The Union of Spirit And Matter In Humanity

Our life exists in a mysterious union of the corporeal and intellectual principles, an alliance of unique intimacy, as well as of strange contrast, between the two extremes of being. 

In their due relation to each other, and in the rightful discharge of their respective functions, I do not know whether the pure ethereal essence itself, (at least as far as we can comprehend it, which is but faintly, ought more to excite our admiration than this most wondrous compound of spirit and matter. 

I do not know that it is extravagant to say, that there is as unique a display of the divine skill in linking those intellectual powers, which are the best image of the Divinity, with the forms and properties of matter, as in the creation of orders of beings purely disembodied and spiritual.

When I contrast the dull and senseless clod of the valley , in its unanimated state, with the curious hand, the glowing cheek, the beaming eye, the discriminating sense which dwells in a thousand nerves, I feel the force of that inspired exclamation, "I am fearfully and wonderfully made!"

And when I consider the action and reaction of soul and body on each other, the impulse given to volition from the senses; and again to the organs by the will when I think how thoughts, - so exalted, that, though they comprehend all else, they cannot comprehend the laws of their own existence - are yet able to take a shape in the material airs issue and travel from one sense in one man to another sense in another man; so that, as the words drop from my lips, the secret chambers of the soul are thrown open , and its invisible ideas made known - I am lost in wonder.

If to this I add the reflection, how the world and its affairs are governed, the face of nature changed, oceans crossed, continents settled, as families of men gathered and kept together for generations, and monuments of power, wisdom, and taste erected, which last for ages after the hands that reared them have turned to dust, and all this by the regency of that fine intellectual principle, which sits modestly concealed behind its veil of clay, and moves its subject organs, I find no words to express my admiration of that union of mind and matter, by which these miracles are wrought by God Almighty.

(Adapted from a speech by Edward Everett, June, 1833)