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THE DUKE OF ARGYLE.

[graphic]

THE DUKE OF ARGYLE

(1823-1900)

EORGE DOUGLAS CAMPBELL, eighth Duke of Argyle, whose "Reign of Law" and kindred essays published during the

last half of the nineteenth century gave him international celebrity, was born in Dumbartonshire, Scotland, April 30th, 1823. Both in politics and literature he represented the best tradition of English aristocratic liberalism. At various times during his public career he was Lord Privy Seal, Postmaster-General, and Secretary for India. Among his works are "The Reign of Law"; "Primeval War"; "The Unity of Nature"; Geology and the Deluge," and "The Unseen Foundations of Society." He died April 23d 1900.

IT

THE UNITY OF NATURE

Is a part of the unity of nature that the clear perception of any one truth leads almost always to the perception of some other, which follows from or is connected with the first. The same analysis which establishes a necessary connection between the self-consciousness of man and the one fundamental element of all religious emotion and belief establishes an equally natural connection between another part of the same self-consciousness and certain tendencies in the development of religion which we know to have been widely prevalent. For although in the operations of our own mind and spirit, with their strong and often violent emotions, we are familiar with a powerful agency which is in itself invisible, yet it is equally true that we are familiar with that agency as always working in and through a body. It is natural, therefore, when we think of living agencies in nature other than our own, to think of them as having some form, or at least as having some abode. Seeing, however, and knowing the work of those agencies to be work exhibiting power and resources so much greater than our own, there is obviously unlimited scope. for the imagination in conceiving what that form and where that

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