Vestiges of the natural history of creation / [Anon].

  • Robert Chambers
Date:
1844
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Vestiges of the natural history of creation / [Anon]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    very high enjoyment. The mere quiet conscious- ness of a healthy play of the mental functions—a mind at ease with itself and all around it—is in like manner extremely agreeable. This negative class of enjoyments, it may be remarked, is likely to be even more extensively experienced by the lower animals than by man, at least in the propor- tion of their absolute endowments, as their mental and bodily functions are much less liable to de-- rangement than ours. To find the world con- stituted on this principle is only what in reason we would expect. We cannot conceive that so vast a system could have been created for a con- trary purpose. No averagely constituted human being would, in his own limited sphere of action, think of producing a similar system upon an oppo- site principle. But to form so vast a range of being, and to make being everywhere a source of gratification, is conformable to our ideas of a Creator in whom we are constantly discovering traits of a nature, of which our own is but a faint and far-cast shadow at the best. It appears at first difficult to reconcile with this idea the many miseries which we see all sentient beings, ourselves included, occasionally enduring. How, the sage has asked in every age, should a
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