Page:Dealings with the dead.djvu/49

 vegetable and animal kingdoms, are but elements of something higher, afterwards expressed in the human. Thus a fox means shrewdness—cunning, low cunning; and that some men have not yet outgrown their recollections and applications of fox-craft, is self-evident to the most casual observer. The ass is the natural symbol of patience, the cat of duplicity, the lion of firmness; an elephant stands as generosity, the horse is pride; the peacock, vanity, the dog affection; and so on through an infinite scale of variations. All living things are but developing monads, at whose bottom slumbers what will one day be an imperial human soul! And these monads develope off their surfaces continually; the longer and more varied the process, the more beautiful the grand result at each successive stage. Thus the monad whose highest manifestation ten thousand years ago, may have been a thistle, perchance looks up to heaven this day from the glorious eyes of a rose-bush, or a dove. The great truth seems never to have been apprehended by the great army of those who have made thinking a business; that while beasts, trees and flowers are not, as such, endowed with a specific immortality, yet at every stage of their being they constantly give off images of themselves, which are, and ever will be immortal. These images constitute the pictures of the soul-world; but the essence, the innate force that developed that of which they are the representations, returns to God whence it started, a full and regal human soul. Thus it is seen how and why man is the culmination of nature, and is brother to the flower and the worm.