1. THE ANIMAL KINGDOM, CONSIDERED ANATOMICALLY, PHYSICALLY, AND PHILOSOPHICALLY.

PART I. THE VISCERA OF THE ABDOMEN, OR THE ORGANS OF THE INFERIOR REGION.

PROLOGUE.

NOTHING whatever is more to be desired, or more delightful than the light of truth; for it is the source of wisdom. When the mind is harassed with obscurity, distracted by doubts, rendered torpid or saddened by ignorance or falsities, and truth emerges as from a dark abyss, it shines forth instantaneously, like the sun dispersing mists and vapors, or like the dawn repelling the shades of darkness. For truths in the intellect or rational mind are analogous to lights and rays in ocular vision; falsities that have the appearance of truth are analogous to unreal or phosphoric lights; doubts, to clouds and shadows; and ignorance itself is thick darkness and the image of night: thus one thing is represented in another.

963.(310) If this spirituous fluid does not live its own life, and still less is wise with its own wisdom; but with His who alone is life and wisdom, we shall in vain look in ourselves for a self intelligent soul. To find this me must go beyond and above created nature; nor even then shall we find it, for beyond the creation there is life and pure intelligence, not a common soul; for the idea of a soul involves that of a natural subject accommodated at once to the beginning of motion and to the reception of life. This in fact is the reason that inquirers into the soul have not known where to bring it from, or where to assign it a place in the animate body. Some, for example, have said that it is a particle of the essence of God, not properly speaking created, nor derived from parents, but miraculously inspired by God; although they confess that the essence of God cannot be a part of a created substance. Others have held that all souls were created by God at the beginning of the world, and were then successively intruded into bodies. Others have taught that particular souls for individual men were not taken from the bosom of matter, or made with the assistance of matter, but were infused by God into created matter. Others, again, as Tertullian and the western presbyters of his time, maintained that the soul of the son was generated from the soul of the father, in the same manner as the body of the son from the body of the father. Aristotle and the Peripatetics declared that there is in matter a natural power of receiving a soul, although not of giving essence to a soul. Hence many theologians assert that in the production of man there are two actions involved; one, the action of God creating the soul; the other, the action of the parent uniting by seminal virtue, as an instrument, the soul created by God, with matter. All these opinions combine to form a perfect unity, when we gain a clear perception of life or wisdom as distinct from nature, and vice versa; also when we acknowledge the omnipresence and universal influx of God in all created things according to the modified character and capacity of each. (Part II., Chap. III., Sec. V.; and n. 922, 923.)