soul is the first grade in the progress of development. In actual life, also, it is the beginning and the permanent foundation, as well as the primary root of the collective consciousness. The development of the spirit or mind of man is much later, being first evolved in or out of, by occasion of, or with the co-operation of the soul. But even when thus developed, the mind (under which term we comprise the will, as well as the understanding) is neither in all men, nor always in the same individual, equally active. In this respect we may apply to it what has been said of the wind, which imparts vital motion and freshness to all the objects of outward nature: we “hear the sound thereof, but we can not tell whence it comes, nor whither it goeth.”[13] The thinking soul, on the contrary, is, properly speaking, always, though silently, working; and it is highly probable that it is never without conceptions. Of these, indeed, it may either possess a clear or an almost totally indistinct consciousness, according to that principle of unconscious representations propounded as a fundamental axiom of psychology by a great German philosopher[14] of earlier times, with whose opinions I often find myself agreeing, and with whom, before all other men, I would most gladly concur.

Applied to the alternating states of sleeping and waking in the outward organic life, this would merely mean that in sleep we always dream, even at those times when our vision leaves no traces on our memory. The great majority of dreams, even those which in the moment of awakening we still remember, are absolutely nothing but the conjoint impression of the bodily tone and the ever-varying temperament of life and health, and of the disorderly repetition of such ideas as previously to sleeping had principally engaged the attention. Now, since every opposite comes near to its correlative in one or more points of contact, which, as they establish, also serve to maintain the relationship between the two, so the