I was one day talking over the subject with a friend who had been long in India, and his arguments as well as a tale he told me of an apparition, not unlike that which had appeared to poor Donine, though of a more beneficent character, struck me forcibly. He was in general a very still, quiet man, listening attentively, speaking little, and never entering into long discussion; but upon the first mention of a doubt regarding the existence of spirits between the mortal beings of earth and the Deity, he roused himself in a way that I had never seen before, and in the somewhat sonorous language which he always used even in his shortest speeches, poured forth opinions which were evidently the result of long and intense thought.
"In every land to which fate has conducted my footsteps," he said, amongst every nation with whom it has been my lot to sojourn, I have uniformly found a belief in the existence of intermediate beings, forming a link in the grand chain of nature, between man and the Deity, The foolish pride of philosophy, believing nought but what is brought within the immediate range of its circumscribed vision, would fain establish that the great Creator has stayed his omnipotent hand at that strange compound of spirit and matter called man; or else would seek to prove that God has only employed the grosser part of existing things, and that man himself was totally material. Analogy, however, (which is the only means of argument within our power,) totally opposes itself to both of these two theories. In regard to the last, the thousand varied forms which we every day behold, and the thousand beautiful and minute grades by which matter is led from the simple clod to the most perfect of our conceptions, proves evidently the will of the Deity to vary and employ all that which is within the immensity of his power. To admit that there is a God, is to admit that there is a spirit. I have ever held a disbelief in the existence of such a thing as a rational atheist, and if there is spirit, analogy teaches us that. God would somewhere and in some way link it with matter: as we find that every class of things are connected with each other, so that it is often difficult to distinguish the bird, the beast, the fish, and the reptile, from the approximating being in another class, so that it is even difficult to say where animation begins, and where the vegetable or mineral ceases. Thus we have every reason to suppose that the Almighty would continue the chain of his creation without a gap; and link the earthly part of man to that essence which approximates more nearly to himself. In regard to the second theory: how it has pleased Omniscience to carry on the system beyond this world, its denizens cannot hope here to know; but it is analogical to conclude, that God has not limited himself to the variations of matter, but has equally willed the existence of other classes of beings, continuing the same grand gradations throughout the whole of his sublime creation.