Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: LAWS AND PHENOMENA. Man finds upon his advent upon earth certain invariable laws in operation which on examination he realizes were necessary to his birth and existence. There seem to be laws united with power relating to all substances; to earth, air, fire and water. He finds in vegetable nature, from the minutest lichen on rocks, gradations of size and usefulness and power up to the giant cedar trees of California. He finds minute animal- culae, graded up to flying insects, and then up to humming birds, and on to the largest species of winged creatures. He finds in fish of stream, lake and the vast oceans, the same minute beginnings, and the same gradation of size and power up to the mighty whale. He finds in the mineral kingdom, mud, sand, rocks, coal, salt, gems of great beauty wonderfully crystallized and colored, and at last he sees the diamond, the flashing beauty of which, our Sun itself deigns to display to our admiring gaze. After this procession of lower grades and substances comes the animal race, all graded and sphered from the smallest in size to the mastodon. But man observes that the truer classification of the animal race is not by size but by mental power. Hence he ranks animals upward from those lowest in intelligence to Man, the highest and sovereign of all. All these grades of being, man perceives are under the operation of laws. What are laws? Laws are influences or subjectivities of mind. What are known as the laws of nature are influences of a Mind higher, and moving in a higher sphere, than that of man. This high Power, the influences from which we name laws, is variously called by us God, Deity, etc. And since man cannot perceive nor conceive of a first cause, the human reason is forced to fall back upon these laws as the agency of revelati…
