Memories carried into the Future. 97 Is it a dream, these worlds crowding the sky with more, and exceeding gorgeous dwellings, than any earthly city of myriad abodes? Will they pass away from thought, leave no trace, as the baseless fabric of a vision? No: all have their use in the vast design, and carry to the invisible universe memories and memorials of great transactions, every star is a footprint of God. We look upon them from our dwelling, as links of light burning in the sky to join past, present, and future, into that vast consciousness by which intelligent creatures discern the course of time. We remember what of love and fear, of joy and sorrow, dwell in one heart; how many hearts throb in the little star of Earth; how numberless are the greater stars; until, translated in spirit by the wonderful, the soaring view, our souls full of grateful memories approach the eternal. Oh ! 66 to have Attentive and believing faculties. To love the voice of waters, and the sheen Of silver fountains leaping to the sea; To thrill with the rich melody of birds Living their life of music; to be glad In the gay sunshine, reverent in the storm; To see a beauty in the stirring leaf, And find calm thoughts beneath the whispering tree, Of God's deep wisdom in the natural world!" N. P. Willis. H STUDY V. THE ORIGIN OF LIFE AND THEORY OF RULE. "We will trust God; the blank interstices With pillar'd marble rare, or knit across E. B. BROWNING. THALES (B.C. 636) considered that water was the source and continuer of life. Diogenes, of Apollonia (B.C. 400), said the air was apyn, a beginning, a soul, such as philosophers sought, evolving itself in all life. Democritus (B.C. 460-357) taught that nothing existed but atoms and empty space-all else is mere opinion. Epicurus (B.C. 341-270) asserted that the mechanical shock of atoms is the all-sufficient cause of things. It was early maintained by Empedocles (B.C. 450) that the fittest survive, and unfit combinations rapidly disappear: Thence, till our own time, a few scientific men have held that "Nature does all things, does them of herself without God." "The mechanical shock and interaction of atoms, trying of motions and unions from all eternity, without any determination by intelligent design, account sufficiently for the constitution and phenomena of the universe." They would have us believe that atoms, individually dead, without sensation and intelligence, get up of themselves, run together, form all actual and imaginable combinations, as if under a drill-master, without a drill-master. Every one, by itself, is dead; yet, together, they live. When apart, they are without sensation, possess no intelligence; but, collectively, they possess sensation, are full of wisdom, and form the universal mind-if there is any mind. We are told-" The physical philosopher can know nothing but matter, force, space, and necessity." Were we not sure that there is indeed Intelligence Credulity of Materialists. 99 at the heart of things, these men, with their theories, which place our feet on the rungs of a ladder the reverse of Jacob's, and leading to the antipodes of heaven, would make us say "We are sick, and heart-sore, But deep, deep; Never to waken more." Men, who believe anything that is not in Scripture, assert that all things exist by "a continual becoming," and that this intelligible hypothesis explains everything—“ matter being eternal." Then we are told-"Matter itself, as generally conceived, does not necessarily exist, may be only a phenomenal centre of energy; indeed, "matter is but the hypothetical mode of our own consciousness." This is delightfully clear,-naught is everything and everything is naught. "1 Some discern in matter "the promise and potency of all terrestrial life;" nevertheless, the "chasm" between our consciousness and this matter "must ever remain intellectually impassable." They say " Everything may be explained on mechanical principles;" yet, things exist which are not material. "The so-called 'imponderables,'—things of old supposed to be matter-such as heat, light, etc., are now known by the purely experimental, and therefore the only safe method, to be but varieties of what we call 'energy.' In maintenance of materialism it is affirmed-" There is one energy, and that is mechanical;" chemical energy is mechanical, only something different. "A living organism is entirely mechanical," but with its mechanical and chemical relations, has something else which is not like matter, nor like mechanical force. It may be fairly questioned by plain men, whether science is not hindered by such statements; chemical energy is something more than mechanical power, if, at the same time, it is something different; and a living organism is not wholly mechanical if it contains something not explainable by mechanics. A professor supposes, "that by the different grouping of 1 "Recent Advances in Physical Science," p. 17: P. G. Tait, M. A. the same units, and then by combination of the unlike groups, each with its own, or each with other kinds, you get everything else;" another professor talks about "Nature's great progression from the formless to the formed, from the inorganic to the organic, from blind force to conscious intellect and will," and the thing is done. The former professor gravely assuring us, "the system is now complete, no further advance in the same direction is probable or required." The latter stating, those who do not accept it have not kept pace with recent advances in natural history, are behind in science, generally unworthy of consideration. So there is causality, but no cause; power, but no person; rule, but no ruler; and we are to graduate under Professor Mephistopheles ; "More brains have I than all the tribe Faust. The physical action which accompanies vital and mental changes seems to be an undulatory displacement of molecules, resulting in myriads of little waves or pulses of movement; so that states of consciousness are attended by the transmission of a number of little waves from one nerve-cell to another. Because life and consciousness and thought thus act on our bodies, we are told that the unit of motion is identical with the unit of feeling; that between the two there is such an unfailing parallelism that the one group of phenomena can be correctly described by formulæ invented to describe the other group. It is equal to the absurdity of saying that the oscillations of a needle are identical with magnetism, and that the two are to be recognised as one. These little waves or pulses of movement are modes in which our life reveals itself. They are not the occult reality, but an appearance; not the cause, but the effect. We are told "Life essentially consists in the continuous adjustment of relations within the organism to relations in the environment." It is nothing of the kind; the adjustment is caused by life, is the exhibition of life, not life itself. Some, seeking great accuracy, state-"In the vegetal world, and in the lower regions of the animal world, the life is purely, or almost purely, physico-chemical; it becomes more and more predominately psychical as we ascend in the animal world, until at the summit it is mainly psychical." Now, physicists do not know matter, only know states of consciousness which they call perceptions of resistance, extension, colour, sound, odour; do not know motion, only know the sequent states of consciousness produced in the muscles of the eyes, or of the tactual, or of other organs, in the act of attending to the moving object; it is rather strange that, by things which they know not, they are able, without any occulta vis, to explain more unknowable things. No one pretends that he can "cognise this occulta vis" in life; and it is sought, strange to say, among the dead. Taking protoplasm, that simplest substance in which life manifests itself, materialists kill it, find three dead compounds, carbonic acid, water, ammonia, the result of decomposition, ordinary matter; and then try to find life-the occulta vis, amongst these dead. Not finding it, they assert-" This protoplasm is composed of ordinary matter, differing from it only in the manner in which its atoms are aggregated, and is again resolved into ordinary matter when its work is done." Then, to excuse the blunder of seeking the living among the dead, it is stated-"The compounds or constituents of protoplasm, like the elementary bodies of which they are composed, are lifeless; but when brought together, under certain conditions, they exhibit the phenomena of life." We know that very well, but the "certain conditions" are vital. When we ask them to make the dead live, and carbonic acid, water, ammonia, are brought together, there is no protoplasm, nor any sign of life, nor is any process known in their laboratories by which life can be brought into existence. Why the substance, protoplasm, should manifest properties which are not manifested by any of its constituents they do not know, and very likely never will know. Mysterious as the fact is, it is common; for every chemical synthesis is the manifestation of a new set of properties equally insoluble. We say equally insoluble, yet must add, that though by chemical synthesis we do produce new sets of properties, we cannot, by any synthesis, |