Increase its mass, arrange it in other modifications, and it immediately evinces other powers or attractions; and these will be perpetually, and almost infinitely, varied, in proportion as we vary its combinations.

If arranged, therefore, in one mode, it discloses the power of magnetism; in another, that of electricity or galvanism; in a third, that of chemical affinities; in a fourth, that of mineral assimilations.

Pursue its modifications into classes of a more complex, or rather, perhaps, of a more gaseous or attenuate nature, and it will evince the power of vegetable or fibrous irritability: ascend through the classes of vegetables, and you will at length reach the strong stimulative perfection, the palpable vitality of the _mimosa pudica_, or the _hedysarum gyrans,_ the former of which shrinks from the touch with the most bashful coyness, while the latter perpetually dances beneath the jocund rays of the sun.

And when we have thus attained the summit of vegetable powers and vegetable life, it will require, I think, no great stretch of the imagination to conceive that the fibrous irritability of animals, as well as vegetables, is the mere result of a peculiar arrangement of simple and unirritable material atoms."-- "Hence, then, animal sensation, and hence, necessarily and consequently, ideas, and a material soul or spirit, rude and confined, indeed, in its first and simplest mode of existence, but, like every other production of Nature, beautifully and progressively advancing from power to power, from faculty to faculty, from excellence to excellence, till at length it terminate in the perfection of the human mind."[151] According to this theory, the mind is supposed to have a real existence, as a substance distinct from the grosser forms of matter, and capable even of surviving its separation from them.

It is supposed to be "a combination of the most volatile auras or gases, diffused over the whole body, though traced in a more concentrate form in some organs than in others;" and it is described as "the very texture of that separate state of existence which the infallible page of Revelation clearly indicates will be ours." A form of the theory very nearly resembling this has been recently reproduced.