678 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



the senses which has found of late years so many able advocates 

 among the men of science and the younger thinkers of England. 

 The perceptions of the senses are undoubtedly the only guides we 

 possess to a knowledge of the material world, and the inferences 

 drawn from them by the faculties of the understanding are the legiti- 

 mate conquests of physical science. But they entirely fail to explain 

 the higher functions of the intellect, which are the domain of meta- 

 physics ; still less do we derive from the senses the moral laws of jus- 

 tice, of truth, of charity, of conscience ; and least of all that concep- 

 tion of the supernatural and the infinite which it is the glory of man 

 to trace in nature and in the emotions of the soul. Man alone, said 

 Goethe, is a religious animal, and those who would degrade his nature 

 to that of the brutes, begin by extinguishing in him the sense of re- 

 ligion. 



These are, in other words, the sentiments expressed by M. Dumas 

 and M. Pasteur. And who are they who hold this language ? The 

 one is a chemist, conversant with all the known properties of natural 

 bodies and the marvelous combinations of the atomic theory which 

 reduces them all to a few primitive elements. The other is a physi- 

 ologist who has refuted the theory of spontaneous generation, and es- 

 tablished on a solid basis that life alone can impart life. They have 

 both traveled as far on the road of natural science as it will take them ; 

 they have even enlarged the bounds of physical knowledge. But, ar- 

 rived at that term of man's labor, they acknowledge that an infinite 

 horizon of thought, of action, of forces, and of power lies beyond the 

 scope of sensuous observation. He studies Nature with a careless eye 

 and a benighted mind who does not perceive that the supernatural lies 

 in it and above it. For when all is said that science can teach, and all 

 is done that skill can achieve to cultivate the earth and bring forth its 

 fruits, one gift remains without which everything else were vain that 

 gift which the Supreme Creator has reserved absolutely to himself 

 that gift which man and every living creature can take away, but can 

 never restore that gift without which this earth would be no more than 

 the cinder of a planet the mystery and the miracle of Life. Life is 

 everywhere ; without life nothing would exist at all : matter would 

 be the caput mortuum of the universe. With the diffusion of life 

 creation begins ; and of that act all but a supernatural power is inca- 

 pable. The seed of cummin you commit to the earth includes it ; the 

 single grain of wheat shoots up, not only to reproduce itself, but to 

 multiply its ears a hundred-fold and in successive generations, millions 

 upon millions of times, and to nourish a world ; the acorn carries in 

 its little cup a thousand years of vitality ; the midge and the butterfly 

 that sport for a day upon the rushes and the blossoms enjoy it ; the 

 laborious earth-worm that builds up the fertile soil of our fields and 

 gardens has it ; it ascends through all the scale of existence until it 

 arrives at Man, a being capable of conceiving Infinite Power and hopes 



